This week: An obscure piece of 1980s video art has become wildly popular on TikTok, the HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die and ScarJo. Favor: Is this newsletter going to your Promotions tab in Gmail? Either move one Stupefy email from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab or add mgardner@gethighfield.com to your Google Contacts. And remember to tell your friends to sign up right here. Thanks!
Obscurities reborn as hits on TikTok
I apologize for two weeks in a row about TikTok, but I’ve been chugging the app. In 2004, in an influential WIRED magazine article and book, Chris Anderson declared that the ”future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”Obscure songs, artists, albums, movies, TV shows were supposed to be rediscovered and reborn thanks to unlimited selection. Anderson turned out to be mostly off: the tail fattened. Entertainment, so far, turned out to be winner-takes-all. It’s an Endgame, The Office and Drake world. But something very odd is happening on TikTok that made me wonder if the Long Tail theory may yet be still alive. A work of video art from 1983 by Cecilia Condit called Possibly In Michigan has been rediscovered by teens who are lip syncing to a 15-second snippet from the piece. The clip has been used in videos that have been viewed at least 485,300 times (that's only counting the videos that use the #possiblyinmichigan hashtag, which many presumably do not). Teens seem to be gravitating to the videos surreal, creepy, and outsider aura. The sound of the snippet that has taken off sounds like a horror movie's take on a nursery rhyme.
There's really no easy explanation for why this obscure piece of art has taken off 36 years later to a degree that would have been unimaginable to the artist. The original video is only 11 minutes long and can be viewed online, but it was posted on a Reddit forum called r/creepy in 2015. It apparently briefed made the first page there. But that is nothing compared to the success it has found on TikTok. Even Condit, the original artist, has heard about and is taken aback by the new popularity of her film.I really hope more obscurities turn into hits thanks to our weirdest and most popular new portal into the hidden lives of others. But I won't attempt to predict which obscurities those will be.
🤦 (THR)
This side-by-side comparison of the iconic "Hakuna Matata" scene from both Lion King movies is absolutely devastating. Remake looks lifeless and stiff. Original looks funny and memorable and lifelike. Despite the fact that the former uses real animals and the latter is a cartoon. (Twitter)
Diddy is bringing back Making The Band. I suggest he forms a K-Pop band. (Twitter)
Scarlett Johansson is finding that people are not taking her "any person, or any tree, or any animal" assertion seriously. I think having given the quote to a magazine called As If is not helping. (Daily Mail)
Stranger Things is the biggest hit ever for Netflix "with at least 26.3 million Americans catching at least some portion of the show over the course of the four-day holiday weekend." Over-saturation works. (Vulture)
If you're curious what VidCon is like: "A dance battle has broken out between two TikTok influencers, both of whom appear to have been born during the Obama administration." (Twitter)
The FTC's $5 billion fine on Facebook represents 6% of the company's cash on hand, or two weeks worth of revenue. (TheVerge)
Apple is making shows that cost $15 million per episode for its upcoming streaming service. (TheVerge)
A meme maker who goes by Carpe Donktum was invited to the White House. (Vox)
Recommended: I Love You, Now Die
Few stories today are open for interpretation. Movies and TV don’t expect the audience draw their own conclusions very often. Complicated moral ambiguity would make it too hard for us to know which side we should loudly proclaim to be on in order to avoid outrage from our peers. The two-part HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die, directed by Erin Lee Carter, leaves a lot open to interpretation. And that's what makes it so fascinating. The irony is that that ambiguity is a result of a flood of intimate information. It's the story of a teenage couple who's vast trove of thousands of text messages amount to not only a digital record of every single intimate thought they had over several years but also the script of a doomed love story that led to a death and a conviction of manslaughter.A handful of Michelle Carter's text messages to her boyfriend Conrad Roy were seized on by the media as proof that she convinced him to kill himself. But the more complete look at her life that the show gives us leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Further reading: — AG Barr’s father warns of ‘dictatorship’…in outer space
Are there any lessons about Trump’s America in Donald Barr’s science fiction?
NYC's ghost towers
Just how many of Manhattan’s luxury condos are owned by people who don’t live there?
The Slackification of the American Home
Stretched for time, some households are starting to operate more like businesses.
How 311 turned its music into a lifestyle brand
'You can't make good art with a gun to your head'