Night Out: Man's Spiritual Journey Begins With Prada

Then Academy Award–winning film editor Pietro Scalia screens his own short film, a “remix” of the nine we just saw; there’s a question-and-answer period that I forget while it’s happening. Finally come the gift bags. And that’s that. I stand in the courtyard again, wondering what makes people attend events like these, which are essentially about not much at all. And I could only think of one answer, besides the obvious one about artists using commerce to promote their own idiosyncratic ideas about life, and commerce using artists to make me feel like I’m not participating in commerce at all. The better, more immediate answer is simply that you can’t do stuff like this in Lubbock, Texas. (That’s just where I used to live — if you like, you can insert your own former swarming-with-hicks locality in place of mine.) It might be inherently shallow to put on an ironed shirt, drive across town, pay for parking, eat delicate fish-miso cones, watch a bunch of arty commercials about a perfume, listen to the directors discuss their product-placement vision and then not say out loud — at least, not to the people around you — that this advertising-as-cultural-event isn’t important. But almost everything people do for entertainment is shallow: eating at Sizzler, watching the talking Chihuahua movie, basketball games, drinking in bars. So why not enjoy watching some pretty perfume commercials in a dark theater? Why not enjoy seeing other people get dressed up to do the same thing? I mean, do you get fed caviar and kiwi juice at those other places? Do you get a free bottle of men’s perfume you can move on eBay when you’re done? That’s right. The answer is no. And I made twenty bucks on my spiritual journey already.