If you know anything about filmmaker John Wilson, you’ll intuit that his new documentary The History of Concrete is barely about concrete at all. Earlier this decade, Wilson’s HBO show, How To With John Wilson, provided a sometimes compelling, sometimes aggravating glimpse into the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, as well as into Wilson’s own woolly, discursive mode of thinking. In one episode, Wilson walked around a New York neighborhood until he saw an Italian flag, figuring that the person who’d hung it would know enough about Italian food to help him learn to cook risotto, which he wanted to make as a treat for his elderly, babushka’ed landlady. In another installment, he sought ways to protect his furniture from his beloved yet destructive cat, and in so doing, stumbled upon an anti-circumcision activist, who in turn led him to a musician and inventor who’d developed a foreskin restoration device. (It was called the TLC Tugger.) In Wilson’s world, the phrase “One thing leads to another” takes on heightened meaning. He shifts gears according to who and what he encounters during the filmmaking process, which is how a simple quest to cover a chair can morph into an anxiety-riddled meditation on the possibility that maybe life is better uncut.
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