'How To with John Wilson' Season One by John Wilson Review: Documentary filmmaking at its finest

I feel there's been some creative stagnation in documentaries in recent years. Many seem too focused on pushing their own agendas with obnoxious hosts, or are simply advertisements created by a group of individuals attempting to promote, again, an agenda or a business/industry of some sort.

This is a problem that's always evident in the space of documentaries, where talent isn't required to make a documentary, nor is it required to get it seen in the age of instant digital media. That isn't to say that documentaries are now all terrible, but that the truly good ones that focus on telling the many stories of history, life, and culture are becoming few and far between.

Another blow to the documentary space is audience. In an age of growing costs, filmmaking requires a lot of preparation, time, and money to create something. Money isn't everything, but there's a plethora of costs that follow filmmakers in their quests to tell stories. Making that money back is often unlikely, where documentaries sit at film festivals and rarely reach an audience outside of them after.

How To with John Wilson is unlike any other documentary series you've seen before. It has a seemingly nonexistent production budget and features what sound like the ramblings and filmings of a madman in the city of New York, filled with people with madness significantly higher. Our narrator roams through the city's streets, filming each and every possible event, person, or object. These images are for the most part without context, but context is later stitched together alongside the clips through the use of narration and metaphors.

Within each episode sits a particular theme. An aspect of life that can be often matched with either inconvenience or complexity. Where as a society we collectively experience these issues and aren't quite sure how to address them. These episodes feature attempts to find answers, but through the events and people John Wilson finds within the city, sometimes these people lead to his travels outside of the city and revealing of a web of additional complexities and issues that people have found in life; this even features some rather peculiar events and people that are trying to also find their own answers in life through unconventional means.

This style of documentary filmmaking seems as authentic to the world of documentaries as it possibly could be, and while there's sometimes some narration or agenda that's displayed in the way the episodes are filmed and edited, it feels incredibly natural. It shows our society for what it is: a facade. It shows the many ways we strive for the assumption that we're sophisticated beings, but even in the cities filled with the most wealth and seriousness in terms of corporatism, everything is in fact very, very stupid.

Some of the best documentaries I've seen have been ones in which the host(s) are mostly silent, or the camera is simply a present member with no opinions, simply observing and having a particular world unfold to it. Ones where we feel as if we are in fact present. How To with John Wilson perfectly provides this feeling. You can very much tell that the documentary is simply a man and his camera roaming through the streets, meeting total strangers and discussing life with them. He briefly asks them questions, but these only ever seem to be questions that amplify the topic at hand, where they encourage the person being interviewed to either elaborate or provide their own thoughts on the topic.

John Wilson's questions are engaging, but heavily amplify the random clips of the streets he's accumulated over time to connect the topic to the video. His use of visual metaphors and narration are what allow for comedic elements to slip into the episodes and ensures things aren't too serious. The humour breaks up the attempt to discover answers in life by showing it all in a light-hearted manner, where nothing is really that important or serious, where even figuring out how to split the bill can be a ridiculous, silly event.

It's rare for a documentary to feel as if it isn't trying to sell you something. As if it has no specific agenda. It's incredibly refreshing to see something that just documents life the way the show does. It has you wanting more and more of it as each episode passes, as you see roughly 25 minutes of footage zoom by. Fortunately, there is a second season that is airing now, but I am finding myself really wanting a third season already.

Society hides behind the mask that it holds sophistication and that there's a set of rules forever set in place and implemented that allow for us to live in the best ways we believe we can, with the structure supposedly remaining fair for all. We all know that this isn't the case, and John Wilson uses sarcasm thought-provoking questions to pursue this.

In a city like New York, with such a large number of people living in such close proximity, this must be more evident than ever. Where each person is an individual with their own thoughts and lifestyles within the same concrete jungle. This level of individualism is mostly overlooked in our day-to-day jobs, where we pretend to be smarter or open with those around us. In a place where competition among its people must be intense, it must be very easy to quickly forget about who you really are.

For a documentary that's both comedic and a series of clips of random events throughout each day, these are the thoughts How To with John Wilson leaves you with. Thoughts that take a look at ourselves as individuals, as being with strengths and weaknesses, with desires and problems that are both private and public. There's truly nothing quite like this documentary, and I don't think there truly can be, given its formula is so specific to John Wilson's own thoughts and style. Without him, it simply wouldn't work.