Dear Kent Osborne,

40 IS a bitch. Man, don’t I know it! I think it was Martin Amis who said—and I’m para­phras­ing here—that turn­ing 40 is the most fucked up thing ever for a guy, because it means, for all intents and pur­poses, that the first half of your life is over, and like, what have you got to show for it, right? You are nev­er going to get that first half back, it’s all down­hill from here, you’ve stopped grow­ing, phys­ic­ally, and you’re actu­ally start­ing to putre­fy. You’re on your way to death. Things start going away, right away. In this film about you, Uncle Kent, you start hav­ing some prob­lems with your sight—you’ve got to look at cer­tain stuff on paper first farther away, then near­er to you, in order to read. Wow, I’m rel­at­ively lucky—I didn’t start get­ting eye issues when I turned 40, and I still don’t have ‘em, but man, bey­ond that…well, I gotta admit I was a little sur­prised and shaken at how much the story told about you in the film Uncle Kent had in com­mon with what I was going through when I turned that age.

The affin­it­ies star­ted hit­ting me pretty early on, as I watched you hunch­ing over your work easel, doing that anim­a­tion stuff—you appar­ently work as an anim­at­or, where­as I work as a writer, they’re both kinda sol­it­ary occu­pa­tions. And then there was how you live by your­self, and how you drink a lot, and how you smoke a lot of pot, and how you hang out a lot with your cat. See, here’s you, with your cat.

And here’s me, a long time ago, back in my 40s, with my cat.

And my stu­pid fan­boy Akira t‑shirt. And my double chin. And my nose hair. Sorry about that. Gosh, how embarrassing.

Now I was nev­er that much of a pot person—until this one peri­od where I got so anxiety-ridden and insom­ni­ac that I star­ted smoking it very intently…but I’m get­ting ahead of myself here—but I def­in­itely had this routine back then of work­ing and drink­ing and just sort of wal­low­ing in loneli­ness. And you’re clearly not tak­ing very good care of your­self in oth­er respects. “Check” on that, for me, when I was your age, too. You live in L.A. , so you have a car, and you’re let­ting that go to shit; I haven’t owned a car in a while (an advant­age of a cer­tain mode of urb­an liv­ing, I’d say), but I dare say if I had, well, what’s hap­pen­ing to your car would have happened to mine.

And there’s even more, and here’s where it gets kinda weird!

In Uncle Kent, you have a week­end vis­it­or, a young lady, as Jerry Langford would put it, who you met on this thing called “Chatroulette,” which I don’t know a lot about but which seems to be a social media thing involving web­cams and fea­tur­ing guys who want to show every­one their erec­tions, or some­thing. That bit kind of freaked me out a little, because it so hap­pens that when I was turn­ing 40, and pretty much all alone (I’d had a girl­friend, and the rela­tion­ship wasn’t going so great, and then she hadda return to her fam­ily in Yurrup, so that was that), I too developed a rela­tion­ship with a woman, online, and even­tu­ally the vir­tu­al turned real. How freaky is that? In my case it’s even freak­i­er than your case, because…omigod I can’t believe I’m telling you this…the indi­vidu­al in ques­tion was a col­lege stu­dent. One of my pals dubbed this indi­vidu­al “The Child Bride,” which was then shortened to “TCB.” I won’t go too much into the spe­cif­ics of this rela­tion­ship, but will say that it was, in the phrase that always reminds me of David Foster Wallace, griev­ously ill-advised. (I remem­ber my Première col­league Susannah Gora some­times look­ing at me and ask­ing, out of nowhere, “TCB; why?” Oh, the human­ity.) In the movie about you, Uncle Kent, your week­end vis­it­or isn’t quite as age-inappropriate, as they say these days…well, they said it in those days, too, let’s not kid ourselves. This person…Kate, is a “journ­al­ist” who writes “about the envir­on­ment” (and just between us, Kent, and don’t take this the wrong way, because I don’t mean it that way, I just hope that the Big Hollywood people nev­er get a gander at this film, because they’ll then be able to say that cli­mate change is a myth per­petu­ated by mor­al degen­er­ates who hang out on week­ends with dudes they’ve met on Chatroulette) and has this boy­friend, who’s pretty hippie-ish look­ing. We know this because no soon­er does Kate show up at your house and go to the bath­room than you abscond with her cam­era and down­load its con­tents onto your computer.

