I first saw it on Twitter, though the video on Instagram has already racked up over 70,000 likes; it’s a brief sketch involving using security cameras to harangue employees at a 7-Eleven, emojis and is haunted by the barren wasteland of mid-2020s retail culture. It was a surreal gag, funny in the earnest, heightened mundane way Nathan Fielder or Tim Hedicker is funny. The man in a 7-Eleven uniform shouting You are a Nothing Man! And you have a soul of dirt! is one of the funniest things I’ve seen online all year.
Some viewers will notice it was also not filmed at a 7-Eleven, but instead filmed inside the very recognizable BP gas station on Myrtle Avenue, near the busy Myrtle-Wyckoff L station; it’s a popular spot, in recent years, the gas station has even turned into the home of the fashionable upscale bodega grill Blue Hour. Writing last year about the experience of eating bodega sandwiches there in the New Yorker, Helen Rosen says “the space has the sort of uncanny near-emptiness that’s specific to places that are both overly sanitized and slightly run-down.” This comes alive in the video too, whose two employees appear visibly beset by the everyday sadness of their unimportance.
That was much the point, says Alan Wagner, the Brooklyn comedian who shot the clip with two actors he picked up for the shoot: John Mastracchio, as the man behind the monitors, and Paul Brown as the yelling employee. (While the surreally poetic Brown does not appear to have much of an acting career until now, Mastracchioa purports to have an upcoming credit in this summer’s Happy Gilmore 2 as “Golf Spectator.”)
Wagner’s sensibilities were described recently by Paste magazine as drawn to the “seemingly banal parts of modern life—fliers stapled to telephone poles, store receipts, bargain basement DVDs, reality TV shows about pawn shops—and twists them to absurd ends.” If you subscribe to his patreon, he mails out a “surprise Wagner thing” every month. According to Paste, these have included windowed envelopes returning lost skin, joke postcards from imaginary neighbors and other gags. His most popular of these so far has been a photo of two old people in a bathroom, under the title BATHE IN MY MILK, which has done some traffic as a meme, described at one point as “creepy-as-hell” by the New York Post. Wagner has also assembled a greatest-hits of all these into a coffee table book, titled WAGNERBOOK.
Alan Wagner: The idea came when I was at a Home Depot, getting props for some other project, and they had one of those ‘You’re being watched’ security camera screens, and in the bottom right corner there really was a video of a guy watching a bunch of security monitors. It was clearly stock footage, not an actual guy watching me, but I thought it’d be funny if that really was the guy watching me, and what a miserable job that’d be, and what social dynamics might arise since we both have live video feeds of each other.
The second half of the idea came when I was at a friend’s birthday at a bowling alley, and the touch-screen for our lane had a weird feature where you could send these super-specific, weird emojis to the other bowling parties in the other lanes, all of whom are presumably strangers. I thought that was a fun dumb feature. So I put the two together and transported it all to the unique American hell of a 7-Eleven convenience store.
Andrew Karpan: How was shooting in that gas station?
AW: I chose that location because it was easy to get to from me, and I scoped it out and it seemed chill inside, people were just hanging out, seemed like a place we could run up in and quickly shoot a video in and no one would super care. We just ran in there and shot it; we figured if the employees eventually kicked us out we’d probably have the footage we need at that point, but the one guy manning the register thought it was cool and fun, he ended up following me on Instagram.
The locals hanging out would yell “Cut!” after every time I yelled cut, and they would clap and tell the actors good job. I was nervous running into a real business and just shooting but it turned out to be kind of a party.
AK: Do you shoot a lot in Bushwick?
AW: I don’t shoot a whole ton around Bushwick because I find most of the ideas that come to me take place in a classic American suburbia, probably because that’s where I grew up. Not much in Brooklyn looks like that, at least not near me, which is a problem haha. Sometimes I have to drive quite a ways to find what looks like a classic American suburban neighborhood for my projects.
AK: Why did you make it a 7-Eleven?
AW: There’s something uniquely late-capitalism about a 7-Eleven that I find beautiful and horrifying and strangely alluring. It’s all the most ultra-processed food you should never put in your body, hyper-sugary drinks, and absurdly overpriced cheap products. They’ll sell you an iPhone charger for thirty bucks because they know you’re probably on a roadtrip and desperately need it. And it’s all wrapped in this super clean “We’re here to help you!” aesthetic. I used to love going as a kid because it’s rows of brightly colored candy wrappers and tasty sodas, then you grow up and realize “Oh, there’s actually something sinister about all this. This place doesn’t want to help me, it wants to squeeze me and other low-income people for the max possible profit while feeding us the most addictive sugar-slop in various forms. But the air conditioning is so nice…. and the chip bags are so shiny today…. I wish I could just live here…”
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