Wilson opens his film with a man dragging a suitcase with no wheels. A hand squeezes either tobacco or marijuana from a rolled cigarette paper, ketchup slides off a plate, and a chicken wanders through a garage full of big trucks as Wilson laments his current situation.in his reedy, nasal voice:
"The space between projects is hard. Time becomes unstructured. You settle into some of your worst habits, and every day’s main activity is just calculating how many hours are left until you’re allowed to fall asleep."
With his HBO show, How to with John Wilson, Wilson had reached a minor level of celebrity, but that faded along with his royalty checks. He shows one for $9.62 and the next year’s for 49 cents.
During the 2023 writers’ strike, he visits a mind-numbing class in how to write rom-coms for Hallmark, where a teacher explains that scripts should be aspirational, take place in small towns or mid-size cities, and Christmas movies must not mention religion.
Wilson expresses dismay and even scorn for many of the possibilities he sees for his now unemployed self. But otherwise, one might be at a loss to describe just what The History of Concrete is actually about.
Wilson does talk about concrete from time to time – he takes a trip to Rome to ask why Roman concrete construction has lasted for so long, and he then says that he blew the budget for this present film on that trip.
The movie takes many digressions. At a wax museum the figures are terrible imitations of famous people and the staff mispronounce names – like "Elvis Prezle" for Elvis Presley.
He visits the grave of the actual chef behind the Chef Boyardee packaged Italian foods, and Court Avenue in Bellefontaine, Ohio, where the first concrete street was built in 1891.
In a somewhat grisly moment, the film shows a place where human tattoos are preserved, skin and all.
And from time to time, The History of Concrete takes serious turns. Over a shot of interlaced highway ramps, Wilson mentions that aside from water, concrete is the second most used material on Earth, and later in the film adds that concrete manufacture is one of the worst activities causing climate change.
The History of Concrete brings to mind Vernon, Florida., the 1981 documentary by Errol Morris about a town in Florida that had missed out on any kind of economic development, and had acquired the nickname of “Nub City” because residents had taken to shooting off their limbs to get insurance payments.
Like Morris’s film, The History of Concrete never tips its hand about when it’s tongue-in-cheek, when it’s mocking people, or when it’s actually a picture about despair.
The History of Concrete also can seem like an exercise in free association. It dances in one direction and then another and seems to live for its digressions. At the same time, those side trips have an uncanny connection to one another, connections you don’t expect, and that ultimately make you wonder about how our minds may be constructed – or at least how the mind of John Wilson is constructed.
I knew a teacher who dealt with the pressure to make education relevant, by telling his students that he had no idea what was relevant – but he knew some things that are interesting. I’m not sure how The History of Concrete matters, but it’s certainly interesting.