Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop
Also, news from HanukkahLand: Mayor Brisketface works on his image.
IN WHICH:
I become one with my family’s aura.
Walter Benjamin explains auras and what they’re all about.
Mayor Brisketface works on his image.
Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop.
1.
My father and my aunts struggled to make Hanukkah special for the whole family. Their solution was to bring everyone’s Hanukkah gifts to Thanksgiving and have us open them after dinner. Beat the holiday rush and save on shipping fees. After a while, I stopped looking forward to it. The gifts weren’t great and the hugs that followed were unbearable.
I have no cousins my age. We weren’t close. Their hugs were loving, but forced.
My dad started preparing us in the two-hour ride to Connecticut. “This is your family,“ he said, as if introducing a new concept. “Family means love.”
Other kids my age got Gameboys for long car rides.
“If your family wants a Hanukkah hug, what will you do?“
I knew what he wanted to hear. “Become one with their aura.”
2.
I believe in auras, don’t you? I always have. They’re not just a wootastical invention used to explain vibes or ghosts or whatever. As defined by Walter Benjamin: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be.” Aura is the jarring sense we get when we encounter the perceived space and the actual space between our bodies. And the thing is, it works for images too.
3.
In the classic meme “Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop,” a shirtless, big-haired Goldblum stares straight down the camera with circular, hungry eyes. He’s backlit slightly, but the majority of the image is overtaken with the image, a still from his first starring role in 1986’s The Fly, his pronounced shoulders, his beautiful face, his glorious Jewish mane. A relic from the early internet, when some memes were meant to be printed out and used as pranks, you’d see it in college dorms printed from an Epson Stylus and taped to the back of a shared bathroom stall so when it closed, there you were and there was Goldblum. I’m not suggesting you actually thought you were in a stall with Jeff Goldblum, the printed subtitle “JEFF GOLDBLUM IS WATCHING YOU POOP” made it clear this was a fabrication, you knew outright that Jeff Goldblum was at a restaurant in Santa Monica sipping gimlets and charming every member of the waitstaff1. Meanwhile, I will suggest that looking at this image, by the nature of celebrity and the essence of Goldblum, you may have felt, you may feel, an unnatural sense that he was close enough to hug2.
And that feels weird, man.
4.
Mayor Brisketface™ of HanukkahLand called Johnny Hanukkah into his office. Johnny was one of his unofficial advisors.
“Look at this picture,” he said, tossing the printout onto the desk for Hanukkah to see. In the photo, Mayor Brisketface was seen in the crowd of last night’s StereoDome™ fight, hugging a strange woman next to him. “The INFORMATION SPHERE is saying that my smile looks fake.”
“To be fair, it sorta does,” said Johnny Hanukkah.
“That’s why I like you,” said Brisketface. “You’re honest.”
The mayor got up and looked out his window. He was always doing that.
“This is your generation, Johnny. What are we supposed to do about it?”
Johnny wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer this one. Fortunately, the mayor kept going.
“Don’t they have any empathy for a dying man?”
Johnny was pretty sure he needed to answer this one, but he wasn’t sure how. So he said, “Huh?”
“I’m dying, Johnny. Or at least, that’s what I’ve told the press. I hoped to win a little empathy, but it turns out, people think it’s funny.”
Johnny was lost.
“So that’s why I’m going to outlaw hugs altogether. At least until the end of Hanukkah.”
“These guys are gonna make great merch,” says Hersh Hyman.
5.
The ritual of the Hanukkah hug happened this way.
After dinner, we’d all retire to the living room. The lights were tableside, casting adult shadows to the center of the rug where the present opening would begin. We proceeded by birth order to the living room stairs where each stair was devoted to one child’s present pile. For each present we would bring it back to the rug and open it with everyone watching. We would then smile, say thank you, and go around to each uncle, aunt, and cousin responsible with a Hanukkah hug.
One year my aunt forgot to get me a gift. I was relieved.
6.
Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish-Marxist intellectual who never got a break, swallowed morphine pills in 1940 to escape the Nazis. But before he did that, he wrote some of the most classic works of aesthetic criticism, some of which might as well be about meme culture today. For number 5 of his 18 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he writes, “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
In researching this essay, I realized that this image of Jeff Goldblum in the meme doesn’t actually come from The Fly. This is an image I so closely associate with the entirety of Jeff Goldblum’s being, yet it’s possible it doesn’t exist anywhere except in reproduction.
Thinking forward, is it possible Goldblum doesn’t even exist? If that’s the case, why do I feel warm every time I think about our hand-hug?
7 .
“We need to make a meme,” says Hersh Hyman, the advertising executive who’s helping me bring my Hanukkah ideas to life.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” I say.
“They’re digital intimacy. Historical hugs. This is how we’re going to get this new Hanukkah story out there.”
I felt betrayed by my own silence. I thought I could walk him back from this one, but when Hersh gets a certain gleam in his eye, you can’t talk him out of anything.
“We can try,” I said. “But not on shabbos.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Not on shabbos.”
And yet here’s a sense of the anxiety I had as a teenager first entering college: what if Jeff Goldblum is actually watching me poop?
The one time I was close enough to hug Goldblum, I settled for a handshake. I was with my dad in New York, stagedooring for “The Pillowman,” one of the closest and creepiest plays I’ve ever seen. Goldblum played a cop whose job it is to force a confession from an innocent man for a string of child murders. My dad hated it. I loved it. Goldblum’s handshake was warm hug from his hand.