know your audience

Since I rarely view homemade vids on YouTube, I never got sucked into the lonelygirl15 phenomenon. And from the professionally-edited clips I did see, can't say I'm surprised that it turned out to be a hoax. Actually, let's call this ambiguously mimetic performance art, or maybe something catchier, like "postmodern kabuki," describing the artistic strategies of creators as diverse as Andy Kaufman, An(thony) Coulter, and the sockpuppetry of Lee Siegel (now with hilarious new site!). It's even possible the brilliant outlaw movie critic Vern is also one of these performance artists, though I can't be sure.

Back to lonelygirl15. Now exposed, we see it for what it is: a stroke of marketing genius.[1] Millions of hits, throngs of fans and addicts and now news stories on the front pages of major dailies. You can't buy publicity like this, and all to launch some mysterious indie movie. And the reason it worked? Let me direct you to the punchline at the end of yesterday's NY Times lonelygirl expose:

On learning that Ms. Rose was an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, ran to parties and posing, one fan wrote, “Very cute, but she’s really not into Feynmann and Jared Diamond! (I’m heart-broken ...But a wonderful actress, had me fooled into thinking she was a geek like me.)”

Schhhwwing! Ah yes, the good ol' cute-but-parentally-oppressed nymphette who adores Richard Feynmann. With a bit of luck, maybe I can find a Maria Sharapova-look-alike on YouTube who digs Alan Moore, Walter Benjamin, and Edward Yang and who's just dying to reach out.

What's the old H.L. Mencken saying? Nobody has ever went broke exploiting the sexual frustrations of nerds who spend all their time on the internet?

[1] But wait. Didn't the box office disappointment of the net-hyped Snakes on a Plane demonstrate that an internet phenomenon won't necessarily translate into "mainstream" success? Weren't we treated to a gaggle of articles pronouncing the irrelevance of bloggers?

Two important distinctions must be made here. One, this lonelygirl thing is likely a small-scale movie, and the filmmakers would suck goat balls for a 30 million gross. Let's look at what the viral exposure from the YouTube clips accomplished: it cultivated a core fan base who were totally hooked. And now news stories make non-fans curious. This is an incredible coup. I'm sure some fans feel betrayed, but I bet most of 'em still plunk down their $10 to see the movie. Second, from all accounts, the legion of lonelygirl fans appear to be transfixed by the teen's persona and problems. They're into the text. Contrast that with Snakes' internet appeal, which is always been something of a collective meta-joke. The title tickled culture maven/info junkie/blogger types who loved that the title reduces the movie to its one sentence studio pitch -- which is essentially what these high-gloss b-movies are: a concept movie that can be summed up by one phrase. We're tired of studios laboring to class up these offerings with a generic title ("Terminal Velocity" or "Flight 893" or whatever). "Snakes on a Plane"! How refreshingly honest! You see how the appreciation is snarky and ironic, with the content of the movie itself nearly irrelevant? (Not for everyone, though. A small element of cultists loved the old school purity of the title, and demanded an old fashioned b-movie to match (which is what they got).)

The reality is that relatively few consumers evince this second level of appreciation. Most products that operate on some secondary level end up as niche items. Take satire. There's a reason the Colbert Report won't ever come close to the ratings of Jay Leno, even if they put Colbert on CBS opposite Leno. And there's a reason why satires don't ever hit $300 million at the box office. The fact is there are far more consumers who want face-value entertainment, and who are largely uncritical of marketing concepts and advertising strategy directed at them. Think of product placement. A lot of people snicker at obvious product placement, but it works. It works on the majority of the population who don't disseminate information with a critical eye on advertising/marketing, etc. (I don't work in advertising, but I'm confident Weiden & Kennedy or whatever big ad agency will have tons of research data supporting my contentions.)

To use another example, consider those obnoxious Apple commercials, with a casual Mac guy lecturing the dweeby PC man about viruses and such. They've spawned a collection of spoofs on YouTube, with this being the most popular series out there. In Apple's ad campaign, they take the basic "sell the lifestyle" adage (perfected by Apple) to a whole new level, with actors actually personifying the product. The Mac is cool, casual, urban, young, confident, creative and stylish. Dude's attractive, fun-loving, yet on top of it (he doesn't get viruses). And he's tall. The PC is a humorless, bumbling company man. He's overworked and uptight, yet doesn't have it together. The underlying strategy is pretty obvious to anyone who's remotely sophisticated about marketing practices.

