There’s a simple formula to surf films: show people surfing.
Rarely do these movies consist of an overt, or even covert, narrative or message communicated to the audience. Plus surfers don’t care much for propaganda.
But on Saturday October 12, 2024 I attended the premier screening of Circles: An Ode To Shredding directed by Dana Shaw at the 4-Star Theater in San Francisco. The film consisted of surfers and skaters up and down the California coast expressing what their chosen hobby, either on water or wheels, means to them. Surprisingly this film did have something to say. It came right out and said what most surfers and skateboarders have known for a long time: brands can’t sell you stoke.
Surfer, shaper, and writer Richard Kenvin expresses it best during the brief trailer for the movie. He states:
“No shoe company, no surfboard company, no fucking app on your phone — nothing is going to give you stoke that comes from within from skating or surfing. You can’t go and buy it. Nobody can sell it to you. No one can give it to you but yourself and the act of doing it.”
Brands attempt to package this feeling but they can only sell you so much. Companies try their hardest to conjure the same sensation of gliding on the face of a wave or carving concrete on a skateboard. But this is more of a memory or projection. A brand can provide a customer products that elicit a recollection or a thought of what it is like to do an activity but it’s certainly not a stand-in for the sensation itself — it’s only a facsimile of the real thing.
Case and point: meditation apps. Brands like Calm, Headspace, and 10% Happier all implicitly promise the same thing: their app will make you less stressed out and pacify your hectic modern life. And with practice meditation can, apps won’t.
I’d be curious to know how many people download one of the many meditation apps in the App Store only to let it idly sit on their phone next to Instagram and Wordle. My guess would be that many acquire the app because of what it promises, then abandon it after a session or two. They want the payoff without the work.
A 2021 article from the New Yorker gets at this topic from a different angle. According to author Rachel Monroe, there is an exploding market for vintage 90s trucks and SUVs in the Austin Texas area — not because they are exceptionally made vehicles but because “the cowboy dream has created a booming market in prestige ruggedness.” Buyers want to purchase the cowboy dream without ever getting their hands dirty. Circles suggests the same but for surfing and skating.
This is why Kenvin states: “You can’t go and buy it. Nobody can sell it to you. No one can give it to you but yourself and the act of doing it.”
Call it authenticity or stoke or whatever. There’s a feeling that comes only from doing the damn thing regardless of the branding that surrounds it. In order to get that sensation you have to paddle out or launch yourself off a staircase, which is the do in “the act of doing it.”
But these things take time. They take dedication and effort and failure that slowly develops into competence. It takes time to be any good at an activity — any activity — which is why it’s easier to try and buy it rather than do it. To hammer home Kenvin’s point: No one can give it to you but yourself. Brands certainly try but they can only take you so far.