Velvet Mischief
Idaho, A Minecraft Movie, and connection
by Sam Williams
I, like many cinephiles who didn’t grow up playing Minecraft, have been completely taken aback by A Minecraft Movie’s box office success. In hindsight, I really should have seen this coming. My “youth correspondent” (a coworker in his early 20s) was clearly invested in the movie for months prior to its release in a way that I had not seen before, even if much of that engagement was negative and baffling to me. My 10:30 screening was full. The late start time leant itself to an older and more sedate audience than the raucous screenings making the news, but I still caught glimpses of how much Minecraft meant to people. There was audible shock at the post-credit reveal that a woman was named Alex, a reference to the games that has been explained to me multiple times and that I only partially understand.
I was clearly catching glimpses of a cultural moment, and I failed to recognize it because I am not a part of that culture. As a millennial, I was just a few years too old to have grown up with the game. The criticism that my youth correspondent leveled was based on game mechanics that meant nothing to me. What I missed was that this focus on game mechanics was central to the movie’s appeal, as evidenced by theaters full of children and young adults losing their minds when a “Chicken Jockey” appears. My youth correspondent was negative and sarcastic leading up to the movie, but what I didn’t account for was that he was talking about the movie a lot. When I asked him about his thoughts after we had both seen the movie he enjoyed the film and seemed genuinely surprised that I didn’t like it very much.
A Minecraft Movie is mostly uninteresting beyond the academic exercise of tracing every creative decision it makes to the obvious corporate interests and studio notes that drove them rather than any real sense of artistry. It is a deeply impersonal film, making several decisions to make the film as easily consumable as possible while stifling any attempt to engage with the work on anything but the most superficial level.
There is, however, one major exception, a touch of the personal that has lingered in my brain for weeks now. The film is shockingly specific and attentive in its portrayal of Idaho. Some of this is the stuff you would expect. A main character works at a potato chip factory. But there’s a lot of specificity in the details. The factory’s mascot is a massive potato statue that is proudly tacky in the way only Idaho can be.
And then there’s The Scene. In an exchange irrelevant to the remainder of the film, the sister Natalie encourages her brother Henry to adopt a “signature scent” and gives him a cologne. The cologne, “Velvet Mischief,” is clearly labeled as coming from Boise. The Scene lives so rent-free in my brain because the reference to Boise is a very visible and unnecessary element of the cologne that is clearly riffing on a detailed understanding of Boise’s unique relationship with the rest of Idaho. It’s something only an Idahoan would put in the movie.
In retrospect, this shocking Idaho forwardness should not have been a surprise either. The film is directed by Jared Hess, who captured a very specific spirit of Idaho life in Napoleon Dynamite. Hess attended and graduated from Preston High School, and spending such formative years in The Gem State clearly influenced a lot of his filmmaking. There isn’t a lot of Hess in A Minecraft Movie, but his Idahoan-ness comes through.
This moment of connection with a film and cultural moment that is otherwise entirely alien to me is surprising because it reflects just how much my relationship with the state and my perception of the state has changed in the past few years, and the vital role that Idaho’s film community has played in that change.
I moved to Boise in 2018 for work as a law librarian and assistant professor at the University of Idaho College of Law’s budding Boise location. I was 29, which isn’t that young but is relatively youthful for a tenure-track law professor and felt, not entirely inaccurately, that I had failed upwards into the position. I was noticeably younger and less accomplished than my colleagues and struggled to connect with them. The people who were closer to me in terms of temperament, age, and accomplishment were educated professionals in their mid to late 20s, a demographic profile that fits the law students that professional ethics demand I keep at a distance.
Seeking companionship outside of work was also consistently thwarted. I’ve never been good at making friends. There are many reasons for this, but a core one is that I am very bad at meeting people. I am afraid of starting conversations with people who I don’t know well, which puts the burden on others to initiate contact with someone who might read as a loner or stand-offish. To get over this hurdle, I have adopted a few common conversation topics that I can talk with basically anyone about. Unfortunately, I have found that most of them do not work in Idaho.
One of those conversation shortcuts were the movies. I’ve always loved movies, and especially the theatrical experience. I think this started in my hometown’s dollar fifty theater, where my mom could give herself and three boys a satisfying night out at a very reasonable cost. This relationship cemented itself in my college years, when I took the bus to a local theater at least once a week to pull myself out of the famed “Reed Bubble.” I have kept this tradition going ever since. This habit rewarded me with several of my most enduring friendships by virtue of shear proximity- by being around people in film-friendly spaces, I met people with similar interests that I otherwise would never have met.
Unfortunately, I really struggled to find any community around the film scene in Boise. The Flicks came closest, but their clientele skewed a bit older than me and never quite felt like my scene. The folks at the multiplex and the surrounding area know me well, but our relationship is the transactional one of a customer and employee.