The spoofs basically adopt Apple's ad concepts except they invert the players. Instead of the attractive hipster representing the Mac, the funniest spoof showcases an actor who completely captures the urban hipster's less attractive qualities: he's an obnoxiously smug and unkempt child-man with an infantile obsession for pop ephemera. And a trust-funded layabout. Dude's basically Jack Black in High Fidelity. Plus, he's short. In the same ad, the PC guy is sober, serious, uncool, but confident and competent. You may not want to borrow his CDs, but you'd hire the guy to manage your money. Plus, he's tall. The contrast being established here is just as pointed as the one in the real Mac commericals, except reversed. As with the real commercials, the spoofs aren't exaggerating the PC's virtues and the Mac's flaws; what all these ads are saying about their products and the competition are true (or at least unfalsifiable). It's all about manipulating brand image and playing to the viewer's lifestyle and values biases -- the bread and butter of advertising.

If you show every American these spoofs, many will get it. A greater number won't, because in order to get it you have to be appreciate the second-level nature of it. In order to make big money, you have to attract these face-value consumers, the same ones who see the title Snakes on a Plane and think "how stupid is that". In The Tipping Point, Gladwell identifies "connectors" as super-popular social hubs who are able to fan out the ideas first identified by "mavens" to a larger, more general populace, to turn a niche item into a fad. Gladwell's ideas can't work here. With second level products, the connection stops at mavens. Hence Snakes on a Plane, the internet geek joke that stayed an internet geek joke.

Too bad. Catching Snakes on opening night with an amped up crowd at the Mann's Chinese was one of the highlights of my moviegoing season. Scott Foundas', too.

The Most Awesome Movie of the Year In Two Years Time

The title is Synecdoche, New York. The creator? Any nerd with two connecting synapses can figure it out from the title alone. It's Charlie Kaufman's new movie, and reportedly it is one for the ages:

If this film gets made in any way that resembles what's on the page — and with the writer himself directing, it will likely gain even more color and potency in the translation — it will be some kind of miracle. "Synecdoche" will make "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine" look like instructional industrial films. No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious. [emphasis added]

Wow. Okay. Since Eternal Sunshine was itself one of the all-timers, this supposed exponential advance in Kaufman art will obviously have to supplant the nerd fantasia version of The Black Dahlia, the new Hong Sang-soo, or the new Assayas as the Most Awesome Movie Playing in My Imaginary Kiddie Corner. DVDs of my imagined versions of Demonlover, Not on the Lips, and Purple Butterfly are available upon request.

NB: The Net and the Traditional Media, Part LXII: Curiously, this breathless fanboy missive is fronted on the LA Times Calendar section, lodged in between Patrick Goldstein's interview with the director of the super-controversial Bush assassination mocumentary, and Tim Rutten (the Ikea-grade Frank Rich) annointing Frank Rich as the conscience of our nation. A few years ago, this sort of scoop -- no reporting, just sweaty, gleeful anticipation -- would be left to the likes of Moriarty or Twitch. Now a net-geek piece is given the same prominence as pieces from the LA Times' two most visible columnists. Hmmm....

Remember the Reagan mini-series?

Wingers whined about "misrepresentations" and CBS caved? ABC is hyping its $40 million dollar "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, going so far as to air it with no commercial interruptions. It also plans to send the video out to 100,000 educators. So what's wrong? It is described as a right-wing propaganda film, made by wingnuts, screened for wingnuts in advance (but not liberals), and pointedly suggesting that the Clinton administration had Osama dead in sight but let him go due to lack of will. A year long inquiry by the 9/11 Commission do not support this allegation, and folks who were there, like Richard Clarke and Madeline Albright, contradict this.

A right-wing film timed to make the Democrats look weak on security in an election year? You don't say.

If you're looking for a quick and dirty account of the events leading up to the September 11 attacks, you can do worse than the comic book adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report instead, which I got through during one short flight and is currently being serialized at Slate. Illustrated in functional rough lines a la John Buscema, the comic doesn't use the artform in any inspired way. Unlike United 93, it doesn't rise ot the level of art and is essentially nothing more than an illustrated Cliff's Notes version of the 9/11 Commission Report. But as far as that goes, it's highly readable. And it doesn't devolve into political propaganda.

