“Napoleon Dynamite” In The Age of Social Media

The citizens of Napoleon Dynamite’s town of rural Preston, Idaho, exist in personal bubbles created by single homes isolated by wide-open farmland. They are free to exist in their own eccentricities while also in constant danger of falling into states of loneliness and delusion.

In 2021, this is all the more relatable with a mass pandemic to keep people indoors and social media becoming the main mode of communication rather than a supplement. Facebook groups and Discord servers allow people to hyperfocus on the communities that pertain to their interests while Google’s algorithm is quick to hide anything we wouldn’t normally want to see. Just as wide open spaces isolate the people of Preston, social media divides people in the real world. 

This is highlighted with Napoleon’s brother, Kip, who maintains most of his socializing through the internet. Alone in the house all day, he chats with his girlfriend and friends as he maintains futile aspirations as a cage fighter. 

This leads to a scene with martial arts instructor Rex of Rex Kwon Do, with who Kip takes a trial class and leaves when he realizes that Rex is a fraud. In the large, open space of rural Preston, Idaho, behind the glass bubble of his television commercial, Rex can portray himself as the expert. In front of an audience, however, Kip (and by proxy, the viewer) has a chance to scrutinize Rex as a pathetic individual.

Later, Kip meets his internet girlfriend, LaFawnduh, for the first time, creating a relationship with someone outside of the Preston bubble. Rather than end the film following his Uncle Rico, who is too entrenched in his own self-destructive habits encoded into him by his hometown, Kip leaves with LaFawnduh. Although Kip’s new hip-hop attire is played for laughs, it is a genuine symbol of change compared to his start as a perpetual internet surfer. 

As the country starts to increase vaccination rates and open up again, perhaps it is time to truly evaluate the way people engage and spend time in digital spaces. Many jobs and subcultures had to adapt to the pandemic and some of them even thrived with the conversion to a purely digital medium (such as Dungeons and Dragons). 

However, there are other things, like graduations, birthdays, and weddings, that simply work better in the real world. Like Napoleon’s triumphant dance scene or Kip and LaFawnduh’s wedding, certain things deserve to be witnessed in person for all their strange, awkward beauty. It is something to consider the next time one has the instinct to reach for their phone for a moment of digital escape.

My Girlfriend Saved Me with Animal Crossing

I’m not a big fan of Animal Crossing. I find the game to be counter to the two things that I instinctively look for in a video game: epic narrative and high octane action. On the other hand, Animal Crossing has a threadbare story, just enough to justify catching bugs and paying your loans.

Still, Sophie had bought me the game for my birthday. It was in our first year of dating and it was one of the first birthday gifts that she ever gave me. 

I gave the game a go. Even though it wasn’t my type of game, I understood the appeal. The game has a great ability to transform mundane actions into virtual meditation. It is a ritual that makes small things like fishing or collecting shells into small, fairy tale moments. It is a slice of life offering the best slice of the wonderfully ordinary. 

The real appeal for me was multiplayer. Sophie and I were 18 years old at the time, both freshmen in college. Neither of us had a car or license to close the 45-minute gap between us during school breaks. 

So, we had online dates. We mostly watched movies (timing the play button at the same time so our separate streams could sync). Sometimes, we played Animal Crossing. 

I vividly remember the very first night we tried. We set up the network. We each had a bottle of wine (procured through a convoluted network of friends and their older siblings). We had our webcams on and she had a glass of Merlot in her hand. My parents don’t drink wine and had no wine-specific glasses. I poured my merlot into a green, plastic cup that my family probably bought when I was a toddler. 

“Cheers,” we said. 

We went to her town first. She walked me through a garden, showed me her collection at the museum, and invited me to her house. After showing me her decorations, we went fishing together at a lake near a bridge. Then, we sat on a bench and screenshotted the moment.

“You know,” Sophie said, “this is technically our first date.”

I thought about it for a moment and realized she was right. The campus itself was efficient in providing institutions and education, but little else. It wasn’t connected to a college town with lively locals with things to do. It was a closed bubble, all the roads lead directly to a highway. There was the nearby town but they had long been in the slumps and cynical of the college. Rather than shape themselves around the school, they had done everything to make us feel unwelcome, even to their detriment. Dates required creativity or a car.

“Well, cheers to that,” I said. We touched our glasses to our webcams, a digital toast.

We played for a while longer when I received a phone call. 

“What are you doing?” 

It was Allie, a friend from high school.

“I’m playing Animal Crossing.”

“Well, come out and hang with us, loser.”

“Where?”

“The elementary school.”

It was common for all of the local high school kids in this neighborhood to meet up at the local elementary school after sundown. The school had trailers in the back that were easy to climb and acted as walkways directly to the roof. It was a giant playground for teenagers. A lot of my friends had their first kiss there. I had my first drink there at 17. The last time I was there, some of the kids had found an old mattress at a nearby dumpster. They dragged it up the roof, then dropped it into the courtyard, right into the pond. I didn’t participate but I admit I enjoyed the spectacle. 

