Ryecatcher 2019

Everybody on the internet is just another phony.

Here’s a short list of only some of the bullshit I saw before lunch yesterday:

  • A manufactured controversy around a Democratic congresswoman, who made dumb but ultimately innocuous comments on Twitter that are being disingenuously portrayed as anti-Semitic. It’s a blatantly shallow attempt at dividing and undermining the Democratic party, and the Democrats are practically stumbling over themselves to take the bait.
  • The congresswoman’s tweet itself, which is indicative of this new round of freshmen representatives, who are in the news not for actual policy so much as for being able to tweet the sickest burns against the stuffy old establishment.
  • Anonymous comments posted to a friend’s review of the new Captain Marvel movie, filled with the usual lazy bullshit about social justice warriors and political correctness. They were posted within minutes of the review going up, almost as if they weren’t actual opinions of idiots responding to the article, but just a different type of idiot googling “Captain Marvel” for the sake of drumming up some false controversy.
  • A separate review of Captain Marvel that elevates the false controversy to the title of the review itself, comparing supervillains to “sexist trolls” in reference to the anti-feminist review-bombing on Rotten Tomatoes, as if putting a smackdown on internet assholes were part of the movie’s promotional campaign.
  • A video clip of Meghan Mulalley on the Ellen Degeneres show, casually delivering yet another story about how she and husband Nick Offerman are so quirky and iconoclastic and a refreshingly unconventional celebrity couple.

Maybe I’ve just been in a particularly bad, Holden Caulfield-y mood lately, but all of it seems super phony, and I’m not buying any of it.

Now I realize that when I equate talk show appearances with political deception, and when I complain about viral marketing being fake, I’m in danger of seeming as naive as the aliens from Galaxy Quest, saying acting was the same as “lying.” But the problem is that we’re so deeply buried under multiple layers of bullshit — from the embarrassment that is US national politics to the cesspool of social media platforms — that we’re over-saturated. The bottom has dropped out of the truth business, and nobody seems to put any value on honesty anymore. There’s no such thing as an innocuous lie in an environment like that.

Consider the 2016 Ghostbusters. I enjoyed the movie, but let’s be honest: it was mediocre at best. It wasn’t as corny as Ghostbusters II, but it also didn’t have anything as memorable as that Vigo painting. Or really, anything memorable at all. And yet it was one of the most talked-about movies in production for at least a year, all because of the nerd outrage over casting women in all the lead roles. I’m not cynical enough to think that all of the outrage was completely manufactured by Columbia marketing, but I can all but guarantee that they exploited it.

I wasn’t always so suspicious. In fact, until a couple of years ago, I was doing a pretty good job of shedding my 1990s cynicism and becoming a better version of myself. I can even name the thing that made me finally join the rest of the United States and shrug and say that nothing matters anymore.

At the top of this post I linked to a video. In case it disappears from YouTube for whatever reason, it’s a song from the soundtrack to the movie The Greatest Showman as ”performed” by the animoji animals available on an iPhone X. The video came out right as the new iPhone did, when people were just trying out the animoji feature for the first time, and just before the release of The Greatest Showman on home media. The video is “by” a guy who, at the time I’m writing this, has a channel with a little under 2000 subscribers and only four other videos, all of which seem to be nondescript vacation home movies.

My first reaction to seeing the video was “What a thoroughly disappointing bunch of twee garbage at every level.” I never saw the movie, but I’d assumed that a musical about P.T. Barnum would have period-appropriate music, or at worst use the default “contemporary movie musical” style that would make it timeless. (see: Rent) But this song is just peak Generic Millennial Pop Anthem, completely forgettable and already hopelessly dated. And the video treatment was a predictable example of someone with too much disposable income making an ostentatious display of wealth using the gimmick that Apple, Inc had chosen to make people think spending $1000 on a cell phone was quirky and whimsical.

But I caught myself! “That’s the old Chuck,” I thought. “The new me is more open and less judgmental.” I have no interest in the movie or its music, but some people just love it. Real people I know, even! I legitimately and deeply love Moulin Rouge!, which is something that a lot of other people find completely insufferable, so who am I to judge? If some dude on YouTube was excited to play with his new phone and make a video for a song he loved, then what’s the real harm? I finally was able to differentiate between “garbage” and “something that’s just not made for me,” and I was a better person for it.

Except, of course, for the fact that some dude on YouTube would never be able to post a music video without its being automatically flagged and blocked before it ever went live. I’ve tried to post videos that got blocked because of music I hadn’t even noticed was playing in the background. There’s no way a genuine fan-made video could include the entire song and survive unmolested.

It took me at least a couple of months to come to that realization, which made it not just a bummer, but made me feel really gullible. I think what made it feel like a betrayal was that it was taking advantage of my better nature — I could remember being a goofy teenager and loving a song so much that I felt like I had to make a video of it. Realizing that that earnest, goofy, vulnerability was being exploited by some marketing firm just seems inexcusably crass.

That extends to the backlash that seems to follow every single property that’s led by a woman or even features women in prominent roles. All the supposed nerdrage doesn’t even feel like genuine stupidity at this point, but just a shallow, predictable performance. With Captain Marvel, it feels so by-the-numbers that it’s actually tough to tell who’s orchestrating it. Is it a bunch of MRA fuckwits? A bunch of bored trolls who believe it’s still funny to pose as MRA fuckwits to get people all worked up?

Those would be the best case. I wish I could be 100% sure that it wasn’t all some marketing firm. Provoking a backlash and then taking advantage of people’s best natures to write think pieces and see the movie as some kind of feminist counter-protest. It’s almost impossible to tell how much of it is genuine, and as a result none of it seems genuine.

I guess practically, it doesn’t matter that much. Saying the right thing to misogynist is the same thing as saying the right thing to a crass marketing strategist. But one thing the Individual-1 administration has made clear is that it goes both ways: saying racist things because you’re trying to appeal to racists is no different from saying racist things because you’re a racist. I feel like we’re at the saturation point with inauthenticity and manipulation, and as corny as it may be, we need to find value in being straightforward and honest.