This is part of the key to why your life is so spe­cific­ally prob­lem­at­ic: as laid-back and not-very-motivated as cer­tain aspects of your exist­ence seem to be, it’s pretty clear that you need to relax a little bit. The lady’s got a boy­friend, check; maybe you ought to just roll with it. Don’t try to down­load pho­tos of the guy the minute the chick pops out of sight. I mean, “TCB” had a boyfriend—who appar­ently admit­ted to her once that if he were forced to choose between giv­ing up sex and giv­ing up marijuana, he would give up sex, which really gave me some­thing that might be said to resemble a, um,  leg up in a par­tic­u­lar depart­ment, des­pite my advanced age and the lousy phys­ic­al shape I was in—and while I occa­sion­ally tor­men­ted myself by ima­gin­ing that he looked like Taylor Hawkins from the Foo Fighters (he didn’t, not even a little, as it turned out)—I figured that maybe the most sens­ible policy would be to not get too hung up on it. This notion is con­firmed by the fact that in the pro­cess of down­load­ing the pho­tos to your com­puter you mis­takenly wipe them from the cam­era itself, neces­sit­at­ing that you lie about break­ing the cam­era. That’s just weird.

I could also observe that maybe it might have been a good idea to have your situ­ation a little more togeth­er when Kate arrived. I have found that, regard­less of how odd the ini­tial meet­ing space or cir­cum­stances of the con­nec­tion, women do like a little romance. When the time came for my first face-to-face meet­ing with my online liason, I took her to a fairly snazzy res­taur­ant for cock­tails and appet­izers before we brought her stuff to my place. (Any New Yorkers out there remem­ber Lola on 21^st Street? How great was that place, huh?) I wasn’t hanging out around the house clean­ing cat shit out of the lit­ter box when she arrived. Just say­ing. Call my way of doing things old-school or even “pat­ri­arch­al,” if you insist; I just call it tak­ing pains, and really, it can PAY OFF.

Another thing that makes your situ­ation look pretty lousy—and there’s really no kind way of put­ting this—is that your friends kind of suck. Man, I had been under the impres­sion that that Bewersdorf char­ac­ter (who is here billed as “Kev,” which does very little to dimin­ish the impres­sion that a few too many twelve-year olds were involved in the mak­ing of this pic­ture) was still liv­ing in Berlin. In fact I’d been hop­ing that as he con­tin­ued to meet with little artist­ic and/or com­mer­cial suc­cess flog­ging his vari­ous music­al endeavors, he’d just keep mov­ing east, deep­er into Europe. I expec­ted maybe he’d be in Dnipropetrovsk by now. But no, here he is in L.A., with his stu­pid dinky quasi-Casio key­board in his lap, call­ing you “dude” and embar­rass­ing you at parties by call­ing on you to do “cock tricks.” It’s kind of sad—and a little gross—when you tell him you’d rather not do said tricks, not just because you don’t wanna screw things up with Kate, but because you’ve got scar tis­sue on your testicles and your doc­tor told you it’s cause, well, you’re dis­fig­ur­ing your­self with these “cock tricks.” By the same token, let’s face facts, Kent: the best way to avoid being asked to do “cock tricks” is by not ever hav­ing done them in front of groups of people in the first place. You might have wanted to con­sider that before unleash­ing that par­tic­u­lar genie from its bottle. I mean, I did A LOT of dumb things in the run up to 40, and more dumb things after that, but man, you made me glad that I exer­cised some dis­cre­tion in that par­tic­u­lar department.