“Nah, I like where I am.”

“Come on, don’t be lame.”

“I’m good,” I said.

“All right, I’ll see you later then.”

We hung up.

“Sorry about that,” I said. 

“It’s okay.” She was smiling, making me smile. 

We played for a bit while longer. It had become night. We decided to switch gears and check out my in-game town. 

“This place is a mess,” Sophie said.

“I know.”

She started picking some stuff up and moving stuff around. Her character walked up to my own and gave me something.

“Happy Birthday,” she said to me. 

It was a wooden bench. We placed it by the beach and took several pictures together, under the digital moon. That night, it was carved into a crescent. Its reflection shined down upon us. We spent the rest of the night sitting on that bench and talking. We finished our wine and told each other how much we loved one another.

The next morning, I woke up to a text message.

“We got arrested last night,” Allie wrote.

Of course, she was joking.

“We’re not joking dude. Cops showed up at the school.”

The school faculty didn’t think the mattress in the pond was as amusing as we did. Cops had been staking out the place for quite a while. 

As a writer, I can’t help looking at life as if it were a story. Realists will tell me that it is all a coincidence that simply benefitted in my favor. That is probably correct but this lack of wonder doesn’t work with my worldview. 

After all, the present moment is the objective reality for only an instant. After that, it is a memory, itself a sort of dream. In this dream I have about a man saved from his decision to spend all night with the person he loves, I’d like to think that fate weaved this moment for us together. It is a sign, a foreshadow, subtext, and destiny carved into the story of my life.

I’ll be 26 this year. I have graduated from college. I can drive now. I haven’t talked to, seen, or heard from my high school friends in several years. I’m certainly not throwing mattresses off the school rooftop. 

But I’m still with Sophie. We share a small apartment with a bedroom and an office. Now, we watch movies together on the couch and drink wine out of actual wine glasses (and not out of a plastic cup). 

I don’t play Animal Crossing anymore. Again, it’s not my style. However, I do like to watch Sophie play. Every once in a while, I sit down on the couch and she will show me all of the new additions that she had built since then.

A while ago, as she went on about all the changes in her virtual town she made or planned to make, I couldn’t help but look around our apartment. Little bits of her things and mine gelled together on the tables and walls. My film posters were being lit by her lamp. The LED statue she bought me was near the candles that I bought her. 

Above our bed, there are two paintings that we made one Saturday when we watched a Bob Ross episode. Two ocean wave crashes onto two rocky shores. Hers has a softer touch, smoother at the edges while mine is more jagged and sharp. Still, there is a cohesiveness, as if they are two parts of the same piece. Like a Diptych, they are designed to be presented together.  

Perhaps, my lack of interest in Animal Crossing is because it can’t offer anything better than what I already have. I have long since acquired the best slice of life.

(Not) Chunky

Despite being a writer, I am not a smooth talker by nature. The spontaneity of speech sits between a spectrum. On one end, there is diplomacy. Speakers on this end have an understanding of subtlety. They understanding the nuance of socializing and read the real-life subtext in conversations. I perceive this as a form of psychic power, able to manipulate or even create the subjective world that humans are naturally plugged into. 

As an 18-year-old, I was more on the other end of this spectrum to the farthest extreme. In this space, subtlety is thrown aside in favor of drama. The sharp knife used by the diplomat to chisel his words is replaced with a baseball bat. This blunt instrument delivers the barbarian’s thoughts with skull-cracking emphasis. 

This power is also psychic but differs in that it is more of a weapon than it is a tool. It offers internal scars that can never be seen but eternally felt by the victim inflicted upon. 

This was useful to me as a school student. I was often the potential victim of bullying. I don’t know what makes me an easy target but by the 4th grade, I had quickly learned that my physical capabilities were never going to be a source of self-defense.

So, I used my words. By the 8th grade, I had received my own spot on the bus. Everyone quickly learned that my tongue was a serpent well traversed in the dark arts of emotional damage. My teeth were the Rods of God, crashing down from the heavens to implode the realities of those that crossed me. 

However, weapons are designed for destruction, no matter the form. I have found that when they are used for anything other than combat, even if just for fun, people get hurt. In my experience, the wielder is often the victim of their own verbal backfire.

By high school, I had started to date. One night, my girlfriend at the time stopped by after work. We were talking for a while when she decided to go home. We got out of the car, hugged, and kissed each other. 

She was the first girlfriend I had been physical with. Sexual adrenaline was still new to me and I hadn’t quite figured how to control, withhold, and throttle this nitrous at the right moments. 

Like a hit of coke slapping my brain into action, I ran my hands down her jeans and started rubbing her. She smiled as we made out. 

