[Narrator] This video is brought to you by Raycon.
(upbeat music)
- Hey Wisecrack, Michael again.
Lemme ask you something.
What's the first thing that pops into your head
when you see this little critter?
If the answer is I must smother this thing
to death with my infinite affection,
then you are one of the millions who have
fallen happily under the sway of Baby Yoda.
The greatest big-eared character ever produced by Disney.
Baby Yoda owns the internet.
He's racked up an obscene number of pre-orders
for a plushie toy that won't even be available until April.
And multiple fans have already offered
to give up their lives for the fictional character.
But what is it about Baby Yoda, and cute things in general
that makes us go so crazy?
- I'm going to look after you
until the Mandalorian gets back.
- You might be thinking,
it's because of our biology, stupid.
But that's only part of the answer.
What is really going through our heads and our hearts
when we feel the urge to fawn over something cute.
Why is your dog's Instagram account
more popular than your own?
And above all, is there something sinister
about our uncontrollable joy in watching
Baby Yoda sipping on that itty bitty cup of soup?
For that answer and more, let's enjoy the internet's
favorite pastime of ruthlessly deconstructing
the things we love in this Wisecrack Edition
on The Dark Side of Cuteness.
But before we get into it, I wanna give a shout out
to Raycon.
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Now, back to the show.
By now, we all know, or at least suspect
that Disney has hijacked our brains.
That the massive media conglomerate
has employed subtle, devious insights into human psychology
to grab our attention and shape our preferences.
Our obsession with Baby Yoda
and other cute things in general has its roots
in the very building blocks of human behavior.
Many a hot take has pointed out that Baby Yoda
with his soft, tiny body, stubby limbs,
and ginormous eyes ticks all the boxes
in what ethologist Konrad Lorenz
first called kindchenschema, or baby schema.
That set of physical features that makes us lose our minds
at the sight of anything remotely resembling
a human infant.
But there's more to cuteness than biological imperative.
Cuteness is also a product of culture.
One that only really developed in the past century.
In her article, "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,"
literary critic Sianne Ngai explains
that the idea of cuteness as we know it today
owes a lot to 20th century toy manufacturing.
Specifically, the shift from toys made of wood and metal,
to ones made of squishier, less breakable materials.
This change only came about, according to Ngai,
as the result of early 20th century insights
into the psychology of children.
Specifically, their potential for aggression
and even cruelty.
At the time, this was a big shift from
the long-standing belief that children
were inherently good, innocent creatures.
Which had been popular since the notion of childhood
first developed in the early modern period.
For a good chunk of Western history,
younger and older people weren't subdivided
into the categories of child and adult.
There were just folks of different ages and sizes.
All with roughly the same set of expectations
placed on them.
French historian Phillipe Aries, for instance,
found that artwork from the Middle Ages
tends to depict children not as a distinct class of people,
but as miniature adults.
And all the horror that implies.
The following few centuries saw the development
of childhood.
A special time set aside for pure, innocent
young people to learn about the world
before they would be called on
to participate in it as adults.
With this new category of persons, that is children,
came an increased demand for products
that they could enjoy and benefit from, i.e., toys.
Manufactured on a massive scale.
Again, during the 19th century, many of these toys
were made of hard materials like wood or porcelain.
Over the course of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud
and other psychologists gradually discovered
that the inner lives of children can be far more aggressive
and violent than they were previously given credit for.
Which in turn affected the design of the objects
created specifically for them.
As Ngai puts it, "once children were no longer imagined
"as miniature adults or as naturally moral
"or virtuous creatures, manufacturers found new impetus
"to produce indestructible toys that could
"survive the violence with which children
"were increasingly associated."
In light of such findings, it only made good business sense
to make toys more pliable.
The china doll, popular in the 19th Century,
isn't likely to survive being thrown across a room.
But 20th century inventions like
the sock monkey, the teddy bear,
and the inexplicably popular Betsy-Wetsy,
it pees when you pour water down its throat.
- Betsy-Wet drinks and wets and cries and frets.
- Were made of more durable fabrics and plastics
that could withstand the occasional malicious head-dropping.
A side effect of all these manufacturing changes
was that by the latter half of the 20th century,
Americans were increasingly exposed to a growing number
of household objects with features
we find adorable in children.
In other words, an increasing prevalence
of kindchenschema in American life
can be tied back to our efforts
to deal with our monstrous kiddos.
