Visceral Experiences and Voyeurism
The most direct and native-to-the-internet appeal is often the most overlooked.
Feet dangle off a girder on top of one of the world’s tallest buildings. A5 Wagyu beef makes sizzling contact with cast iron, inches from the lens. Hundreds of M&Ms fill a toilet bowl, waiting for the flush. A giant rainbow lobster is cracked open in an Okinawa market, revealing translucent flesh. An industrial shredder, befitted with googly eyes, consumes a folding chair.
YouTube’s recommendation system has, in collaboration with billions of viewers and millions of creators & publishers, through by far the largest experiment on mass attention ever conducted, uncovered a staggering array of fascinating things about the human psyche. Each strange emergent form or sub-genre reveals a new aspect of the collective unconscious and a new truth about what appeals to us, why it appeals to us and, most interestingly, how it appeals to us.
The Visceral
Some of the most resonant and, consequently, most successful emergent styles of video go relatively unheralded. The popular imagination associates platforms with their most famous aspects: YouTube with the YouTuber, Instagram with the aspirational/inspirational influencer, TikTok with the dances that kicked it all off - while whole industries spring up without proportional comment or analysis. Hydraulic presses and driveway SUVs destroy a catalogue of familiar objects, pimples and ingrown toenails are excavated and purged, filthy rugs are washed, gnarled wood is turned and worked. Videos that provide a direct experience which can satisfy deep unconscious desires are unimaginably popular. Here’s a playlist if you’re not familiar.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Despite the obvious colossal demand for content with this oddly captivating, primally affective appeal, media companies and creators alike don’t seem to know how to make things which connect with audiences in that deeper, more direct, visceral way. Perhaps we might see a extended shot of Francis Mallman’s crackling fire as fat drips from some splayed beast in Chef’s Table. The knife on apparent trans-dimensional cable import “Is It Cake?” moves slowly through the spongy simulacrum, offering an unusual moment to take in the texture of buttercream. Travis Bickle stares into a glass effervescing with Alka-Seltzer, the bubbles filling the frame. A YouTuber does a stunt with goo or slime or melted lipstick, perhaps only thinking that they’re “doing a trend”. But for the most part, the demonstrable truth that people absolutely adore and obsess themselves with these practically unmediated experiences with all their crunch and crack and ooze and fizz and squish and burst goes unexploited.
Viscera, from the Latin, are guts. Internal organs. A point of view shot from somebody flying between jagged rocks in a wing suit can be stomach-churning or quicken your heart, but visceral appeal doesn’t have to be stressful. Peaceful cooking videos or long, gentle sequences that focus on ancient crafts can reach and affect us just as primordially.
This video of a lobster’s demise and dispatch has 134M views.
The trick with this stuff is to get out of the way and give the audience unfettered access to the physical experience of it all. Diegetic sounds, mic’ed close with attention to the most satisfying, evocative audio. No music, or at least be sparing, well-matched and appropriate - if you must, I really advise against it. As little editing as possible - long, continuous shots, even if they have the odd judder or mistake. Get close to the minutiae and the sensual. Focus on organic, natural aspects. Sensory superlatives work well - the smoothest, the hottest, the stickiest. A sense of place really helps it connect. This style and appeal matches perfectly with artisanal excellence and traditional craftsmanship - a sense of the absolute and the eternal. Of course, there are no rules, just some heartfelt advice - weave it into your creative. The main thing is just to know that it’s tremendously powerful. If you get in the way of the viewer’s visceral experience and retreat to conventional techniques and ill-fitted best practices, you miss out on something spellbinding.
The Vicarious
When casting for hosts or “assessing talent” in my last job, we would often use a term from the study of literature or cinema: audience surrogate. Especially in video on the internet, the traditional top-down, one-to-many, “here’s the show, ladies and gentlemen” host can be passé or ineffective. You really want someone who’s there on the viewer’s behalf - asking the dumb questions, getting up close to the action, touching, smelling, tasting things and inviting you to share in it. The viewer gets to experience it all vicariously through the audience surrogate, rather than having it polished, formatted, distilled and presented to them.
