[691] The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers

Let's channel my inner 12 year old and start with the basic question. What makes something “unique?”

When we go to our smallest scales we can differentiate atoms. We break those up into even smaller particles and start describing forces mostly understood in theoretical terms and quantum fluctuations. In going the other direction, I initially thought of an ocean. A collection of those particulars filling up a hole to create a distinct ecosystem. What's unique about one or the other spans endless fluctuating categories.
 

Every time you try to discuss the “thing-ness” of an object, or body of water, or person, you're going to run into the same problem. I know it's a thought experiment that's been done a thousand times, but not by me. Am I my hand? Am I me without my hand? If I experience phantom limb pain, my nervous system is registering real pain in a part of me that's gone. Am I now merely a memory of pain? Is it possible to be both the memory and the experiencer of the memory at the same time?

What we might intuitively understand as unique is hidden in the last paragraph. I chose to run a tired experiment and potential chain of questions again. Stated differently, the idea that there was some reason or insight to be gained in doing so occurred to me. If there can be infinite versions, infinite pieces of the words and pixels and potential paths for the thought to have traveled as my brain lit up, this one now uniquely exists among them. It's there insofar as I, or you, are able to perceive it.

There was a point in which I had seen every Netflix show. Overnight, it seems, Netflix exploded into hundreds of new avenues I likely won't keep up with. It started as this unique and different take on how to approach and distribute media. It's now a sea of “content” competing for as many “unique” views as any major player ever has. It's introduced more voices that “the mainstream” probably isn't familiar with including ethnically diverse comedians and original anime series. Over time, Netflix retains it's unique place as the best example of “what it's doing” even if what it has become resembles a mindless flood plain of millennial baiting inclusiveness. It set the pace for other big media players to copy.

There's the cynic in me that is frequently disappointed when I think I can see the calculation under why something grows or gets popular. An “alarm bell,” if you will, was hearing that Adam Sandler was contracted to put out 4 movies exclusively on Netflix. In a second, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Waterboy were reduced to “Those approaching or just breaching middle-age irrationally love this guy!” What made watching those movies enjoyable, be it a combination of youth alongside what makes Adam Sandler unique, became washed away by the “comedy sea” that every platform knows it needs to stick its feet in. You hope the actors they enlist still believe in what they're doing and are working from the place that was born for the stage and screen, but then as each new thing they create comes out, you try to ignore how it makes you feel like you've died a little for having watched it.

I talked about my “taste” in the past and being mostly disinterested with most things media, music, or food related. I think the walls that established those tastes were, in part, breached because it just became so easy to engage with everything. There was no pilgrimage to the movie store and debate with the family about what to pick. You tried something new by chance or got the chance to be pleasantly surprised when your first choice was gone. You got to build up anticipation in a way only Marvel and Star Wars movies announced years in advance manage to conjure today.

Your unique relationship to the story, to the actor, had it's own story as well. American Pie, for me, wasn't an “immature college sex movie in a series of 15 with the American Pie brand.” It was this ultra taboo media circus I only got to watch at a friend's house whose mom didn't know mine had prohibited me. You talk to someone today about the pie fucking scene and they'll show you a Youtube video of a guy who's fucked 100 pies for the “pie fucking challenge” and has no idea who Jason Biggs is.

Am I trying to romanticize pie fucking? Is this my version of back-in-the-old-days syndrome? It's more that the movie, and that scene, transcended their unique root and became not just a personal story of mine but embedded in the culture in ways younger people have no grasp of. While there are plenty of references to the first white and black kiss onscreen still happening today, the uniqueness is born from the story around it, not because we generally find kissing anymore ostentatious than a kid who grew up watching beheading videos is going to care about pie fucking.

There seems to be a danger of being washed away by the sea. Is Black Panther “ZOMG THE MOST AMAZING THING JESUS CHRIST THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER MOVIE!?” Or is white guilt desperately trying to avoid its apprehensions regarding racism? Both Get Out and Black Panther were great, but might not single-handedly reshape race relations or define new genres. The story of why we need more representation seems individually lost to the sea of praise and we're quick to establish new tokens of “wokeness.” Kendrick Lamar doesn't stop my black DCS worker roommate from getting asked if he's looking for the child support office when he's there to meet with the head of the department about a case.

Sometimes I'm flabbergasted when I learn someone is paid an exorbitant amount and getting interviewed for their views against something like “the while male savior narrative.” They teach at an expensive school, they consult on movies and books. But in the modern era where messages go viral and influence in ways we can't begin to comprehend, I get why so many are obsessed with narrative. A voice that's “living it” or “doing things” that you had to engage with while developing your own has all been reduced to arbitrary “influence peddlers” who respond to surveys and weak temperature gauging of the cultural climate. “He has over a million followers!” No, not really. He's triggered the “follow” button for a moment from both child and bot alike and has cultivated “his voice” to rise towards the upper end of a system.

I worry that voices and influences I used to shape who I was are all fated to become mockeries and propaganda. People aren't brands. “Rebooting” a TV show is simply zombie-fying something that had reasons for its death. The voice that was doing things, speaking to something, relevant and important to consider in the future, died. So you have to create something new. You have to incorporate and move on. You have to find a new way to live the lesson or tell the story, or you don't really have a reason to exist. You're a phantom pain in a limb your remembering brain can't control. And that's only if you can bother to give your brain a reason to remember.

How you work is unique. It's how I watch “everything” and attempt to relate it to you and back to myself, not “that” I've seen everything in a series or under a brand. The cycle between my saddest soul-crushing blogs and acutely aware or attempting insight pieces is the unique story, because each one only dies or is put to work in service to the next one. Unique is a process, and as a process it takes energy, and in order for that energy to not explode or dissipate it takes a perspective relative to all else. That's what I want to see captured. That's the tool I want to work with on the next thing. That's the only energy truly mine to give or take while every other endless force tries to turn me into something else.

So is your work of the kind only you can do? Is your struggle one worth preserving and passing down? I think it's much easier to conceive of our uniqueness in our capacity to suffer alone than it is to praise what we know we're capable of creating. At least, I know I never stop bitching no matter how good I have it, and I suppose if I stopped, it'd truly be the death of me.