It may be good business to suck up to wingers, but wouldn't it be funny if Disney and ABC found themselves in a shitstorm trying to do so? Check out this site for more. Also, here's a good post by Digby on why pop interpretations of history matter.

the bloodied corpse of the noble counter-blogofascist

The story of the brief, meteoric rise and fall Lee Siegel, The New Republic's culture blogger, has yet to be written. This will not be that story. This post is something of a requiem, as I now mourn for the blogosphere. For surely we are all poorer when they succeed in silencing such an original voice as Siegel's. For surely few can provoke such memorably vicious takedowns such as this one by James Wolcott. Yes, we should mourn. The man was probably the most consistently amusing target of blogger ire, and I'm truly sorry that we won't have. Lee Siegel to. Kick around. Anymore.

Why was Siegel so widely mocked? Siegel fashioned himself as a kind of intellectual David, slaying overpraised Goliaths such as Malcolm Gladwell, mean bloggers, Stephen Colbert etc. with his deft pen. His particular genius, however, lied not in counterintuitive brilliance, but in his unerring instinct for the perfect "firestarter" blog post. Style was part of the problem. Siegel crafts infuriatingly obtuse, grandstanding nonsense, written in a tone that is at once stentorian and snide. But there are plenty of delusional, self-satisfied blowhards published in important journals and fora. What made Siegel truly special was his inimitable fighting style -- two parts Randy Savage to one part Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. Siegel's m.o. is to lash out, in an especially indignant tone, at some hyperbolic straw man of his own creation. An academic who mused about Americans' sexual attraction to the lurid JonBenet Ramsay beauty pageant images looped ad infinitum on cable news is not merely wrong. According to Siegel, that academic is a pedophile and probable child-molester. (Never mind that Siegel once posted a Red Shoe Diary on how he should've fucked a sixteen-year-old Uma Thurman when he had the chance.) And those who disagreed with Siegel are permissive sexual degenerates who have doomed the Democrats to permanent minority status. And bloggers? They aren't just potty mouths with predictable opinions. They're the natural descendents of Mussolini.

You can see why Siegel attracted so much attention, almost none of it positive. Like a few others before him, Siegel could not withstand the viciousness of the blogosphere and got caught creating a sock puppet that was defending him against the army of infidels and haters that populated his comments section. (It gets a little suspicious when you've got your "fan" consistently writing suckups like "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep." I try to at least vary the vocabulary and syntax of my own sock puppets.) It's a shame, really. Siegel had so much more left in him. No one but Siegel could have ushered in the Golden Age of blogofascism, an explosion of brilliant snark unrivaled in the history of the blogosphere. Fortunately for us, long after Siegel's forgotten, his immortal locution will survive.

Robert Farley over at Lawyers, Guns and Money graciously credited me for reporting the story (actually, I merely noticed that TNR took down Siegel's archive and noted it in that blog's comments). In any case, he's put together some very interesting thoughts concerning the desperate hostility towards the blogosphere of writers like Siegel (the blogosphere essentially devaluing smart but unexceptional writers like him), which will nicely dovetail into a longer post I'm currently drafting, my long-awaited magnum opus on the role of pundits, movie critics and other opinion traffickers in the age of the blogorrhea. Look for it at around the same time Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights is released, some time in 2009.

chocolates compliments of Scarlett's publicist

[Lee Walker: slowly step back from your computer. Gently click on "back" on your browser. Okay. You're safe.]

There are basically two types of celebrity suck-up jobs. There's the rote kind you find in Entertainment Weekly, which amounts to a gushing profile accompanied by a few tastefully airbrushed Herb Ritts-styled photos, all scrubbed over by two publicists and an unpaid intern. Then there's the Ring Cycle of the celeb-rimjobs, the kind in which the subject of the profile becomes Marie Curie, George Eliot, Catherine Denueve and Mata Hari all rolled into one. This one, fawning over the delicious (if one-note) bombshell Scarlett Johansson, is the Wagnerian kind. I link to it not because of its hyperbolic ridiculousness because it offers some enthusiastic praise for what will assuredly be the Most Awesome Movie of the Year. Or of the month, hopefully. Also, because this blog has been so pictorially challenged of late, it'll give me an excuse to post something to liven up the proceedings. So here ya go, courtesy of Egotastic:

Some needed perspective

This site, which (sorta) tells you how rich you are compared to the rest of the world, can be either uplifting or depressing, depending on your point of view.

the pathetic little satisfactions of the humble blogger

Blogging doesn't change the world. Most bloggers can't even change a single mind. The activity yields mostly modest satisfactions: an e-mail or comment giving you props or an exchange that inspires a coherent thought. Even flamewars that lead to barbed insults can be fun, if it so happens that you think you got in the better dig. Then there's the satisfaction of learning that your words have found their way to people you admire (or loathe).