Of course, tactile qualities aren't the only thing
we think of as cute.
As Ngai points out, cuteness is also identified
with a twittering use or style of language.
(character vocalizing)
- Think of Baby Yoda chirping
as he toddles along behind Mando.
(character chirping)
Or Pikachu saying nothing but literally his own name.
- Pikachu.
(character vocalizes)
- Or since Disney can't seem to control itself,
Babu Frik as he goes about Babu Friking in C3PO's head.
And cuteness goes beyond the particular traits
of the cute object.
Ngai argues that properties we associate
with cuteness, things like smallness, softness,
or simplicity, are closely connected
to certain related affects.
In particular, helplessness, pitifulness,
and even despondency.
Sounds harsh, but examples of sadness
magnifying perceived cuteness aren't too hard to come by.
Think of Puss In Boots's wide, teary eyes in Shrek.
Or Blankie crying over his master's portrait
in Brave Little Toaster.
Picture the poor little robot Wall-E
who just wants to hold his girlfriend's hand.
Or Dumbo's enormous ears folding tragically
in reaction to a cruel, malevolent circus.
While we're on the subject, you can start googling
right now, and find a toy line whose entire
selling proposition is, "Squeeze this baby until it cries."
To put it bluntly, we find things cutest
when they are most miserable.
(crying)
Care-giving impulses aside, there is something
a bit sinister about the way we relate to things,
animals, or people we label cute.
Why, for instance, do many otherwise reasonable people
feel a sudden urge to crush or even bite
when in the presence of children or animals.
- I'm gonna take his fuzzy little perfect head
I wanna put it in my mouth and squeeze down on it hard
until I have a puppy-faced diamond in my mouth.
- Neurological research into what is called
Cute Aggression explains why some parents
feel the need to nibble their baby's feet and legs
like a big spicy rack of ribs.
U.C. Riverside psychologist Katherine Stavropoulos
has found that people who feel cute aggression
experience high levels of activity
in both the brain's emotional processing centers
and reward systems when they are exposed to cute things.
She theorizes that the unexpected aggression
might be the brain's way of preventing emotional overwhelm
by counterbalancing all the positive gooey feelings
with some negative ones.
In other words, even in the presence
of a French Bulldog puppy, your brain prevents you
from being incapacitated by joy by slipping you
the occasional urge to nosh on the little fella.
Handy.
And Stavropoulos isn't the only one to notice
this unexpected link between cuteness
and aggressive impulses.
In his article, "Cuteness", cultural critic Daniel Harris
denounces everything from Cabbage Patch Dolls
to E.T. as examples of a "seductive and manipulative
"aesthetic" that appeals as much to a desire for control
as it does to any hard-wired caregiving instinct.
Harris observes that we tend to find something cute
because of "a quality it lacks, a certain neediness
"and inability to stand alone, as if it were
"an indignant starveling, lonely, and rejected."
Like Ngai, who references him throughout her article,
Harris notices that cuteness is about more
than just kindchenschema.
Big eyes and a large forehead alone
are not enough to qualify something as cute.
- Aww, aren't you just the cutest.
(creature growling)
- Most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
- In order for an object to be perceived as truly cute,
it must also appear to be dependent on us for survival.
Totally subject to our whims.
As Harris puts it, "cuteness is not something
"we find in our children, but something we do to them.
"Because it aestheticizes unhappiness, helplessness,
"and deformity, it almost always involves
"an act of sadism on the part of its creator
"who makes an unconscious attempt to maim,
"hobble, and embarrass the thing it seeks to idolize."
Less provocatively, Ngai points out that
"it is crucial to cuteness that its diminutive object
"has some sort of imposed-upon aspect."
Look at Baby Yoda, the puppet is designed
with a slight downward turn to the lips.
So that he often seems just on the verge of shedding tears.
And it's hard to escape the fact that the best Baby Yoda
memes involve him struggling to accomplish basic tasks.
Or looking sad over a small injustice
the world has dealt him.
And sure, he occasionally wields
his incredible Force powers to save the day.
But then he immediately goes comatose in just
the gosh-darned cutest way imaginable.
Indeed, many of the things we identify as cute
seem to get cuter when they have this imposed-upon
look that Ngai is talking about.
Picture, for instance, the pout of a little kid
who's just dropped their ice cream cone.