Say something cool, I said to myself. Cool.

“Stay frosty.”

She stopped. 

“What did you say?”

“Uhh,” I said. It comes out like the broken reception of a radio that had its signals crossed in several directions.

“Is that from Call of Duty?”

“…Yes.”

She broke up with me two months later. 

A year after that, Sophie and I were making out in my bed. It was freshman year of college and everyone was into rock n roll. Maybe not so much the music but the pop cultural pillars that held it up: sex and drugs. 

We were high on pot and our hands ignited the lightning in our bodies. This energy crackled up the nervous system and exploded in our brains. There are chemicals being created, released, and transmuted in our heads, released as pheromones. The room was humid. We were generating potential energy, waiting to fuse them together like an atom bomb. 

We were grunting, breathing heavily. Sweat acclimated upon our skin, and we traded salt upon our bodies, like oceans carrying sands from one continent to another.

Say something sexy, I said to myself. Sexy.

“I love your chunky legs.”

Those words, like a wet blanket, snuffed all of the passionate fire. All of the sexual pheromones in the air were instantly gone, replaced with a cold, stiff atmosphere. 

We were not kissing. She looked at me, eyes narrowed. She was not smiling. 

There was no sex. 

I’m 26, now. Sophie and I are still together. Over the years, she’s helped me sharpen my bat into something more of a sword. I like to imagine that it is like those long knives that sushi masters use to carve fish into artisanal slices of shiny, marbled salmon. It still has elements of a weapon but has since gained more utility. 

Still, there will be times, either when making love or anything else, when she will suddenly look at me. She is not smiling. I’ll ask:

“What?” 

“You called me chunky.”

I Was High When Sam Ellis Killed Two People In A Car Crash…

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I was hitting a joint when I heard a car rage by my house. It was in the summer of 2015, sometime past midnight. Although the property had these tall, wooden fences blocking my view of the road, I could hear the engine roar with reckless abandon.

Living right off the street, I was familiar with the usual sound that a passing car made. This was not the usual hum that grew gradually into a crescendo before fading off into the distance. This was a demon ripping its way into our world, sudden and violent. 

Then came the crash.

Underneath the night sky, with only the streetlights and the joint’s ember to light the scene, Mikey and I looked at each other. We shared a solid second of concern. Without exchanging words, we both shrugged and continued to get high.

About 10 minutes later, we heard an envoy of sirens rush pass my house. The red/blue and red/white lights bled over my fence, scorching the tree leaves with artificial luminescence. The sirens wailed and we could hear them for a while until they stopped.

Mikey and I walked off my porch to take a look. We could see some of the lights flashing but it was too far to see exactly what had happened. Perhaps, we would have been more curious if we weren’t so high.

But we were. So we looked at each other, then we shrugged. We walked back to my porch and drank some beers that we found at Mikey’s house earlier that evening.

A couple hours later, we were coming down from the buds and booze. Mikey had decided to go home. 

“Hey, do you think that accident was serious?” he asked. 

“It’s a long stretch of road,” I said. “It’s not too busy. Probably just a thrill seeker who lost control. They are probably okay.”

I learned the next morning that they were not okay.

“I think this is the accident from last night,” he wrote in a text. He had attached an article. When I opened the link, it was a photo of a car flipped upside down, with a trail of grass and dirt scrapped behind it. The car had broken through a wooden fence and ripped some bark right off the trees.

The headline said something along the lines of–

Two High School Graduates Dead in Drunk Driving Incident

They had apparently been drinking at a party. A big house in Potomac, where the parents had been known to let the kids drink as long as they did it in the house.

There were anti-driving measures in place. Sam Ellis found a way to get around this. By not bringing his own car, he didn’t have any keys to give to the parent in charge. 

Later, the father of the house filled with underage drinkers, Kenneth Saltzman, was convicted for allowing the party to take place. The county also passed a law called the “Alex and Calvin Law”. Named after the two kids who passed, it was designed to make it easier to prosecute parents who knowingly let underage kids drink alcohol in their homes. 

I would say that I agree but then I would be a hypocrite. I did a lot of my underage drinking in the homes of parents, both knowing and ignorant.

I think if I was a kid growing up in Potomac now, I would be a little more upset.

I would swear under my breathe, “God damn you, Sam Ellis. You piece of shit, making this harder for everyone else out here.”

That said, I’m 25 years old, able to buy a drink whenever I damn please. I also have no children. So this is also of little consequence to me. 

In the next few days, I wasn’t one of the scores of people who came to the crash site later to offer flowers and a spiritual condolence. Despite the fact that it was only a 5 minute walk from my house, I never felt the urge. 

I wasn’t at the school to participate in the collective grief of the students. At that point, it had been two years since I graduated. The thought of going back for any reason gave me the same repulsion as a high school reunion. 

