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November 14, 2007
Cruel... but Necessary?
I've been thinking about films and videos online for a while, now. The next few posts are my attempt to put some of these thoughts together in some reasonable order.
First, something juicy to start us off. John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey turns our attention to these two videos posted to YouTube by Betty Munson. They're sequential, sort of, so watch them in order to get the full effect.
Rogers has this to say about these:
"So who is Betty Munson? Is she real? Or is she an entertainer who's figured out that video entertainment on the web is more like haiku -- short bursts of standalone narrative that can be linked over time? Or is she both, one become the other? Either/or, spiffy."
I agreed with him. I thought the first was interesting, and the second was really, horribly, gratifyingly cool. So I clicked on the video and tracked Betty back to her YouTube profile.
There, I learned that she had posted a third video (which was really her first, but it was the third I had seen:
Now, at this point I was beginning to wonder whether Betty Munson was really Betty Munson, or rather "Betty Munson," a la lonelygirl15. As I watched this clip, I was bothered by the gynecologist. Not because she was a jerk, but because I thought I recognized her. I freeze-framed on her and it became clear to me that she is an actress -- Lisa Zane. I had most recently enjoyed her as Diana, the exiled Roman trying to gain control of rebellious ancient Ireland in the TV series Roar. (The SciFi Channel had aired most of the series' episodes, and The Spouse and I enjoyed watching them many, many months later from the DVR. More info on the show here.)
Going back to Kung Fu Monkey, of course the Hive Mind had beaten me to the punch. First commenter "Sander" outs the videos as part of a fictional narrative work. In this case, it's Cruel But Necessary, a film imdb claims came out in 2005. Here's the plot summary, written by "anon":
Cruel But Necessary is the story of Betty Munson's strange journey of self-discovery and soul-awakening in the traumatic years following the revelation, on videotape, of her husband's infidelity. Her marriage over, struggling to raise her teen-age son alone, Betty becomes driven to discover other secrets that may surround her and so she videotapes every aspect of her life during the gradual disintegration of her comfortable upper middle-class existence. Sometimes used as an eavesdropping device, other times as a confessional, Betty's camera dispassionately records the layers of family and personal dynamics. The film is seen entirely from the viewpoint of Betty's video camera resulting in a "surveillance tape" that is a kind of voyeurism of the absurd.
I can't find a copy of the movie anywhere, and I don't remember it getting a wide release. Here's a blurb from the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival. Maybe it failed to get a distributer.
In any case, why are these clips getting released now? Is it a marketing ploy? A sign of an upcoming sequel to the original movie? Certainly, the "finding yourself by videotaping others" theme isn't new in movies. sex, lies, and videotape (one of my favorites of all time) did it in 1989. The Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet made Hamlet's need to videotape everyone around him one of the film's central modes of characterization in 2000.
But in sex, lies, and videotape there's really no way to distribute the videos James Spader makes. They're private and mostly secret. Things have changed. As we saw in yesterday's post the desire to document one's life (or the expectation that one should document one's life) on sites like Facebook and MySpace (and YouTube and the other video sharing sites), means that not only is nothing really private anymore, but that what used to be considered private is now easily and widely broadcastable.
From the point of the consumer of these videos, it's a huge shift. We don't just watch professionally-made videos anymore. We watch each others, and we frequently enjoy them more than we do the professional stuff out there.
While this is new in respect to video technology, it's not really a new dynamic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, diaries and journals were often published and read widely.
But what's the difference, still thinking about this from the perspective of the viewer/reader of these personal works, between reading Samuel Pepys' diaries, and watching the video blogs of someone like DiGiTiLsOuL?
One of the grad students in the department is starting work on his MA thesis on digital media, and I keep pushing him to address this issue: what's the aura (to use a term from Walter Benjamin in a decidedly, intentionally, not-exact-and-not-really-what-Benjamin-meant sort of way) of video, and how does that compare with print? How do their respective modes convey information, and what is the potential for impact, for affect, with their viewer/readers?
In our composition classes, we teach students how to increase, ideally, their rhetorical authority and their ability to convey their individual voice through the mute medium of print. But are those concepts really even parallel enough to remain applicable when we think about personal videos? Bree's hesitations and fumbles in the lonelygirl15 videos endear her to us and invest us in her narrative, but infelicitous prose and awkwardness often alienate readers.
Much to think about here... and we haven't gotten to the perspective of the producers/composers of these videos!
Posted by reparent at November 14, 2007 2:25 PM
Comments
Neil Postman was pretty articulate on the inherent differences between printed text and video as a means of getting information. He was talking about traditional television, but I think most of his basic points retain their validity in the youtube age. Steven Johnson would argue that we've become more sophisticated consumers of video content but the fundamental baked-in differences in the ways our brains process information gleaned from print and video are still extremely relevant.
The more direct comparison for Pepys and the 18th century pamphleteers are bloggers. Again, as you mentioned, the key difference here is distribution.
Posted by: bill simmon at November 19, 2007 1:34 PM