Heck, there are whole subsections of YouTube
dedicated to gathering footage of unhappy cute things.
You've got your guilty dogs compilations.
Your cats freaked out by cucumbers.
The invisible challenge that pits animals
against sheets of plastic wrap.
Dogs that hate baths.
And of course, kids in trouble.
According to Harris, we look at things like Baby Yoda
with "a transformative gaze that will stop at nothing
"to appease its hunger for expressing pity
"and big-heartedness, even at the expense of mutilating
"the object of its affections."
Yikes.
Now, this could all just be Harris publicly declaring
his beef with the Care Bear franchise.
But in addition to Stavropoulos's study
of cute aggression cited above,
there is also historical evidence to suggest
that cuteness and malice are more intertwined
than we might care to admit.
Ngai points out that while the concept
of cuteness took a while to develop in the United States,
it exploded in Japan in the years following World War II.
According to Ngai, this Japanese culture of cuteness,
or kawaii, grew out of the nation's experience
of defeat and demilitarization.
As she puts it, "there are historical reasons,
"in other words, for why and aesthetic organized
"around a small, helpless, or deformed object
"that foregrounds the violence in its production
"as such might seem more ideologically meaningful
"in the culture of one nation than in that of the other."
This is a very academic way of making a simple point.
That cute objects, which through their design
call attention to the fact that they are made
to be crushed, poked, fondled, et cetera,
might be more meaningful to people
who have an experience of being crushed themselves.
In post World War II Japan, this resulted
in kawaii spilling out from toy production
into every other section of the economy.
From automobile manufacturing, to public works projects.
You thought your state bird was cool?
Well (beep) right off.
In Japan, each prefecture gets its own freaking mascot.
Suck it Western meadowlark (airhorn blasts).
Some of the more popular products of kawaii culture
are familiar even here in the U.S.
Anyone who went to elementary school in the '90s
will remember the truckloads of Hello Kitty folders,
pencil cases, and lunchboxes
that flooded our classrooms at the time.
Of course, there's the electric
marketing monstrosity himself.
But Ngai also highlights a few kawaii things
that make the connection between cuteness and suffering
more transparent.
Probably the most heartbreaking of these is Kogepan.
A burnt roll of bread, prone to existential dilemmas
and fits of depression.
Sort of a Japanese Eeyore.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Over the years, things with a kawaii
or cute sensibility, that is, objects
that make us conscious of our power to control them
emotionally or physically, have proven very sellable.
According to Harris, that's exactly the point.
Harris believes that cuteness is the stuff
of marketing dreams.
He claims that, "advertisers have learned consumers
"will 'adopt' products that create,
"often in their packaging alone,
"an aura of motherlessness, ostracism, and melancholy,
"the silent desperation of the lost puppy dog
"clamoring to be defended, namely, to be bought."
To put it another way, the more marketers
can convince you that the plots of Toy Story 2
and The Brave Little Toaster are real,
that objects have feelings, the more you will shell out
to keep a non-sentient ball of stitched-together
cotton and polyester from feeling abandoned.
Or rather, the more you will pay to experience
the feeling of rescuing something inferior.
What we're buying, according to Harris,
is the power to feel bigger and more powerful
than whatever small object we acquire.
But Mando's charge is safe from our passive-aggressively
sadistic clutches, at least for the time being.
In a rare miss, Disney has been caught completely
off-guard by the insane demand for Baby Yoda merchandise.
With an official plush toy not scheduled for release
until spring 2020.
Not that stopped a handful of intrepid marketers
from taking creative liberties with product descriptions
in a misguided bid to get consumers what they want.
So sorry for you if you bought one of these.
Now all that said, Baby Yoda is only a puppet.
Albeit the most adorable one ever captured on screen.
It's probably fine not to interrogate our feelings
around him too deeply.
After all, even if there is an element of hostility
to the way we project cuteness onto him,
he isn't an actual child
who could be emotionally harmed by our distortions.
Still, when you find yourself groping for your credit card
under an irresistible compulsion
to mash that plushie pre-order button,
it might be interesting to ask yourself,
"what do I really feel for you Baby Yoda?"
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks to all our patrons for supporting our channel.
Don't forget to subscribe, and before you go,
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You can get 15% off your own earbud order today.
And as always, thanks for watching guys.
Peace.
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