I watched a great film yesterday! It was an independently financed and editorially liberated feature documentary, which as a reviewer for the site I would give five stars in an instant. This is a great thing; except that the weight of the experience I had can be completely removed by explaining the entire thing with different words.
I watched a really good YouTube video yesterday about the history of the Disney Channel theme song. As a consumer of YouTube videos, I slammed the subscribe button and liked the video. It really helps them continue to do what they do, and also helps with the algorithm. The channel currently has over 1,950,000 subscribers, and the video itself has over 7,000,000 views.
Instinctively, this means I just struggle to bring myself to write about it for an outlet like Indy Film Library. Equally, though, if it was submitted and handed to me to review, I also feel like I couldn’t find a good reason not to write about it. And that’s when this became an interrogation of my own biases, rather than the movie itself.
The film is itself an act of visual criticism. Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery explores this problem of “videos” vs “films”, and the odd situation filmmakers who have found success on the platform struggle with. Is the filmmaker doomed to be considered a “YouTuber”, destined to be paired with Mr. Beast and reaction videos, instead of being seen as a contemporary of Werner Herzog or Michael Moore? Is it worth making a steady living as a content creator, if it means never having the experience of seeing your work praised at Sundance while you eat baked beans out of the can and cry into your rented handkerchief?
This may be at the heart of my problem. It’s initially very difficult to argue that this video/film isn’t independent. It’s directed, written and financed by one team with no studio interference. It’s very difficult to argue that this film doesn’t have “cinematic qualities”. In fact, compared to something like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room or Supersize Me, it’s positively electric with artistic flair and invention. So how do I still end up reflexively dismissing it as ‘content’, rather than a film?
Perhaps we go after the platform it’s on, YouTube. This would be fine, except many of the films the site covers are hosted on there too, I mean why wouldn’t you? It’s a convenient and well-known video streaming platform. Does the success of a YouTube channel in some way de facto change a film with artistic merit into “content” by a ‘YouTuber’? Surely not… right?
Art or content?
This is a trojan horse of a film. It begins with the usual style of the channel, Defunctland. Defunctland is headed by filmmaker Kevin Purjurer, and the job of the channel in general is to cover extinct theme park… stuff, and extinct tv show… stuff. More importantly, the channel has a series of feature length documentaries, which step away from the usual YouTube style, the cadence etc, and step into a different world to create something distinct. Something meant to be viewed as a film. As the video goes for 5 minutes in the classical YouTube style about the history of interstitial television music jingles, or TV channel signature themes, whatever you want to call them, the gimmick of the video comes into view, when the god-narrator suddenly breaks character and realises they literally cannot find who wrote the Disney Channel Theme Song. Suddenly the entire video zooms out until we see the YouTuber editing the video and the question repeats. Who did write this thing? I need it for my video.
From here, the video branches out to be about the nature of being a YouTuber as opposed to a Filmmaker, and compares this to the fate of agency artists. For every John Williams surely there’s a hundred nameless, faceless artistic geniuses who want to be the next Bach but end up writing and producing various advertising themes for insurance companies and the like. Perhaps as the agency composer is doomed to be nameless and never have true artistic freedom and respect, so is anyone using social media.
After all, if the social media company is giving you advertising revenue, ultimately you do have to play within their rules. Perhaps this is it then, the silver bullet used to write it off. Except, the channel also makes money from crowdfunding via Patreon. Also, for “content” like this about the Disney Channel which has absolutely no need for anything problematic in the first place, I seriously doubt anything had to be censored to avoid a breach of terms and service. For us to hold an artistic gun to his head and say “you must turn off monetisation or you didn’t make art” just seems dumb.
Defunct utilitarianism
Ultimately, I find myself arguing from a sort of utilitarian perspective. If my passions should bring me to write for a publication like this, it really should be to spotlight something obscure or worthy of attention it wouldn’t otherwise receive. A media outlet is not a historical journal. It’s not my job to obsessively catalogue films to please an entity which wishes to know things, that’s for the so called ‘AI Tutors’ to do for the purpose of anonymous plagiarism. The ideal end place for this kind of recommendation would be some kind of social media post, but I don’t really use social media.
Social media, though, is the reason I’m not going to try to officially review the film. The really pernicious and sneaky part of social media is a lack of common understanding of the business model in hegemonic life. The best way of describing it was done long before it’s heyday by a long-forgotten but fondly preserved author from the very early days of the internet. The great Marxist-Feminist essayist, Humdog, aka Carmen Hermosillo. In her 1994 masterpiece “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace”, she puts forward this feeling of alienation from social media identities alongside the hierarchical nature of social life in the internet space. The lower casing of the I is, as best as I can tell, a deliberate separation of language similar to how many of the young people began to talk online quite recently. apparently.
“i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.”
Even in posting about our lives on Facebook, the reality is that we are selling our content as entertainment to other people, which in turn keeps them on the platform and thus reachable by advertising. YouTube has this exact same business model, it’s the old business model of television. This nature of monetisation, for me, dooms anything which uses the platform of YouTube or Netflix from independent status because it is, at best, the business model which has taken over the torch of television in our culture. We wouldn’t consider something like House of The Dragon a series of films, even though far more people would have watched it streaming rather than as a traditional cable television product. Even though HBO shows don’t rely on advertising, there is an individual language to TV shows or even “shows” as compared to film, as well as very different methods of writing and editing.
So, although ultimately, I do consider Defunctland’s masterpiece a film, I can’t consider it to be independent – and maybe that’s from where my problems really stem. Although it is not a tv show and has more than enough merit to deserve status about a “video”, the platform it’s on (YouTube) is ultimately a hybrid social media/television entity. Yeah, an Indy Film can play on television and still be an Indy Film, but something made by and debuted on a channel within that space is more akin to a Channel 4 original matinee movie than an Indy Film.
In the end, though, it’s all just intellectualised excuses. The real reason I didn’t want to write about it was some mix of the utilitarian thinking I mentioned, and a sort of base pretentiousness. Oh well, he’ll be fine. Over 7 million views, and counting.
Coming up though, some nice fun underdog filmmakers from left field. I’m excited to see what people come up with!
Oh, it debuted on Patreon, for f…