Also, your bit about Fallon showing us how to watch his own show reminded me of a Zizek quote from Pervert's Guide to Cinema: "The problem is, "How do we know what we desire?" There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."
A lot of our modern entertainment is tied to having our desires trained, but not fulfilled. It's no mistake that some of the most popular shows and vid clips involve cooking and interior design. We watch and can't eat the food or enjoy those spaces. The evolution of these involve unsavory foods not meant to be eaten (candy corn pizza, for example) or decorating houses the people intend to sell outright. Even they won't enjoy the spaces they decorate.
Glad I'm not the only one who finds the average american talk show to be a place of horror. They always give me strong Lynchian vibes, especially Jimmy Fallon
I don't normally watch Fallon but my favorite clip of his was when he played an Alexa-based game with John Oliver, who asked the robot some pretty agressive questions about Amazon's working conditions, and then said something along the lines of "I hope you don't cut me asking about unions" at the top of the interview. It's the only time I've seen Jimmy really break - not in the way comedians usually do, by laughing at what they're supposed to say, but by looking genuinely uncomfortable and afraid, because An Issue was brought up. John Oliver has his own role in maintaining the power structure, but I haven't ever stopped thinking about how much he revealed about Jimmy Fallon & his show there.
The lack of boredom is something I’ve noticed during the pandemic in particular: we can’t leave the house so we have to fill our time somehow. As a result I can’t remember being bored since last March. But that means I’ve been plugged in to boring crud for a year, and it really hasn’t helped. I wonder how much better I would be feeling if I had been bored a bit more.
@@friedrichfaust1366 I am a time traveller :) In all seriousness, one of the perks of supporting thelitcritguy on patreon is getting to see videos early!
The intro music and editing was like, Adult Swim levels of uncomfortable. Very well done. (And I wasn't familiar with this from Fisher so, very happy to be exposed to it)
Huge thanks man - yeah I really wanted that segment to feel super uncomfortable. And the fisher piece is nice and short (easier to talk about that than the entire KPunk collection!)
i think your critique is spot on, pop culture is all so banal and similar so as to grab the largest market share possible. But whenever something actually different does escape into the culture it’s immediately captured, sanitized and repackaged into more of the same blandness. great video!
Linklater's first film, which didn't actually get a release until it was bundled with the Criterion release of Slacker, was It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. I watched it again on YT the other day. Breathtaking boredom. A dude sitting around an apartment with no TV, no direction, no job. Listening to his answering machine. Driving around and taking trains. That's when I came of age. I'm not nostalgic. And I'm not proud of how, no matter how loud some of us screamed we missed out, collectively, on a potential revolutionary moment. But time had a different quality and texture then. Sometimes I spend days deliberately disconnected and I can snap back to it (I'm absurdly privileged to be able to do this, which is mostly luck). Fisher was incandescent. You (and Ash, I"m a huge HV fan) have been so useful in helping understand a new vernacular for many of the same principles I've yearned and struggled (and failed) for much of my life. Sorry for being so wordy, but this is as good a time and place as any to say thanks.
hey, thank you so much for this comment and for listening to our show. I'll be thinking about that notion of time having a different quality and texture for a long time. And I've not seen Slacker so I'll have to check it out (y'know if I'm in need of some boredom!)
I think there's also something there about how she's not actually teaching him at all; people do enjoy dancing, but in this instance we're not supposed to do it. Just admire how happy they look doing it and watching it. Unlike the actual tiktok where you are encouraged to do the things.
I’m reminded of the first episode of mindfield. In it they talk about boredom and isolation. The point being our brain desires stimulation to the point of we will cause ourselves pain if we are put into an environment with no alternative form of mental stimulation. In a sense ANY experience is more tolerable than no experience.
