Early in director John Wilson’s The History of Concrete, we learn the difference between cement and concrete. Cement is a powder made in high-heat kilns from limestone, clay, and minerals. Concrete is cement with aggregates (sand and rocks) plus water. Stronger than cement, concrete is used for buildings, roads, and anything that will bear a load. Cement is used for grout, screeds, or roof tiles.
Think of cement as only Jell-O and concrete as Jell-O salad with pineapple, strawberries, cantaloupe, and Mandarin oranges. Jell-O alone jiggles when shaken, while Jell-O salad with aggregates holds steadier. Like cement, Jell-O works for simple needs, like a children’s snack, while the concrete-like Jell-O salad handles the serious tasks of Easter brunch or church-basement funeral meals.
Wilson didn’t use the Jell-O salad analogy. That’s mine. He could have used it to describe the film’s structure. To call The History of Concrete a documentary is to use the term lightly, as would calling it a video essay. There’s no real narrative arc, but musings, wanderings, meanderings, all interesting, but at times disjointed, like a wall with horizontal cracks, buckling, ready to collapse, just not yet. At 100 minutes, the film is more like Jell-O salad, with the “Jell-O” being a very, very broadly defined thesis about concrete, filled with bits of personal reflection, social history, and quirky personalities that often have little or nothing to do with concrete. I’ve never known anyone who picks fruit out of Jell-O salad, but if someone did, they’d find very little actual Jell-O. Same goes for The History of Concrete.
Yet, the documentary holds together. I wasn’t familiar with Wilson’s three-season HBO series How To with John Wilson, with a Rotton Tomato 100% Average Tomatometer, by the way. The series is known as formulaic in an effective way. In each episode, Wilson deals with personal issues, narrates in the second person, goes on a road trip, often to a convention, splices in memoir-like segments, and uses lots of B-roll shots of things like street signs, scaffolding, and just plain random people. The intention is intentional unintentionalness. Viewers who loved the series will love this movie.
Uninitiated in the John Wilson world, I expected a quirky history of concrete in the vein of The Way Things Work or the Connections TV series. Instead, quite a bit of the first minutes of the 100-minute running time was Wilson reflecting on his life after the HBO series ended. We see shots of his dwindling royalty checks, the lowest amount being 49 cents. He laments his lack of opportunities, though one could also say a lack of ambition and go-get-it-ness. He says, “The space between projects is hard. Time becomes unstructured. You settle into some of your worst habits.” By “you,” he means “I”.
There’s a perverseness to Wilson’s self-obsession that attracts the viewer. Wilson was born in Queens, grew up on Long Island, and has lived in Queens much of his adult life. He’s not Jewish, but his self-commentary has a New York City Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld tone. I went with it. To his credit, Wilson and his editor, Cori Wapnowska, keep the slow history of concrete moving at a snappy pace. At times, you may wonder why he is including something like an extended segment on the cleaning protocols for New York City public pools, which are made of concrete. Then, in short order, he’s off to another topic.
Maybe this approach worked well for a niche HBO series, but in a full-length feature, purporting to be a documentary, the segments feel too much like skipping through the Louvre. We pass many very interesting items, but who has time to stop and really soak them up? Wilson notes how he spent much of his initial budget on a trip to see Rome’s Pantheon, a 2,000-year-old structure made mostly of concrete. He makes relatively meaningless chitchat with three Rome policemen and some bashful construction workers. He adds Wikipedia-level facts, like the Pantheon is the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, or that the Romans added volcanic ash to the concrete to make it self-healing. Self-healing? Wilson doesn’t explain such a shocking fact, so I will.
Ancient Roman concrete contained components that dissolved when it got wet again. When moisture seeped into cracks in the Pantheon, these components softened, filled the cracks, and then reacted with other components, like volcanic ash, to resolidify and seal them. Now you know. Wilson never scratches the surface of the Pantheon’s concrete or concrete in general. He offers the hackneyed insight that the ancients built to last millennia, while these days we build to last, at most, only decades.
He says, “You go to Rome to explore the actual history of concrete, and fail to get any insights outside the Pantheon…” The pronoun “you” is confusing. Does he mean us, the viewers? No. It’s him. He stayed mostly outside the Pantheon, both physically and metaphorically, which is why he didn’t gain any insights. Neither do we.
Don’t get me wrong. The History of Concrete is fun; it’s just not really a documentary or a video essay. Fun in the way that one says of a party, “Yeah, it was fun.” Multiple times, others and I in the audience laughed at parts that were meant to be funny, which is pretty much the entire movie. For example, Wilson interviews Anthony Mule, owner of Gum Busters, a company that specializes in removing gum from sidewalks. Mule has a pure New York personality. He takes his job of removing gum from sidewalks seriously. He calls gum “the bird shit of people” that is creating “gum pollution.” He yells, “Busted!” after he cleans a wad of gum off the sidewalk. He also has a branded Gum Busters wine. At least Gum Busters relates to concrete.
Then there’s Save My Ink Forever, a mortician father-and-son taxidermist shop in Ohio that preserves tattoos from dead humans and mounts the hardened flesh in museum-quality glazed frames for the still-living, as-yet-unpreserved loved ones. These preserved pieces of flesh can be as large as entire backs, with arms attached. The father emphatically assures Wilson that the company would never preserve the swastika on Charles Manson’s forehead. That’s preserving something evil.
Save My Ink Forever has nothing to do with concrete. It’s about intentionally preserving things, as the Romans did with the Pantheon. Regardless, the segment is very, very funny, in that “ew haha” kind of way.
Wilson is a Millennial born in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. As a Gen Xer, I was sure that he was a co-traveler. The History of Concrete’s sensibility is close to Gen X’s: deadpan, banal, meta-commentary, self-conscious flouting of conventions, and, of course, Gen X’s pièce de résistance: irony. From what I’ve read, Millennial humor, as Gen X’s calendar neighbor, is close to, though distinct from, its older sibling. Does Wilson really care about concrete? I’m not convinced he does.
During the 2023 writers’ strike, Wilson took a class on writing Hallmark movies. He decided to use the Hallmark movie formula as a template for a documentary about concrete. It feels more like he decided to make a wacky movie about himself taking the Hallmark movie class and using the Hallmark movie formula for a wacky documentary about concrete. The spontaneity is a bit too polished in the final edit.
The History of Concrete, however, offers some lessons about the temporality of human life and the need to connect with others. Ultimately, the film is like a funny but innocuous stand-up comedian, a good first-date show. Go to have a good time, laugh, maybe think a little, laugh again, then leave without giving another thought to the sidewalk beneath your feet.