Today, I want to talk about one of the most important moments in recent cinema history.
Perhaps, you remember it.
It went like this: "Don’t you know who I am?
I’m the juggernaut, bitch!
I’m the juggernaut, bitch!"
In case you weren't spending hundreds of hours on the internet in the early aughts, this
line from the 2006 summer blockbuster, X-Men: The Last Stand, was cribbed straight from
an amateur parody video - "I’m the Juggernaut bitch!”
"Motherf**ker, I'ma whoop your ass."
"Silly bitch, your weapons cannot harm me.
Don't you know who the f**k I am?
I'm the juggernaut!"
It inspired a wildly popular meme, which, against all odds, traveled from the depths
of the web to the big screen.
X-Men’s reference to Internet culture was no mere comedic moment.
It was the birth of an entirely new relationship between Hollywood and the internet.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Memeification of Actors.
And no spoilers ahead...
I guess.
This X-Men thing wasn’t an isolated incident, either.
Just months earlier, the world’s most prolific speaker of profanity, Samuel L. Jackson, saw
his own fame eclipsed by a series of gifs when his new film, Snakes on a Plane, was
announced.
It quickly became an online meme-ified sensation.
Most notably, a couple of Internet fans created an overdubbed R-rated audio trailer for the
film, inspired by Jackson’s role in Pulp Fiction.
"I did not ask for motherf**king snakes on my motherf**king plane!"
Unable to ignore the Internet’s insatiable demand for good, old-fashioned Samuel L Jackson
f-bombs, the film’s producers scheduled reshoots to add new scenes that played up
the ridiculousness, including the now-famous line: "I have had it with these motherf**king
snakes on this motherf**king plane!"
Samuel L. Jackson’s public persona was crucial to the internet frenzy.
The incredibly salient motherf**king mantra of the film’s viral bubble exploited Jackson’s
firmly established on-screen image as the potty-mouthed badass.
"Say 'what' again!
Say 'what' again, I dare you!
I double dare you, motherf**ker.
Say 'what' one more, g*ddamn time!"
Then, to great humorous effect, it placed said-badass into a delightfully absurd situation:
the greatest reptilian invasion in the history of aviation.
Fans were explicitly waiting to see how Samuel L Jackson, the celebrity entity, would respond
to the scenario.
They were envisioning some kind of fabricated combination of the characters played by Jackson
and the man, himself.
This moment represents what we’re going to call the "memeification of actors."
While X-Men’s Juggernaut moment, or Snakes on a Plane, may seem like a bizarre blip on
our collective cultural radar, it’s much more than that, encapsulating a revolutionary
breakdown in the separation between film and fan.
And yet, at the same time, it represents the next step in a process that’s preoccupied
Hollywood’s efforts since its earliest days.
While the memeification of actors is new, the processes that lead up to it aren't.
So how did we get to this moment, a time when Sad Keanu can literally inspire the sad vengeance-seeking
hero of John Wick or when Ryan Gosling is known as the face of the “Hey Girl” meme
to scores of people who have never seen his films?
First, we have to understand something called serialization, but not in the narrative sense.
So, what is this kind of serialization?
Most literally, a franchise.
Most metaphorically, according to media scholar P. David Marshall, you can compare it to a
series of related products, such as a car or an on-screen performance, “that are stylistically
linked.”
Marshall argues that serialization fulfilled a need of early day Hollywood producers: it
helped them cement an individual movie star’s persona into the public consciousness, thus
setting them apart from the rest of the pack.
In the early Hollywood star system of the 1920s, branding celebrities was an economic
strategy, a way for studios to make their films stand out in a crowded market.
It was quite literally product differentiation.
In a sea of attractive movie stars, cultivating demand for individual actors like your resident
‘Cowboy” or “Blonde Bombshell” was like popularizing Diet Coke to the other studios’
“soda pop.”And so, a complex infrastructure of public relations professionals, star magazines,
and studios grew in the pursuit of moulding actors into name brands.
Once a star became a household name, studios could then exploit said star’s fame by making
the exact same, generally sh*tty serialized movies over and over, using their resident
“good girl,” "Casanova,” or “vamp.”
When people got bored, actors could be cast against type, and thus consciously evoke the
very same audience expectations.
For example, Schwarzenegger became a brand, so the studios gave you Terminator, Commando,
Predator, The Running Man, etc.
Tired of that? then, they gave you Junior and Jingle All the Way, where our Last Action
Hero has to fight not with aliens, but with Sinbad for a toy.
With this serialization of performances, came what Marshall calls "celebrity personnage.”
Personnage refers to “a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of
performance for the actor.”
In other words, a feedback loop of typecasting.
Sometimes, that familiarity becomes so encompassing that it literally supplants any sense of the
actor as an autonomous being.
When you picture classic stars like James Dean, you picture them exactly as they looked
and behaved on screen, not their real selves.
You could say the same about Samuel L Jackson, who, for all I know, goes home and soothes
his children to sleep with the calming refrain, “go the f**k to sleep.”
Because branded stars equaled easy money, studios invested in them heavily, and Hollywood
celebrity “personnage” was mediated by the aforementioned PR reps, star magazines,
agencies and more.
They worked in synergy to create and safeguard celebrity reputations.
Back in these good old days, a celebrity name was enough to generate reliable box office
returns.
But that’s all changed.
Today, not even heavyweights like Tom Cruise or J-Law are totally safe bets.
That’s partially because celebrity identity no longer belongs exclusively to powerful
movie executives.
Why?
Because the internet.
It allows us to actively participate in creating the narrative of each celebrity, giving us,
as scholar Paul Mcdonald writes, “the opportunity for an interactive construction of star discourse
that was not possible with previous channels of mass communication.”
