Hiding in Plain Sight

or, How I saw the Matrix at Canadian Tire

Buckle in for a series of interconnected pop-culture anecdotes!

Let’s start with What We Do In the Shadows - the TV show on FX, not the 2014 movie it’s adapted from. A couple weeks back, on the very night that the show’s Season 3 finale aired, I was listening to a panel discussion with the cast. I would call myself a “big fan” of the show, but not the kind of obsessive¹ fan who knows everything about its production or producers. I find I don’t really obsess over much of anything (I am too busy trying to have a cursory understanding of EVERYTHING to dive too deep into any one thing). This panel therefore offered a plethora of new information to me — and not just about What We Do in The Shadows.

The moderator asked the showrunner, Paul Simms, about two episodes from Season 3 that include scenes in a generic big-box store. Thus, not only did I learn where the show was shot in Toronto, but I also learned that those two scenes were filmed on location at Canadian Tire. Buried in that fun fact, yet more new information: Canadian Tire is not a tire store, but rather Canada’s strangely-named answer to, say, K-Mart.

Here’s another example of behind-the-scenes insight that doubled as general-pop-culture insight: In the one where Nandor (played by Kayvan Novak) joins a group of vampires who have renounced their vampirism, much of the episode’s delightful ‘80s aerobic aesthetic was not written into the script, but rather the contribution of the show’s costume designer, Laura Montgomery. Nandor’s whole look in that episode, the panelists said, was largely inspired by a John Travolta movie I swear I’d never heard of — 1985’s Perfect (d. James Bridges).

These are probably not the best parts of that panel, or even the most interesting. I bring them up because of what happened later that week. Well, “happened,” might be an overstatement. Let’s just say a certain phenomenon occurred, one that is not new to me. That Saturday, I listened to an episode of the excellent interview show Bullseye². Jamie Lee Curtis was being interviewed, and at some point in the show, she mentioned that she’d been in the 1985 film Perfect. The very same movie that I’d “never heard of” had now come to my attention twice in 48 hours, in completely unrelated contexts.

Later in the week, for reasons I can’t quite recall, I put on the first episode of Jim Gaffigan’s The Pale Tourist special on Amazon Prime as I was getting ready for bed. Part One of the special finds Gaffigan performing live in Canada. Crossing into my bathroom to brush my teeth, I stopped cold upon hearing a joke about…Canadian Tire. “You know how people love shopping for tires?” the best bit goes. “We lure them in with the tires and then, boom, we sell ‘em a blender.”

That “phenomenon” I mentioned before? I wouldn’t call it “coincidence.” I can get pretty mystical when the mood strikes me, but I don’t think there’s anything metaphysical going on here. This is a phenomenon of being granted a new word or concept and having it open up a new personal wavelength on the world. Just as we can learn a new language and suddenly understand entire bus ads or song lyrics that were previously meaningless to us, I often find myself learning a new word or concept and suddenly hearing it everywhere. When this happens, I can only assume that the idea had already been there, all around me. Only I wasn’t tuned to the proper channel to receive it.

The case of Canadian Tire is a perfect example of this. Part of the reason I was so surprised by the Canadian Tire joke on that Pale Tourist episode is that I have listened to the special before. I hadn’t watched the show, but I listened to the full album version while on a 12-hour road trip to Santa Fe last Christmas. The material is the same. It’s just that when I’d heard the joke the first time, I’d had no context for it, so it didn’t register. I didn’t know Canadian Tires were K-Marts, and that blenders were just one of a thousand non-tire things one might buy there. Nearly a year later, I had more information, and now I heard the joke clearly.

Or, take some recent research I did for a kids’ trivia quiz about baking. While researching the episode, I learned that round sprinkles are often referred to in the UK (also in Australia and New Zealand) as “Hundreds and Thousands.” There is not a single American I’ve shared this fact with who was not flabbergasted by it. But now that I know, I have heard the term countless times in British media, most recently just last night while watching Taskmaster on YouTube. The hundreds and thousands were there all along, hiding in plain sight.

This is not a paid advertisement for whatever this candy is, but if someone act Whittaker’s is reading this, I would absolutely take payment in candy form.

Branching out from mere language, I recall that after I learned how to do a cable knit, I could no longer look at a thickly knit sweater, scarf, or hat without thinking about how it was constructed. Once I started photographing wallpaper (which, despite my Instagram feed, is not a major part of my life, but more of an appreciative interest), I began seeing wallpaper everywhere. If you watched the recent Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, did you notice the extravagant wallpaper that covers almost every interior in the eponymous building? Because I did.

What do you see in this picture? And is it that wallpaper?

When I tell someone about something I’ve been hearing about a lot and they respond that they’re unaware of it, I’ll often make a prediction: you’re going to hear about it a lot in the weeks to come.

I must say, I find this phenomenon both intriguing and a little disturbing. It’s a bit like glimpsing the Matrix. It’s not as if I’m entering a new milieu and learning all about the unfamiliar culture there. Instead, without changing my setting or my habits, I suddenly see something or hear something that was, presumably, happening around me all along.

I think this in itself is a reason to keep learning. Exploring new worlds is great. But what I really want is to be able to see and hear the world I am already in.

1. No negative connotation implied here; the world needs obsessive fans. Without them, who would build wikis and write fan fiction?

2. One might call it a coincidence that Harvey Guillén, who stars as Guillermo on WWDITS, was interviewed on this same episode of Bullseye, but I wouldn’t. The theme of the episode was Halloween, and it’s a safe bet the timing of that panel’s airing — and of the season finale of Shadows — was also a tie-in to the spooky season.