Everybody’s Cindy Nowadays

Billy Bragg introduced me to Cindy Sherman.

Not personally, of course. He wrote a song about the photographer on his 1991 album, inspiring me to visit the library (pre-Internet!) to learn everything I could about someone who created imaginary, cinematic worlds for characters to roam around in, then cast herself in those leading roles.

At around the same time, I was working through my communications degree at Ithaca College. One of our graduation prerequisites in the Television-Radio program was “Field Production.” We had to write, direct, and produce a short video containing a scavenger hunt of shots and techniques, scored in the same manner as a figure skating routine, but while carrying thirty pounds of newsgathering equipment.

The hardest part of the assignment was writing a script with all the shots (2-shot, reverse shot, close-up of an object, focus pull, establishing shot of a large building) and then finding some friends willing to actually be in the video.

You couldn’t just Cindy Sherman yourself into your own video. You had to manage all that gear and make the camera moves yourself to prove to a professor that you had the technical skill that our industry would require for at least the next three decades. (Autofocus handycams hit the market shortly after this whole exercise.)

Let’s set aside my nostalgia for the day I made my friends Kara and Mike fake-break-up-in-public so I could get an “A.” Like a good Gen X citizen, I watch my favorite TikToks when they’re boosted to Instagram Reels three days later. (We’re the same people who watched Gilligan’s Island in syndicated reruns, we’re used to running behind.)

What strikes me about my feed right now—even the business-related content and definitely not all the footage of adorable dogs running on portable treadmills—is how quickly folks have mastered the art of producing 90 second reels of shot/reverse-shot content. 

They’re not worried about poor lighting. They HOLD their lavalier microphones. They’re using hairbrushes as stand-in props for telephones. They’re definitely unconcerned about fuzzy edges around their green-screen backgrounds. (That would have gotten me a “D” in Television Directing class.)

Most of them have invented universes of characters, much like Cindy Sherman, that blur the lines between cinema and reality. I have found myself unexpectedly invested in a few of these little, home-brew microdramas. Will Project Poodles ever ship? Will Sween get indicted by the SEC? Will SHRM get… (oh, wait, that one is real).

All that’s to say: I have some things to promote in the next few months and y’all are not gonna force me to stitch multiple versions myself into a bunch of videos like I’m Eddie Murphy in The Klumps. I’m unconvinced anyone wants me on camera, and yet the “pivot to video” bell rings really hard for someone like me. All my formal training in the work happened during a time when it was poor form to allow yourself to actually be in the video.

My standards for video remain pretty high, but my peers in the space didn’t have to win praise from professors who directed network television when Johnny Carson was still hosting a show in New York. 

Talking recently with some peers and inside of my mastermind groups, the frustration’s real. It reminds me of what else I learned in the 1990s, when freelancers often got jobs because of how good they were at delivering conference talks (as opposed to actually doing the jobs). We thought we had it pretty easy in the mid-aughts, when you could knock out a big launch with a couple of solid essays and some help from the blogerati. 

It no longer matters what work you do or what industry you’re in. Moving forward and staying relevant requires diving into a new medium every few decades, especially when it’s something uncomfortable. (Even Cindy Sherman had to do it. Her most recent work involves converting some Instagram selfies into tapestries.)

I’ll see you on Reels soon.