“What the fuck are we doing?” Jack Rebney impatiently asks director Ben Steinbauer in Winnebago Man, Steinbauer’s documentary about fame, personal meaning, and how one can be mistaken for the other. The question comes near the middle of the movie, as the two are sitting in the woods in northern California, and there’s a palpable feeling that Steinbauer is struggling to determine what form his film might ultimately take. To this point in the story, things have not gone as expected, for the viewer or, most likely, for Steinbauer.
Winnebago Man begins as a search for Rebney, one of those accidental stars of the internet thanks to outtakes from a sales video he made in 1989 for the Winnebago Corporation. The video was shot in Iowa, at the height of summer, and the cult classic outtakes reel features Rebney melting down repeatedly and profanely as he flubs his lines, flings sarcastic barbs at crew members, and angrily chases after the swarming flies, all while trying to extol the virtues of state-the-art mobile homes. In the days before the internet, VHS copies of the reel were handed around, one of those secret handshakes of ironic cool, and when YouTube arrived, Rebney quickly joined the pantheon of the Leave Britney Alone Kid, Brian Collins, Epic Beard Man, and the innumerable other strangers whose earnestness, in the infinite fragmentation of media, has been transformed into our entertainment.
But Steinbauer’s search for Rebney is a short one, resolved within the film’s first 25 minutes by, wait for it, a letter Steinbauer sent via snail mail to one of Rebney’s PO box addresses. Without much of a journey to his intended goal, Steinbauer found himself in the woods with Rebney making a movie about; what?
Rebney, now in his late 70s, is living in remote Manton, CA, working as the caretaker of a rustic mountain getaway when Steinbauer finds him, and he’s unaware of his internet fame. The obvious thing to do with Rebney once he’s discovered is to focus on him and the video; why was he so angry in that video? What has he been doing since the video was made? How did he find himself making the video to begin with? The problem is that Rebney isn’t interested in any of this, nor does he understand why anyone cares about the video. Indeed, he steadfastly and gruffly (though good-naturedly, for the most part) refuses to discuss biographical details; when Steinbauer asks about his childhood, he chuckles and shakes his head in wonderment. “You’re so transparent it boggles the mind,” he tells Steinbauer, and it’s hard to disagree.
Rebney is revealed to be a funny, intelligent and still-profane crank who’s chosen living alone in the woods over dealing with what he clearly sees as a hopelessly corrupt world. Steinbauer, desperate for direction, suggests Rebney use his fame to communicate his political ideas, and offers to buy him a video camera with which he can make regular YouTube-ready broadcasts. The idea seems natural to Steinbauer, a 20-something filmmaker for whom the value and relevance of the internet is unquestionable and unquestioned, but to the analog Rebney, it’s idiotic. Who would want to listen to my ramblings? he wants to know. For Steinbauer, Rebney’s notoriety as the angry man in the Winnebago reel is a currency he can use; you have a ready-made audience, he tells Rebney. But for Rebney, his fame is a fluke and an oddity, interesting but meaningless, and though he has plenty of opinions and is in the process of writing a book, he doesn’t have the younger generation’s unthinking eagerness to display himself at any cost. One of the few biographical details Rebney shares with Steinbauer is that he was once a CBS news producer, and he speaks with reverence of Conkrite, Murrow, and the other gods of journalism’s Golden Age, when only a chosen few had access to the soapbox and, he says, news simply delivered the objective facts. Though it’s never made explicit, it isn’t hard to understand why the internet, with its blogs and commentaries and endless democratization of information and opinion, fills Rebney with a rage no swarm of flies could ever hope to inspire.
If Winnebago Man wants to be anything besides a vague portrait of an eccentric man, it wants to be a lesson in how the internet brings us together. Indeed, there’s a puerile assumption here that knowing information about a person is the same thing as knowing the person. In Rebney’s initial skepticism and then, in the end, in his seeming understanding of the internet’s power, Steinbauer may be suggesting that, to quote that ubiquitous icon of internet togetherness, Facebook, the internet can help us all “connect and share with the people” in our lives.
But what goes unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, is the irony that while the internet is what made Rebney famous, it’s also the obstacle to his being known in any real way. At the movie’s climax (such as it is), Steinbauer interviews people waiting in line at the Red Vic Theater in San Francisco (ground zero of West Coast ironic cool), where Rebney will appear and answer audience questions at the Found Footage Festival. One interviewee sums up the feeling when she says, “I’m hoping he’s gonna say the F-word a lot.” To the audience, this is what Rebney is: an angry, cursing trained bear. After the show, at which Rebney is sweet, thoughtful, clearly touched by the attention, and satisfyingly potty-mouthed, Steinbauer conducts follow-up interviews, and the prevailing sentiment is that the audience regrets assuming the man in the Winnebago reel was all there was to him. The fact that internet exposure was reductive, and that it was the face-to-face meeting that allowed Rebney to be truly understood with anything like complexity, seems lost on Steinbauer.
The film is mostly entertaining and occasionally gathers momentum, but struggles with its focus. It brushes against some big ideas, but Steinbauer is either uninterested in them or fails to notice they’ve arisen at all. The only person who seems to understand the contradictions on display is Rebney, many of whose ideas and opinions are plain old-fashioned. It’s easy to romanticize the old model of news dissemination, but Rebney overlooks its obvious shortcomings, and there’s no question he plays to the crowd and likes the attention. Who wouldn’t? But the essential emptiness of internet fame (or any fame, for that matter), the fact that people knowing who you are is different from them knowing you, is obvious to him. A great many people are rightly excited by the possibilities of the internet, which are enormous, but for most people its value lies videos of kittens dunking basketballs, skateboarders falling down stairs, and Winnebago salesmen having hissy fits. Rebney gets it, even if Steinbauer doesn’t.
Winnebago Man runs through the 29th @ Kendall Square Cinema.
Larry Fahey is a writer living in Boston. He has a wife, two children, a cat, and an orange rotary phone he’ll never surrender. He writes about film, cranks out copy for razors and sneakers, and chronicles the daily misery of parenthood on his blog, ThereIsNothingForYouHere.wordpress.com.