As for the students involved, I have no relationship to them. I recognize them as people who I saw in the halls but I never had a single conversation with them. 

I had met Sam Ellis, the drunk driver, once in a parking lot with a couple of mutual friends. Even then, he had a reputation for driving despite having a suspended license. Luckily, he didn’t offer me a ride that day.

The kids in the car were all football players. In a stereotypical high school, this would be a big deal. At my high school, however, everyone knew that the football team was terrible. I always heard more about the soccer, tennis, and wrestling teams.

As of 2020, Sam Ellis seems to hold some sort of high school record for the entire state of Maryland. Too bad it was for a shit team. Too bad he was a shit person.

Despite all of these reasons to not give a shit, this is something I have thought about for 5 years. Not an everyday occurrence but more something that refuses to leave me alone. I still think about it a lot. Perhaps, it’s because I was there that night, separated only by a wooden fence and drug induced lethargy.  

In a weird way, I was so close to it all. 

As for Sam Ellis, he received a four year sentence, with a possibility of parole after the first year. Technically, he received 20 years but 16 of those got suspended. I read that as “Mom and Dad have some nice friends.”

In the papers, they talked about how he had changed in the 1 year between the manslaughter and the trial. One article talked about how he was regretful of his actions. Another talked about how he wanted to start his sentence early, a symbol of his willingness to change. Some articles wrote on the brain damage that he himself sustained and how it should influence his sentence.

I laugh thinking about how much of a bitch response that is, a pathetic flashing of privilege. Then, I get angry when I remember that it worked. Bitch is only serving a 5th of the sentence. 

At times I think that I am too hard on Sam Ellis. He was only 18 or so when he did the manslaughter. I even feel bad for constantly referring to him as his full name, like he is some sort of classic villain from a western. I imagine he would make a great oil baron with a twisted up moustache. 

When I consider giving him some benefit of the doubt, however, I also think about his phone calls from prison. I think about how he told his parents that he would make up some sob story to get brownie points in court. In another call to his sister, he said that if “it wasn’t for this bullshit…I would be having a lit ass time.”

Later, he would state that “bullshit” referred to his own actions. Even if I buy that, he still outed his MO: having a lit ass time. 

This wasn’t the first time that he had been caught drinking and driving. In fact, it took three citations before he killed two people and an entire county of rich white people realized they had collectively fucked up raising their damn kids. 

So, no: I don’t buy his sincerity. I don’t think that he had changed from the year between the manslaughter and the trial. I don’t think that his admission of guilt was genuine. If it was, then it would only be the start of a long journey towards redemption. 

But I don’t buy it. 

In a way, I do feel bad for him. Not everyone is born inherently good. Most of us have to try every day to be a good person. To get to that point of constant self-reflection is a journey in itself, one where a lot of the external conditions have to be just right. 

Sam Ellis didn’t have those things. He was a rich white kid raised by rich white parents from a rich white county. Montgomery County is known as one of the richest counties in not just the state of Maryland, but the entirety of the United States. Those that lived here were either rich families that had settled there a while ago or hyper-competitive immigrants trying to guarantee their kid’s future. The school system offered the most AP classes that a high school could offer. The other programs and facilities were top-notch, especially for a public school. 

My point is that he was raised like a prince in a town of princes. The bitch had no chance. So yeah, sometimes, I do feel bad for him.

Then I remember that he offed two people that he called friends and then complained about a drug withdrawal. 

Despite my distance from the situation: Why do I care so much?

I guess the best way I can describe it is by sharing a memory I have from several years later. I was getting drunk with Corey. We were having a discussion when we descended into some passionate topics regarding race and economic status. At one point, Corey states with an impassioned emphasis—

“Where I’m from, People do terrible things because they can’t fucking afford not to. I have never heard of a rich person having to do that.”

He is right, of course. I wasn’t going to tell him that the lack of wealth is inherently a virtue. I have heard a lot of his stories and stories of others that tell me of the terrible things people do when financial duress takes over one’s soul.

But I also think of Sam Ellis, a person with a lot of money. It was enough to shave 80 percent of his sentence, possibly another 10 if he makes parole. I think about what money has done to this kid. Some may be so deprived of money that they act like junkies itching for the next dose.

Sam, on the otherhand, was overdosing. It sedated him. He no longer felt the souls of his fellow humans. Perhaps, he never did.

Last year would have been the four year mark of his imprisonment if he never received parole.

If I am being optimistic, I would like to think that Sam Ellis has changed. I would like to think that four years is plenty of time to reflect on one’s actions. I would like to think that he is now like the rest of us: living everyday with an internal battle over the fate of his soul. I would like to think that on most days, he contributes to the faction of good.

What really fucks me up is that even with this best case scenario, he had to kill two people before he got the point. Worse case scenario, he learned nothing and he simply killed two people.

Cover Photo by Esri Esri on Unsplash