I’ve always thought of the internet screen as more porous and permeable than the TV screen of old. It’s not just that you can like, comment and subscribe. Regardless of the nearby buttons or potential replies to comments, a viewer feels inherently more part of the gang, along on the journey. The position of a phone or laptop screen accounts for some of it, lending an intimacy to a relationship conducted within arm’s reach. The position of the old-school vlogging camera brought some extra feeling of presence and camaraderie as well as a dynamic potential to switch suddenly to POV. Stephen Colbert’s “hello, nation” or in-on-the-joke “folks” on The Colbert Report felt more internet than Jon Stewart’s news anchor, funny man-on-the-wall talking-down-to-you style. Vicarious means that they’re on screen with you, for you, almost AS you.
The Voyeuristic
I was almost feeling pleased with myself about the alliteration and continuity between these two ideas - visceral, the feeling of direct experience in filmed media and vicarious, the experience mediated by a character or presenter - when I found out about the work of Jon Boorstin. His excellent book, Making Movies Work: Thinking Like A Filmmaker lays these out as different ways we watch films - the visceral eye, the vicarious eye. He adds another - the voyeuristic eye, which he describes as “the mind’s eye, not the heart’s, the dispassionate observer, watching out of a kind of generic human curiosity.” Boorstin gets deeper into cinematic and narrative techniques than I could hope to and I heartily recommend reading it if these ideas resonate with you. He places the voyeuristic eye as the furthest emotional distance, at the level of the story. “I’m not talking about plumbing depths of character or living through the thrills of a lifetime but something simpler: watching events steadily unfold in rational, explainable sequence, an engrossing story that never violates our sense of logic.”
These are levels of proximity with different types of mediation. At the voyeuristic level, you’re understanding through story - essentially, the writer is in charge. At the vicarious level, you’re connecting through character - the actor or the host is primary. At the visceral level, you’re almost feeling it directly - with only the camera and microphone between viewer and action.
My suspicion is that, from ideation through all stages of production, people often default to the voyeuristic layer and use the techniques which support that approach, to the exclusion of the vicarious and, even more so, the visceral. There’s widespread overuse of music, telegraphing the emotions the viewer is supposed to feel. Edits are hurried and focused more on hitting narrative beats than grounding the piece and giving a deeper sense of space, place, mood or tone. Think of the chasm of apparent “realness” between television and internet video and how rabidly audiences connected with the authenticity of creators in the early days of the influencer. Hosts are more likely to be reading a script or delivering a pre-planned moment than losing themselves in an experience or exploring a subject extemporaneously on behalf of the viewer. Traditional instincts and old habits can measurably detract from the opportunity to connect people more deeply with a subject.
The biggest and most useful takeaway from all of this, should you be looking for one, is that audiences have voted with their time spent and clearly shown that they are hungry for more direct experiences through the media they consume. The techniques, approaches, ideas and appeals are there to be studied, applied and exploited. It’s an opportunity to lift the veil of familiarity and connect people more deeply with their world.
Links
Jean Twenge was on Ezra Klein’s NY Times podcast back in May - I deeply admire her patience and diligence approaching the psychological impact of phones & social media - illustrated again in this absolute banger of a retort to an opinion piece.
We are always told that original films don’t get made. Of course it’s hyperbole to make a point, but also feels demonstrably untrue - here’s 100 films from 2021, with budgets where easily available.
An old friend put me on to Road to Roma - a making-of doc about Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film. It lingers on the little things - the minutiae of period production design, the casting of extras, iterations take-by-take on longer tracking shots - which makes it really rich, especially for people engaged in making things.
The incorrigible list-maker and great producer, Ted Hope created a timely outline of the film business’s inflection points since 1970.
A24 get a lot right, including these beach towels. I’m not sure about accuracy of the aspect ratio.
Park Chan-wook talked on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast about how reading novels and going to the theatre can be more beneficial for film-makers - exercising your imagination rather than seeing someone else’s finished sound and visual work. You really get a sense of that spirit in the work of genius that is Decision To Leave.
“And he is laughing now, tears of laughter in his eyes, one precious instant in the paradise of recollection, and even as I’m laughing with him I think how fast the mind can move us, the way the story is a span of light across space.” - Billy Bathgate, E. L. Doctorow