Living & Arts

Broadcast yourself

In print | April 24, 2008

Hi, my name is Alex, and I am a YouTuber.

And just when you thought that this column couldn’t fall any lower into the depths of low culture, (“Bring it On”? Seriously?) I am devoting my last column entirely to the home of the viral video, the Time Person of 2006 (if I wasn’t mistaken) and what has recently overtaken much of the time that I would traditionally reserve for watching movies. Yes, YouTube is an absolutely bottomless well of largely crappy videos and yes, a part of me is slightly ashamed to confess my YouTubing ways. Still, another part of me (the ADD infantile part) breathlessly heralds the coming of a new age of media consumption — where tons of archival footage of, say Marilyn Monroe, can be endlessly repeated and reexamined by anyone, where record labels now look to the Internet to broadcast promotional videos, where any Joe Schmoe can look into their webcams and become a self-entitled diva. If these thoughts seem completely prosaic and obvious, it’s only evidence of YouTube’s utter usefulness to our media demands that in the three years since YouTube’s inception, the language of Internet videography has become so omnipresent.

Much as I love uncovering old films and TV shows (Is “Batman: The Animated Series” not the best ever?), some of the most interesting videos on YouTube aren’t media relics, but creations by people with little to no connection to the entertainment industry. First, there’s “littleloca,” a video journal by a Hispanic teenager named Cynthia from East L.A. who introduces herself as “your homegirl.” Then, there’s “DaxFlame,” the video log of a maladjusted 14-year old boy who throws tantrums at his unseen mother.

If you haven’t already guessed, these two “vlogs” are fake. The first, performed by a white actress named Stevie Ryan, throws its viewers for a loop. One’s immediate reaction might be, isn’t this reprehensible? Should a white actress be performing a race? Should we be watching a white actress performing a race? At the same time, Ryan plays her character so resolutely that it’s a creation to be contended, not dismissed. Cynthia is a loud, annoying character to be sure, but Ryan gives Cynthia so much conviction and self-respect that she at least makes us consider how stereotyping and the resultant denial of stereotyping have been emphasized over truly understanding individuals. She even makes jabs at those who attempt to break down the vlog’s frail verisimilitude, loudly telling her viewers, “People are sending messages to me, telling me that I’m fake … Are you so close-minded that you don’t even realize that this is real shit happening out in the world?”

“DaxFlame” is a similarly complex creation that parodies the sheer ineptitude of many video logs floating around in YouTube. It’s easy to laugh at DaxFlame’s speech impediment and penchant for short shorts. But the actor (whoever he is) approaches his character so seriously that it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Dax and not to critically challenge the at times sadistic nature of vlogging spectatorship.

In spite of the obviously low-budget nature of videos on YouTube, YouTube entertainers are still worth watching in their own right, and, at times they feel like they’re more interesting than anything on film or TV because of the truly independent nature of their work. Still, it doesn’t hurt to have a little celebrity cameo or two. On “littleloca,” Crispin Glover appears as a man who for 20 years has been mistaken for Crispin Glover. On a popular comedy page “kevjumba,” Kevin Wu challenges Baron Davis to a game of wastepaper basketball. In another comedy page “nigahiga,” Ryan Higa actually invites Milo Ventimiglia to promote his new, clearly badly selling film “Pathology.”

It probably isn’t news to anyone that public figures of all forms, from pop singers to politicians, are milking YouTube for all it’s worth. While these instances in and of themselves aren’t particularly interesting, every once in a while, a celebrity is savvy enough to able to subversively turn their robotically commercial venture into a place for creation. For the release of R.E.M.’s new album “Accelerate,” for example, Michael Stipe holds a fake press conference announcing that his fellow bandmembers have come out as straight. Another favorite of mine is Michel Gondry, who is a prolific music video director that loves to toy with logic (If you haven’t seen Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” and Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World,” get on that, stat!). Given that his work has always had a kinship with “uglier” video formats, Gondry’s foray into YouTube hardly seems to be a stretch. There’s a video of Gondry solving a Rubik’s Cube with his nose. And of course there is the playfully meta “Sweded” version of the trailer to his film, “Be Kind Rewind.”

Scoff all you want at the uncouth entertainments of YouTube. It’s the perfect remedy to the prim and polished, but clearly ossifying, state of much of film and TV today.

Alex is a sophomore. You can reach him at aho1@swarthmore.edu.