I actually am glad more people are getting into dancing through tik tok and similar platforms, as it's a generally healthy thing to do and is universally accessible. You could call the process of dancing a Limit-experience, as it helps to step outside yourself and express your creative nature through movement. However, dance challenges specifically mechanize the whole process and remove creativity, their emphasis on gaining social capital commodifies dance significantly. Nothing personal against dance celebrities individually, as I'm sure they mean well, but kids should maybe remind themselves of why exactly they're dancing and how it can be used as a liberating expression of self (not to be patronizing here ofc). Anyway, fuck Jimmy Fallon, good vid
I was never one of those people who got too too worked up about how Conan was done dirty in his time hosting The Tonight Show, since I'm not the Late Night TV audience, but I also up until now never made the mental connection that this was the same show that was given to Jimmy Fallon and became the churning, jokeless banality engine you outline, and suddenly felt the pang of the road not taken. However, I am going to levy a criticism, and I hope you won't take it too hard. I think you have made the exact same mistake as Adam Curtis in Hypernormalization's montage: you've gone and used a woman who's having fun dancing for online videos as shorthand for the disgusting vapid banality of culture. Your cutaways to your own face and the score serve the exact same purpose as Jimmy's gormless gaze in instructing us how to watch, except the attitude is one of horror, of disgust, of bafflement. This makes you out not only as a puritanical buzzkill who discredits dance and fun as culturally valid, as your "Old Man Yells At Cloud" gag acknowledges, but even as a coded sexist. Your immediately proceeding verbal argument counterbalances this by explicitly saying "this is not a critique of the whole white girl who dances on TikTok economy" because of proclaimed ignorance of the subject, but firstly, this is against your TH-cam description which says on face value that you're building towards exactly that verbatim, and secondly, singling out white girls is unexamined, when to my awareness the TikTok dancing economy is far from exclusively white nor female. The video only comes around to constructing the actual argument, a good one correctly centering Jimmy Fallon as conductor and audience surrogate and unpacking media grammar, after about 3 minutes of, first, implicitly making a different, worse point with your own media grammar - the one close-up on Jimmy in the intro doesn't cut it, seeming on first encounter peppered in there as a minor variation for variation's sake and not an emphasized rhetorical maneuver - and then second, a disclaimer that the points you could be read as making is not the one you are making, correcting cinematic shortcomings in the refuge of more-carefully deployed traditional language.
hey - thank you for watching. And, this is a really fair -- and good -- criticism, reflecting a failure of my own editing (or in other words a failing of my own grasp of, as you put it, media grammar). I think I'll get rid of that joke in the description precisely for the reason you've pointed out. I really appreciate you taking the time to bring this up, and it's something I'll absolutely be coming back to when trying this kind of criticism in the future.
@@JonTheLitCritGuy I just found your channel thanks to Reddit. Only critique is that this video is a bit short, heh. Nice points, though. People referencing Fisher always get's me a little excited - I've only interacted with "Captialist Realism" until now, always grateful to learn more
Also, your bit about Fallon showing us how to watch his own show reminded me of a Zizek quote from Pervert's Guide to Cinema: "The problem is, "How do we know what we desire?" There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."
Oh man, I absolutely have to do a video on the perverts guides to cinema.
A lot of our modern entertainment is tied to having our desires trained, but not fulfilled. It's no mistake that some of the most popular shows and vid clips involve cooking and interior design. We watch and can't eat the food or enjoy those spaces. The evolution of these involve unsavory foods not meant to be eaten (candy corn pizza, for example) or decorating houses the people intend to sell outright. Even they won't enjoy the spaces they decorate.
Glad I'm not the only one who finds the average american talk show to be a place of horror. They always give me strong Lynchian vibes, especially Jimmy Fallon
Just a void into which we pour our attention
Psychogenesis of mental disease
I don't normally watch Fallon but my favorite clip of his was when he played an Alexa-based game with John Oliver, who asked the robot some pretty agressive questions about Amazon's working conditions, and then said something along the lines of "I hope you don't cut me asking about unions" at the top of the interview. It's the only time I've seen Jimmy really break - not in the way comedians usually do, by laughing at what they're supposed to say, but by looking genuinely uncomfortable and afraid, because An Issue was brought up.
John Oliver has his own role in maintaining the power structure, but I haven't ever stopped thinking about how much he revealed about Jimmy Fallon & his show there.
Oh absolutely. It was an amazing moment 😅
The lack of boredom is something I’ve noticed during the pandemic in particular: we can’t leave the house so we have to fill our time somehow. As a result I can’t remember being bored since last March. But that means I’ve been plugged in to boring crud for a year, and it really hasn’t helped. I wonder how much better I would be feeling if I had been bored a bit more.
That's the thing I really love about the Mark fisher piece I quoted -- the idea that actually being bored can help us generate something new.
“No one gets to be bored, but everything is boring”
The music in the intro works so incredibly well
Was aiming for some horrifying ambience 😂
How is this reply 18 hours ago and the video 15 mins
@@friedrichfaust1366 I am a time traveller :)
In all seriousness, one of the perks of supporting thelitcritguy on patreon is getting to see videos early!
Yeah the music is fantastic. Now all its missing is a tiktok dance choreo of its own. call it the Do the Despair.
Seriously excellent sound design.
I wonder if this is why the "Murray Show" scenes from Joker resonated so much with people?
The intro music and editing was like, Adult Swim levels of uncomfortable. Very well done. (And I wasn't familiar with this from Fisher so, very happy to be exposed to it)
Huge thanks man - yeah I really wanted that segment to feel super uncomfortable. And the fisher piece is nice and short (easier to talk about that than the entire KPunk collection!)