In 2019, after a year of trying and failing to make any real connections outside of work, I finally broke through. I discovered the Idaho Horror Film Festival, an annual local festival at the Egyptian. I got to spend my entire weekend watching the sort of weird stuff I usually had to go out of my way to find. People started to talk to me. I discovered that Creepshow 2 is a surprisingly common frame of cultural reference. It did feel like a barrier that these people were all filmmakers while my greatest aspiration would be to become a filmmaking hobbyist, but I was sure I could figure out some aspect of film production to make my own. At long last, I had a lead on finding My People.
Then the COVID-19 Pandemic happened.
The pandemic was bad for everyone, and I’m not going to claim any unique harm from it. But it did kill the first real lead I had for interpersonal connections in Idaho. It cut off my primary means of breaking free of my own shit and connecting to the rest of the world. It also damaged my desire to connect to the people around me. There is an ample discourse about how the pandemic drove us all mad and broke up many previously close relationships as we saw those close to us devolve into conspiratorial thought. I wasn’t all that close to these people, so it wasn’t even hard to cut them out of my life.
And, in more of a mixed blessing than problem way, it replaced those threads with something else. My friends from my past lives reached out. I had regular game nights, presentation parties, movie nights, and check-ins. I could see that what I was looking for did exist in the world- it just wasn’t here. Most of these regular hangouts have persisted, and even expanded, long after the lockdowns have ended.
But as anyone who has been in any sort of distance relationship will tell you, distance is a problem. Not an insurmountable one, but it takes more work than local connections. There is no shared experience. There is not the same spontaneity. And people have lives. Their more immediate concerns make it easy to put more distant connections on the backburner. These distant relationships crowded out any time that I would set aside to develop a new, more local one.
Flash forward to Summer 2024. As I perform my regular ritual of Googling “Movies Boise,” I see that Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is showing. It’s an old favorite of mine and I have a free evening, so I buy my ticket online, drive to the strange new venue where the movie is playing, and bump into a former coworker who is also a fan. I never would have guessed that- nobody at work ever seemed to talk about or even like movies. The presenter gives a brief shpiel about the movie and the Idaho Film Society’s mission and upcoming events, and the film rolls.
I bought my $120 membership the next day. I might have bought it as I was leaving the theater.
Idaho Film Society has been the main guiding force when scheduling my weekends for almost a year now. The first thing I check when figuring out my plans is what each IFS screening is and if I’m even a little interested and available (I usually am, their curation team is incredible), I lock it in and plan everything else around a 7:00 screening.
It became clear right away that IFS was finally helping me to build any sense of local community. I stripped away enough of the new ways in which I was bad at meeting people to rediscover the ones that I had forgotten about years ago. As I became a fixture at their screenings, the folks running the space recognized me and began to reach out. Hence, after almost a year of being an IFS regular, I send this transmission.
Film is unique in that it is both a deeply individual experience and a deeply communal one. It is exceedingly easy to go see a movie alone- I’ve done it at least once a week for almost twenty years now. There’s nothing about watching a movie that demands that someone else be there to watch it with you. Yet there is also a deep sense of community in film. There is a reason that what I remember most about A Minecraft Movie (other than Velvet Mischief, the scent of Boise) is the audience reaction. Film is also a deeply collaborative art form. I think this is a big part of why I like movies about making movies so much- they revel in how many different perspectives come together to form a coherent vision.
The connections that come from film are also frequently surprising and can open pathways you never would have imagined. I went to such a late Minecraft screening because I went to IFS’ screening of Phantom of the Paradise earlier that evening. During the curator’s introduction to the film, I threw in a fun piece of trivia I picked up from an old vacation- Winnipeg’s strange fascination with the film. This fact stood out to me when I visited the city because Phantom of the Paradise is my best friend from library school’s favorite film. Shortly after meeting this friend and reporting this fact to some friends from undergrad at a different movie night, we immediately watched it and gave them insight into this newly important person to me. Watching and sharing film deepens relationships between people and places in a way few other things can.
Which brings me back to A Minecraft Movie. This film so central to a culture that I feel no connection to has made me realize that while Idaho may never truly feel like home to me, it is a part of me. I have heard nobody express as much confusion or delight over the film’s strange Idaho-ness beyond my fellow Idahoans. What is especially interesting is that people do remember The Scene. Even harsh critics bring it up as an example of something charming and unique poking through the corporate visage. It is one of the only moments when this deeply impersonal film becomes personal. And no matter how alienated I may feel from Idaho, my being here helped me to break through my alienation from a cultural moment and connect with it in my own way. I am not as much of an outsider to either state or film as I first believed.
At Idaho Film Society, I have found a place that has begun to feel like home, a place that connects the real world around us to the film that offers escape from it. It is a place that I want to be and seek out outside of work. And I believe that it can be that place for so many more people. I look forward to finding new ways to help people discover it and make it their own.
I should also say that IFS is also starting to draw those more distant connections back in. Next year, my best friend in Portland plans on coming here for the IFS membership drive Oscar party rather than giving me my annual excuse to return to the place that I most consider home. Idaho is my home now, and I’m starting to act and feel like it.
Sam Williams is a law librarian and law professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, a lifelong cinephile, and a regular Idaho Film Society attendee with aspirations for less scholarly creative writing. If you are interested in film criticism in the form of law review articles, you can visit his SSRN page here.