Checking Out Some Video Essays
Added 2020-09-09 19:34:56 +0000 UTCIt isn't particularly profound to point out that popular media is lowbrow, uninteresting and trashy, and I suppose the same is true when talking about the popular brunt of video essays. Still, there is some particularly ironic sting when a whole medium that prides itself on being thoughtful and intellectual, yet hip and countercultural to the dreariness of academia, ends up producing utterly banal content.
Go ahead and search "video essay" into youtube, no other qualifiers, and gaze into just how many of them are dedicated to fellating the mega-mainstream of popular culture, talking about how subversive the third Thor movie is, how this cartoon made for babies is actually a genius morality tale that is ripe to be analyzed like its a Kafka novel or some shit, stuff like that. Maybe it is, fine. But is that really all you got? I get, I get it; the popular ones are popular because they talk about popular stuff. Still, it ends up feeling like a totally novel way of producing disappointment in popular media, which is something, I suppose.
That's not to say that all video essays are bad, obviously, nor to even say that its pointless task to analyze 'low art'; I've gotten into heated debates with friends over the qualities that make one shonen manga superior to another. Still, to see the young, hip, cutting-edge wing of media analysis fall prey to clickbaity funko-brain is a bummer, especially when there are so many video essays that I think really make the genre shine.