That’s changed our position in the food chain of media.
According to Marshall, the audience member is now a “hybrid of producer and user that
is engaged in the media consumption/production” or a “prosumer” and this fact is “redefining
the dynamics of popular culture.”
Which brings us to memes.
The Internet meme is comparatively more egalitarian than most art forms.
It’s nearly effortless to make one, anyone with an Internet connection, the know-how
and a couple of minutes of free time can do it.
And, unlike literally everything else in the cultural industry, they’re typically not
made to generate money, they’re made for the lulz.
Because memes operate somewhat outside the realm of economics, they can actually act
as an authentic intervention in our consumption of culture.
Particularly given the source material: memes can pull from literally anywhere, since we
have access to nearly the entire history of American modern visual culture at our fingertips.
As a result, we can use memes to evoke powerful, shared moments of our collective cultural
identity.
And we are doing that literally every day.
As a result, so much of our visual exposure to celebrities is happening via user-generated
culture.
This means a more level playing field.
Back in the day, fandom meant passively reading canned stories in gossip magazines or joining
a celebrity fan club.
Today, the fan can actively shape the way they and their entire social networks view
individual celebrities via dank memes.
All hail the great prosumer!
But now that we have the means to meme - what are we doing with it?
When it comes to celebrities, three major things.
First, some memes are reaffirming celebrity brands and making them even more powerful.
Consider the Sad Keanu meme.
The meme was instantly comprehensible because it exaggerated pre-existing notions of Keaunu
as vulnerable, his life as tragic.
It emerged and spread organically in June 2010, after paparazzi published the now-famous
photo.
While the meme began with words superimposed on the image, Photoshoppers got creative,
and suddenly Sad Keanu was kickin it with everyone from Stalin, to the Breakfast Club
Brat Pack.
At one point, Sad Keanu was a more popular Google search than Oprah.
Hollywood had a knee-jerk reaction to the blowup, issuing takedown notices to sadkeanu.com.
RIP.
The sad man himself expressed annoyance about the meme’s characterization of him — "I
mean, do I wish that I didn't get my picture taken, and, while I was eating a sandwich
on the streets of New York?
Yeah."
But whether Keanu is or isn’t sad, the widespread sharing of the image has the power to literally
shape our conception of his personnage.
Because the image of him looking sad was serialized widely across the internet, the preconception
of his sadness, confirmed and solidified that personnage.
Until, inevitably, Hollywood found a way to capitalize on it with: John Wick.
The film and its titular role, which feels tailor made for Keanu, casts him as a sad
action hero, creating a sort of feedback loop between his memed self and the performances
he gives.
Sometimes memes can also recontextualize the meaning of a celebrity brand and tap into
a larger, broader cultural sentiment.
That process can be totally subconscious.
So, let’s go back to Samuel L Jackson, who as previously discussed, saw his badass “personnage”
set the Internet ablaze.
Now, to be clear, the intertextual commentary about Samuel L Jackson’s unique brand of
badassery is not unique to the Internet.
You can trace it back at least to the days of Chappelle Show in 2004 — "No, I can't
stop yellin', cuz that’s how I talk, ya ain't never seen my movies?"
Since then, memes have reaffirmed and hyperbolized his persona, giving the commodified “Samuel
L Jackson” even more value via increased recognition and visibility.
But at the same time, there’s an underlying explanation for why Samuel L Jackson, and
the particular movie “Snakes on a Plane,” captured so much Internet attention beyond
Jackson’s famous potty mouth.
"Personality goes a long way."
Consider the specific setting: a post-9/11 world, in which Jackson, a beloved figure
of strength, saves an airplane from attack the perfect encapsulation of post 9/11 anxiety
and our collective desire to feel safe.
This performance helped solidify Jackson’s badass rep, which then became a feedback loop
in which Jackson was repeatedly cast to play the character of “Samuel L. Jackson the
actor.”
Most recently, that’s landed Jackson a 9-film deal with Marvel.
"Motherf--" "Motherf--"
Meme-making isn’t just a fantastic procrastination tool: it’s the paradigm-shifting act of
a modern prosumer.
What’s more, our ability to make memes, i.e. to actively participate in cultural production,
inherently changes the way we view visual culture.
In seeing movies and tv shows, in part, as source material for great memes, we’re developing
a critical distance from the media we consume.
If you’ve ever made a meme, you’ve probably experienced that light-bulb moment, when you’re
watching a Youtube video and thought, “Man, that would look really dope on loop.”
In that moment, you were thinking less like a consumer, passively waiting for the next
thing to happen on screen, and more like a prosumer, searching for your next source of
inspiration in your day-to-day media consumption.
So, what does this mean for the future of Hollywood casting, and celebrity persona?
Well, a few things.
First of all, it means that the cultural currents of Internet fandom could become increasingly
visible in popular entertainment, such as the potential Netflix heist movie announced
in 2017, to be based on this classic 2014 meme of Rihanna and actress Lupita Nyong'o
sitting together at a fashion show.
Now, unfortunately, Danny Devito won’t be playing Detective Pikachu… yet.
It also means that actor identities will become, if anything, increasingly reliant on the Internet
masses.
The rapid serialization unique to the medium of the meme means it will continue to have
the power to create some of the key defining moments of popular celebrity and popular culture,
sometimes overnight.
And it will guarantee that Bill Murray will keep wishing you happy birthday for years
to come.
So, what do you think?
Are memes creating a new class of prosumers or are they just good for the lulz and an
upvote?
Let us know what you think in the comments, and as always, thanks for watching, guys.
Peace.