August 1, 2007

Let You Entertain Me

The YouTube-ization of America is underway. I’m so tired of all the annoying commercials from transnational conglomerates asking you! to make your own commercial!, like it’s a privilege or something. Gone are the days when visionaries like David Lynch or Spike Lee would use sizeable paychecks earned from helming ads for Wal-Mart or Tampax or whatever to finance weird, expressionistic art films. Now any moron with a camcorder and a dialup connection can make commercials.

Now don’t go thinking that I’m waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ days of gorgeous advertisements with high production values crafted by A-listers. I hate commercials. I recently got a DVR and feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven, breezing through hour-long shows in twenty minutes because I no longer have to be deluged by that stupid Heineken ad that blares “Don’t Cha” by the Pussycat Dolls. But what I hate even more is when greedy executives hop on the bandwagon, asking us to do their dirty work for them. There hasn’t been a corporatization of such a thoroughly un-corporate movement since the record labels descended upon Seattle in the early 90’s to make grunge safe for your grandma.

User-generated media and online communities are now being incorporated into everything. MTV is the worst offender. Their late night programming is shown with a series of CNN Headline News-esque split screens that run constant streams of information sent in by people on the internet with nothing better to do. For example, an episode of Human Giant will have scrolling messages on the bottom of the screen with insightful comments like, “Wow, this is hilarious,” or “This sucks.” The action will periodically be interrupted by a full screen, pixelated, poorly positioned shot from a webcam of some stoner exclaiming, “This is my favorite part!” with the audio completely out of sync with his lips. Only, the cut to the webcam and the delay in cueing up the audio caused us to miss his favorite part, making everything that just transpired completely and utterly pointless. In short, the revolution is being televised, and it sucks.

What’s the point of this? To make us feel like part of a community, brought to you by the fine people at Viacom? I used to pride myself as an egalitarian that put no importance on celebrities over ordinary joes until this started happening. I think my breaking point was on the (otherwise highly enjoyable) MTV Movie Awards when some teenager on a webcam in her dorm room was blown up on a massive screen in the middle of the Gibson Amphitheatre to present an award. Again, the pixelated video and out-of-sync audio make it an uncomfortable, mind-numbingly stupid experience for all. “This is something a celebrity should be doing!” I shouted.

Spin recently ran a cover story about the death of the rock star, asking why Keith Richards and Tommy Lee have been replaced with Chris Daughtry and the loser from Nickelback who looks like Jesus. The gist of it was that the walls between fan and icon are being torn down and, because of this, people want their icons to be more like them. At first it seems like a fairly inoffensive proposition. But think about it, shouldn’t rock stars be more like Iggy Pop than your dad? And I certainly don’t want to go to the trouble of getting addicted to heroin or surviving on a diet of milk and cocaine or getting stabbed with a broken bottle in a dingy cabaret in Berlin just so I can be like him.

In the end, YouTube will probably go down as a fad. The memory of Time naming “You” as Person Of The Year because you filmed your cat fighting a turtle in your backyard will fade away and the entertainment business will continue as usual. But last week showed us one aspect of its current popularity that may last considerably longer. CBS cancelled the serialized drama Jericho last month, thinking it hadn’t accumulated enough viewers to justify a second season. They were quickly proven wrong, as fans sent in 20 tons of peanuts to tell the execs that they were “nuts” (har har). As I’m writing this, fans of The CW’s Veronica Mars are mailing in thousands of Mars bars in a last ditch effort to save their show. Maybe it’s unrelated, but perhaps the establishment’s adoption of user-generated content has inspired them to listen to regular people more, and regular people feel that they’re not wasting their time with stunts like this because of it. Regular people controlling professional entertainers: the way of the future!