Lets Make Our Own Reality

The Four Eyed Monsters phenomena is so multifaceted, it can be hard to pick a point of entry to begin the discussion. I just watched the trailer for the first time in a while, and I'm fixated on a title card that reads, "Let's make our own reality." That's basically the theme of the whole thing, right? As the film dramatizes it, Arin sent Susan a message on a dating site; Susan told Arin to stop by the restaurant where she worked; Arin instead secretly videotaped Susan and then emailed her stills from the footage. Instead of thinking that was totally creepy and calling the police, she wrote him back. Right from the beginning, they were breaking every rule possible and making their own.

Four Eyed Monsters is probably the biggest example to date of a film finding its audience primarily via online social networks, but it's not like Arin and Susan just set up a MySpace profile and started cashing checks the next day. I saw the film at SXSW 2005. I wrote one of the first reviews of the film for Cinematical; I followed Arin and Susan's progress first via their indieWIRE blog, then through their MySpace page and, of course, the video podcasts.  I watched them struggle against the established indie distribution system--before they found their own way around it. There's no distribution context for your film? Invent one.  

There's a million reasons why people respond to Four Eyed Monsters, but that's really what does it for me -- whether we're talking about dating ettiquette or narrative construction or online audience seduction, I'm fascinated by Arin and Susan's resolve to carve out their own niche.

What does it for you?  

Re: Lets Make Our Own Reality

The Four Eyed Monsters phenomenon is great, and the fact that they made their own distribution model because they couldn't fit in to a traditional one is pretty incredible. But what I wonder is how long it will be before it's all co-opted by mainstream media? While I trust that Arin and Susan have a truly independent spirit, what about this method they've created? This sort of DIY distribution seems to be catching on, thanks in a large part to the example they set. Maybe I sound like a broken-record, jaded hipster who's always paranoid about the good stuff "selling out," but it's worth considering that MySpace still seems to be the primary venue for this sort of thing, and it's now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the same people that own Fox News and at least one fifth of everything you see hear and read. (And the same people who write Bill O'Reilly's paycheck!)

I guess what I'm asking is: will the path forged by Four Eyed Monsters be followed by a stream of like-mined independent filmmakers, short on cash and big on ideas; or will it be transformed by the uber-conglomerates into yet another tool to suck cash from the "youth demographic"?

Or here's a scray thought: can it be both? 

Re: Lets Make Our Own Reality

I think companies like FOX are only interested in co-opting social media to the extent that they're interested in reaching the social media demographic. They're interested in co-opting the social space, not the media itself. The mindset is like, "Kids are on the internet? We've got to get on the internet too!" 

NewTeeVee (which is kind of the Variety of the online video world, as well as a site I write a column for) did a great interview a few weeks back with Michael Eisner, re: his MySpace series Prom Queen. He basically said that he doesn't care at all about the media that users are creating and sharing amongst themselves, he's only concerned with internet distribution as far as it allows him an opportunity to reach a captive audience of teens. If you look at Prom Queen, or even something like Clark and Michael, which was paid for by CBS but which has the production values of the typical YouTube clip, the style of storytelling is far more reminicsent of mainstream television than it is of anything being produced in the online video world.

Right now independently-produced video is peacefully co-existing on sites like mYSpace and YouTube with corporate product, and I think inevitably it will be up to community to decide which they prefer. I always feel a little icky about trying to get into the mind of a teenager sitting at home trying to make choices about what they're going to watch on the internet, but if I force myself to do it, I imagine that kids (who are rarely stupid when it comes to spotting what's uncool/inauthentic) would take one look at something like Prom Queen and see no material difference between it and the crappy teensploitation movies that they're no longer buying tickets for at the theaters. I think at the end of the day, the audience decides, and any mainstream media company that wilfully defies what the audience tells them they want is flushing money down the toilet.