That leads to today's installment of little satisfactions: it looks like a snarky little comment on Kevin Drum's blog was highlighted by Robert Wright in an exchange on bloggingheads.tv. I had written:

Watching [Kaus] battle the estimable Robert Wright on bloggingheads.tv is akin to [watching] a one-on-one basketball game between Helen Thomas and Dwayne Wade.

Wright brought up my line in a long exchange with Kaus about how everyone in the blogosphere hates him (for good reason).

Why has this little line-dropping proved so satisfying to me? Here's the context:

(1) Robert Wright is awesome. Robert Wright is probably the intellectual I most admire in public life. His work in evolutionary psychology is mind-blowing, and seemingly everything he's written about geopolitics, bioethics, technology, and what have you has been impeccably reasoned. His lengthy Times op-ed making the case for "progressive realism" is about the most sensible foreign policy doctrine I've seen. What's great about Wright's writing is how clearly he shows his work. He marshalls facts in support of arguments and arrives at conclusions through clear, logical reasoning. He'll address strong counter-arguments and methodological difficulties along the way. In the world of punditry, he's a mad baller.

(2) Mickey Kaus is a smarmy half-wit. On the other hand, there is no contemporary pundit I despise more than Mickey Kaus. Imagine a witless Larry David, except unfurling his neurosis not through self-effacing comedy but through incoherent, bilious screeds against Democrats (the party to which Kaus unconvincingly still insists he belongs) and you have this small, petty man. Like Lieberman, Kaus is the product of the late 80s, when self-loathing Dems were in vogue and not a bad type to be. Nothing wrong with being critical of liberal orthodoxy per se -- I'm all for welfare reform, reducing the power of teacher's unions, means-testing Social Security, and skepticism on affirmative action, etc. It's just that, like Lieberman, he's not making any constructive "centrist" critiques (or taking proportionate measure of the right-wing-led disaster currently playing at a town near you). Instead, we're treated to an endless stream of self-congratulatory nonsequiturs, with the odd snipes at assorted liberal bogeymen. For a man who hasn't uttered a useful idea since the Herbert Walker Bush administration, when he was a leading proponent of welfare reform, Kaus has got quite an ego. I think people still pay attention to him out of habit, since he's published by Slate and is, by all accounts, the first "name" blogger. But he's about as obsolete as the pica font at this point.

(2) (a) Kaus haters of the world unite! The one great thing about Kaus is the bond Kaus-haters have. One day, needing my Kaus-hatin' fix, I googled "Kaus moron" and found this terrific group political blog called Lawyers, Guns and Money, which has a continuing series on why Mickey Kaus blows chunks, weekly battleship blogging, and even a little something on Olivier Assayas' awesomeness for good measure. So Kaus can be a force for good -- by helping Kaus haters locate one another.

(3) bloggingheads.tv is misguided but addictive to hopeless wonks. However smart Wright is, I can't vouch for his business acumen. His current project is bloggingheads.tv. The format pits two talking heads against each other on the topic of the day, with links on the side of the page. The visuals add very little to the debate (except by humanizing the debaters), and it's mostly the kind of dry back-and-forth that can't possible interest anyone outside of the wonkiest of wonks. I am, of course, hooked, mainly because I'm a nerdy wonk, but also because of my fanboy interest in both Wright and guest-blogger Matthew Yglesias's takes on the great issues of the day. Unfortunately Wright is frequently pitted against Kaus, who evinces the same level of intellectual incoherence in these "diavlogs" that he does on his blog. It is like watching Wade play Helen Thomas or Harry Knowles in hoops -- the obvious disparity in intellectual firepower is so staggering as to become distracting within the first two minutes of any diavlog. It's instructive, I suppose, to watch Wright reason through an issue while minutes later Kaus will simply try bulldoze his way to some pre-ordinained conclusion that makes no sense (Kaus's desperate defenses of Nazi drag queen An(thony) Coulter is probably the nadir of many low-points). If you want your kid to learn the value of rigorous thinking as opposed to lazy thinking, you can do worse than to show her these diavlogs. Otherwise, seeing Kaus get destroyed in this debate club format would be more fun if the self-delusional twit actually realized he's getting pwned.

Conclusion: No point, really. I guess it's kind of awesome when you write something that makes an impression on both an intellectual idol and an object of scorn.