And then there’s your friend Joe, who’s also the cred­ited dir­ect­or of this movie, and who has a mean­ing­ful exchange with you when you vis­it him at the large but mostly empty house he’s stay­ing in, the prop­erty of a “pro­du­cer” who Joe says is “inter­ested” in him. Joe greets you at the gate of the house in swim trunks and black socks, which is I guess indic­at­ive of how “not L.A.” Joe is, which is fine because just between you and me I don’t think he’s gonna be spend­ing a whole hel­luva lot of time out there in the future. In any event, Joe’s an expect­ant dad at this point, and he seems to dig it, while you lament that you “missed the boat.” “I think if I had met the love of my life when I was 20 and we were mar­ried now it’d be awe­some, “ you observe. “But there’s some­thing really pathet­ic about dat­ing when you’re 40.”

Lemme give you some tough love here, Kent: pathet­ic is as pathet­ic does. Drinking beer, smoking pot, doing “cock tricks,” get­ting all passive-aggressive about sex/displays of affec­tion with your week­end guest, going on line with her to soli­cit a three­some, and then not really hav­ing any idea of how to pro­ceed while the threesome—the griev­ously ill-advised three­some, I’d say—is actu­ally hap­pen­ing; pathet­ic is one word for it. And I don’t want to be too harsh here, but It cer­tainly doesn’t help that, personality-wise, you seem to be a little on the mono­ton­ous side. And I know you can’t help the face you’ve got, but the fact that it seems to have only one expres­sion is a little…I don’t know. On the oth­er hand, you DO have a damn good head of hair, which really is a real nice thing to have when you’re 40, take it from me. Why you keep said hair in that sub-SuperCuts Beatles do is bey­ond me, but like that black guy once said to Lester Bangs, it’s your head, man. I also can’t help but won­der if maybe part of what makes your exist­ence so unful­filling is that you’re not…well, you seem to be not all that bright. When you and Kate are assess­ing your “third” (for the poten­tial three­some, that is) on Chatroulette (and again, not to get too judg­ment­al or any­thing, but Chatroulette really looks like a pretty skeevy site—FYI, I met “TCB” in an AOL chat­room, about cook­ing, yet!…not that that makes me any bet­ter, I hasten to add…), you say to Kate that you “don’t get” the girl’s references—which are to Beethoven and Sappho. Wow! You and I are only ten years or so apart in age—did the United State pub­lic schools sys­tem change that much in the inter­im? I KNOW I didn’t hear about Beethoven merely via Peanuts. As “Kev” says, “Dude.”

Near the end of the film, you’re seen in front of your com­puter, look­ing at a video of your­self with a niece or neph­ew, enter­tain­ing the rel­at­ive. “Uncle Kent is the best” reads the head­er for the video, and as you watch, with “Kev”’s piano music hit­ting wanting-to-be-poignant notes behind it, we get a glimpse of…what, exactly? An altern­ate to the life you have now? Some ver­sion of the life you want? These shots play…well, “sen­ti­ment­ally” is the word that comes to mind. But that can’t be right, because accord­ing to Richard Brody, your dir­ect­or Joe is the new Maurice Pialat, and Pialat didn’t have a sen­ti­ment­al bone in his body. So maybe I’m mis­read­ing things. But I do think the dif­fer­ence between this movie about you and any movies by Pialat, or I should say a dif­fer­ence, is that this movie is rather soft where Pialat’s are hard. Not without ten­der­ness, but hard. Hard enough so that the dis­tance between “I recog­nize myself in the people here” and “get me the hell away from these assholes” ceases to func­tion as any kind of effect­ive dis­tinc­tion. Which makes the exper­i­ence of the films some­thing dif­fer­ent than the exper­i­ence of this film. And part of that’s due to the fact Pialat actu­ally had A SENSIBILITY, and has some (of what we crit­ics call) dis­tance, and did not, again, have a sen­ti­ment­al bone in his body. As upset­ting as the plight that is your life is, Kent, what’s weird about Uncle Kent is how pleased with itself it seems; there’s some­thing smirky about its over­all depic­tion of sun­lit misery. One gets the sense, not for the first time, of its dir­ect­or rev­el­ing in the sen­sa­tion of put­ting some­thing over on the view­er. Even what’s been cited as the film’s most gut-wrenching moment, a kiss-off in which one per­son says to anoth­er, “Write on my wall,” felt, to me at least, arbit­rary, and no more or less con­trived than any of the wanting-to-be-“with-it” social media ref­er­ences that dot No Strings Attached. 

