Contrary to its name, the attention economy thrives not on attention, but on precisely that gray zone between awareness and unconsciousness which brings forth the subliminal and hallucinates the sublime. Thus it is that advertisements, not academic treatises, are said to induce a feeling approaching instant satiation: its colors and sounds bring to fore products and wants, enticing the viewer with a strange satisfaction of being recognized and profiled, even before a single thought is sublimated out of this bundle of impulses. Like the reality behind the billboards of John Carpenter’s They Live, obedience and conformity form the cornerstones of the advertising industry, and not necessarily in a knowing, ideological way. The less you know, really, the better.
But knowing is what a mysterious religious group desires, and in their province of truth-seeking, woe betide the false prophets of late-night TV whose promulgation of flash deals and overall gluttony knows no bounds. The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom, led by an enigmatic spiritual guru named Langdon P. Hershey, warns against “what is to come” as they promote its founder’s literary oeuvre who, in this wacky alternate world, stands alongside the greats (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf). But Hershey and his worldly eccentricities are mostly blips in the airwaves of the fictional Albertan town that commands the whole-hearted attention of Buffet Infinity, the feature debut from Simon Glassman. Composed almost exclusively of television commercials and news bulletins, Buffet Infinity stitches together a grotesquely captivating tale of consumption and capitalist monopoly, in which an unidentified sinkhole heralds the arrival of an all-you-can-eat restaurant chain at the local strip mall.
There’s a tautological excess, arguably, to the eponymous restaurant’s name, which cheekily hammers home the point: buffets, where more is always better, exploit the principle of abundance toward a hypothetical point of infinity, and why not for the absurd price of $4.99? But more literally, Buffet Infinity also charts the bizarre expansion of this establishment, whose ads glisten with the Anglo-American universality of a Shutterstock collab and whose employees have never once appeared on-site. First targeting a neighboring family-owned staple (“Jenny’s Sandwich Shop”) with informal airtime slights (to which the shop retaliates with its own slogans), the shop scales up with each new product placement, edging out the pet groomer’s, the electronics store, and — spoiler alert — Jenny herself, by offering cheaper deals, wider culinary arrays, and longer operating hours, all while a coterie of other businesses gradually find themselves under its omnipotent sway.
You could read Buffet Infinity most obviously as a glaring satire of unfettered capitalism, which would, of course, be spot-on. But Glassman and his crew of non-professional actors aren’t all mesmerized by this premise so much as they playfully toy with the possibilities of its representation, and the resultant concoctions of uncanny imagery and juxtaposition subsume the quirky small town of Westridge County under a menagerie of phantasmagoria that uniquely articulates the pleasures and perils alike of our monkey-brained attention spans. Amidst news reports of missing individuals and an eerie sound that soon blossoms into a city-level crisis, the war for our eyes and ears commences in full analog swing, with a costumed superhero battling a villain of high prices and championing savings at a car dealership, a pro-business lawyer eager to proffer his lawsuit services, an insurance spokesperson promoting her coverage plan while suffering numerous tragedies onscreen, a mattress aficionado, a fat guy with a self-esteem problem, and a pawnshop dealer and his slacker associate advertising the collateral supplies that come their way. There’s Hershey too, warning of some eternal Lovecraftian horror on the cusp of manifesting and terrorizing the collective mortal plane.
But it’s hard to mount a straightforward homily from the barrage of hokum that Glassman and co. have gleefully launched through the ether straight into our prefrontal cortexes. Cribbing from the Screenlife subgenre, albeit eschewing the interactive digital interface of our times for an old-school channel-surfing one, Buffet Infinity imagines cosmic horror as sketch comedy, a miasma of images and psychic torrents hurled at viewers of virtual and imagined communities who get inundated by their distractions and willingly immerse themselves into the slop. The ontology of infinity revolves around the paradoxical need for a boundary: in seeking monopoly and total mental control, the gastronomic entrepreneurs set up a conglomerate promoting “independent business freedom,” expanding their base franchise across several blocks and explicating the limits of their own logic. An unsuspecting young patron wanders into a backroom marked for authorized personnel only, led by a stray ball; the camera lingers way longer than it should on her doomed soul. The rest of the film’s variegated characters have bits of their “real” lives revealed in their ads, their mishaps and moments beyond the frame grafted onto it.
The surrealist tinge in these sequences befits the witching hours during which they’re ostensibly meant to be broadcast, a time when the subconscious reaches out and pulls the unseen viewer all the way in. Spelling errors are rife, and so is the queasiness that only a combination of deadpan humor and inexplicable happenings can convincingly muster. Is this all the work of aliens, Amazon, or AI? The deus ex machina reader would posit extraterrestrial incomprehensibility; the politically expedient, billionaire malice. Those more media-savvy might recall the nightmare fuel of Adult Swim’s Unedited Footage of a Bear, in which a drug ad becomes the real thing. In a way, Buffet Infinity is that work filtered through the prismatic virality of artificial stupidity, conjuring provincial nostalgia and intrigue only to repurpose these sentimental feelings in a cascade of unceasing engorgement. But we’ll never truly know. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan says, is the message, and captivation, not clarification, constitutes the film’s irresistible charm.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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