Paint By Numbers PoMo Ha Ha

On the face of it, Paint (2023) looks like the inevitable Bob Ross biopic, right down to the I-didn't-known-Bob-smoked-a-pipe details. But it's not Bob Ross, as we find out in the first seconds, it's Carl Nargle, and the question of How will they deal with Bob's U.S. Airforce drill sergeant past? is replaced with What kinds of permissions were sought to keep the Ross estate from litigation?

As with most extended SNL skits (was this one of them?), there is no past, only a protracted cartoon present that has been around since postmodernism immemorial. As for the "future", that is now our IRL present, where identitarian issues are daily meeting topics -- from the office water cooler to the butcher's chopping block.

The disruption of Carl's world comes in the first ten minutes, after he is told by the station manager to extend his "popular" how-to-paint show from one hour to two. Carl waffles, and Ambrosia arrives to take the baton, switching the focus from Carl's mountain landscapes (always the same mountain) to her alien spaceships blasting forest stumps with blood.

Suddenly, the Cult of Carl is replaced by the Cult of Ambrosia. And because Ambrosia is Black and sleeps with women, an unimagined future becomes the white male privilege version of an equally sudden and dystopic present. This is brought home in surprisingly few words after Carl's station manager lands Carl a university teaching position, on the condition he resign from the show, which he does (not surprisingly, Carl is bought out by semester's end). A similar reckoning occurs when Carl visits the local art museum( Burlington, Vermont) to ask the bow-tied, sixty-something white male director why his paintings aren't in the collection.

As is typical of American film (from indies to blockbusters), the beleaguered subject rallies. Carl creates his masterpiece, but loses it just as quick in a studio fire. The show's producer, whose love he lost many years before (Carl cheated on her), and who still loves him, inexplicably takes him back. Not sure if Carl returns to his job at the PBS-affilate or not, but by then it doesn't mater. Carl gets whatever we deem is best for him, not that we ever believed he existed. Bob Ross, on the other hand, did exist, and I think the more relevant film would be the one that chronicles Bob's transformation from a maker of killing machines to amateur Zen master.