But I will, no doubt, be told that I am wrong for observing thus. And also wrong for think­ing, well, yeah, it’s true, as some of your pal Joe’s cham­pi­ons say, that highly-regarded french dir­ect­or Philippe Garrel also makes movies in which he fea­tures his friends and fam­ily going through, or re-enacting, pain­ful emo­tion­al stuff, so yes, there’s a resemb­lance between his films and films such as the one you’re in, but, well, I don’t know, the people in Garrel’s films seem some­how less…trivial. Am I a bad per­son for think­ing that? And am I think­ing that only because those people are speak­ing French? I don’t know. I’m kind of torn. I keep com­ing back to those “cock tricks.” Again, I don’t want to seem above it all; hell, I atten­ded the world première of Le Petit Package and everything. I’ve been friendly with Glasgow Phillips, the auteur of The Sound of One Hand Clapping (that’s NSFW, for those of you who DON’T work at home), who did, even­tu­ally, I believe, con­clude that maybe “dick jokes,” as he him­self called them, maybe were, as they say, no way to go through life. What can I tell you. If not want­ing to hang (either cine­mat­ic­ally or in the flesh) with people who do “cock tricks” at parties makes me a snob, then fuck it: I“m a snob. And I’ll get called a snob. And that’s life. It’s okay, I can handle it. I flare up some­times, true, but I’m not actu­ally as thin-skinned as my vari­ous per­sonae some­times sug­gest. Hell, if I was, I think I’d have been insti­tu­tion­al­ized by now!

Which brings me back to you and me, and you: at the end of the film (um, spoil­er alert?) your exist­ence is once again just you and your cat, and your cat seems a little ticked off with you. Sad? Yep. Like I said, I’ve been there. And I gotta level with you, Kent: for me, things got a lot worse before they got bet­ter. The whole thing with “TCB” expan­ded, and then imploded, and then I got into ANOTHER griev­ously ill-advised rela­tion­ship with a divor­cee (which was less frowned upon by my peers because at least it was more age appro­pri­ate) and when THAT imploded, I got so anxiety-ridden and insom­ni­ac that I star­ted cadging all this pot from my buddy Tom B., and I spent one whole month of 2002 pretty much drunk the whole time, and it was so bad enough that Tom B. and my oth­er friend Christina staged the World’s Smallest Intervention for me (I did sus­pect at the time that Tom was really mostly irrit­ated that my con­stant beg­gings were start­ing to eat in to his per­son­al pot sup­ply). And some­where around all that time, 9/11 happened, and that was kind of a buzzkill, too. Right? In any event, after all this I finally got into ther­apy, and that def­in­itely helped, and while I’m cer­tainly still very much a work in pro­gress, I’m now five years hap­pily mar­ried to, yes,  the love of my life (who I did NOT meet on line), am in bet­ter phys­ic­al shape than I’ve been in years, and am no longer haunted by the notion that the first half of my life is over. It happened to me and it can hap­pen to you, Kent. But you’ve got to take some steps your­self. You might want to think of cut­ting down on the alco­hol and drugs, maybe even cut­ting them out entirely. Do a little self-care, too. Some reg­u­lar exer­cise. It might not be the worst idea to make some adjust­ments in the hair and ward­robe depart­ments, too. (I know, I’ve got little right to talk. But I’m just say­in’.) And ser­i­ously, man, drop those loser friends of yours. And maybe think about not advert­ising your plight in unat­tract­ively shot, inar­tic­u­lately craf­ted, disin­genu­ously inversely-porny “indie” pic­tures. Seriously.

I think you’re gonna be okay.

Yours in Christ,

Glenn Kenny