Jimmy Fallen’s made an entire career out of laughing at his own jokes.
It’s only just caught up with him.
yup!
i think your critique is spot on, pop culture is all so banal and similar so as to grab the largest market share possible. But whenever something actually different does escape into the culture it’s immediately captured, sanitized and repackaged into more of the same blandness. great video!
hey, thank you so much for watching :)
I like the part at 6:30 where 'negative' can both be interpreted as 'bad', and as 'absent'.
I love thinking through the connotations of terminology like that
very succinct, a kind of depth i didn't expect from a 10 minute video
Thank you so much for watching!
Linklater's first film, which didn't actually get a release until it was bundled with the Criterion release of Slacker, was It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. I watched it again on YT the other day. Breathtaking boredom. A dude sitting around an apartment with no TV, no direction, no job. Listening to his answering machine. Driving around and taking trains. That's when I came of age. I'm not nostalgic. And I'm not proud of how, no matter how loud some of us screamed we missed out, collectively, on a potential revolutionary moment. But time had a different quality and texture then. Sometimes I spend days deliberately disconnected and I can snap back to it (I'm absurdly privileged to be able to do this, which is mostly luck). Fisher was incandescent. You (and Ash, I"m a huge HV fan) have been so useful in helping understand a new vernacular for many of the same principles I've yearned and struggled (and failed) for much of my life. Sorry for being so wordy, but this is as good a time and place as any to say thanks.
hey, thank you so much for this comment and for listening to our show. I'll be thinking about that notion of time having a different quality and texture for a long time. And I've not seen Slacker so I'll have to check it out (y'know if I'm in need of some boredom!)
This is my favourite comment on TH-cam. ❤️
I think there's also something there about how she's not actually teaching him at all; people do enjoy dancing, but in this instance we're not supposed to do it. Just admire how happy they look doing it and watching it. Unlike the actual tiktok where you are encouraged to do the things.
Absolutely agree
I’m reminded of the first episode of mindfield. In it they talk about boredom and isolation. The point being our brain desires stimulation to the point of we will cause ourselves pain if we are put into an environment with no alternative form of mental stimulation. In a sense ANY experience is more tolerable than no experience.
This is a really good point - think you'll find the piece I quote from really interesting
Hey the litcritguy! This is an amazing take, 100% agree. I'm sure this channel will blow up!
No one told me that the capitalist dystopia would be so boring😐🙁😕
Coercively boring really sums up how it felt watching that intro. Nicely put together, especially within 9 minutes
really glad you enjoyed it and thank you for watching!
Bruh did you just describe hell?
Am I in hell...but I didn't know?
⊙︿⊙
I think we all might be :-/
The channel We're in hell explains this as well.
This IS the bad place.
I've been swimming in boredom for so long it's become hard to identify....
haven't we all...
The face of eternity looks like Jimmy Fallon
He'll be what we watch for all eternity 😂
I actually am glad more people are getting into dancing through tik tok and similar platforms, as it's a generally healthy thing to do and is universally accessible. You could call the process of dancing a Limit-experience, as it helps to step outside yourself and express your creative nature through movement. However, dance challenges specifically mechanize the whole process and remove creativity, their emphasis on gaining social capital commodifies dance significantly. Nothing personal against dance celebrities individually, as I'm sure they mean well, but kids should maybe remind themselves of why exactly they're dancing and how it can be used as a liberating expression of self (not to be patronizing here ofc). Anyway, fuck Jimmy Fallon, good vid
Opening the video with a bad reaction video is an irony that must be underline.
I almost tuned out before the intro finished, glad I didn't.
thank you so much for watching!
i'm not saying this all started when he touched t**mp's hair **--it started *-**_-way-_*- before that-- but, yes, that's exactly what i'm saying
Compelling argument honestly
So Fallon is proffered as a kind of interpassive conductor?
I would argue so, yes.
@@JonTheLitCritGuy Interesting! Glad to see you making these video essays, they are very good!!!
the alternative clickbait title damn that would be a dope ass book
ha! something I'll work on
I was never one of those people who got too too worked up about how Conan was done dirty in his time hosting The Tonight Show, since I'm not the Late Night TV audience, but I also up until now never made the mental connection that this was the same show that was given to Jimmy Fallon and became the churning, jokeless banality engine you outline, and suddenly felt the pang of the road not taken.
However, I am going to levy a criticism, and I hope you won't take it too hard. I think you have made the exact same mistake as Adam Curtis in Hypernormalization's montage: you've gone and used a woman who's having fun dancing for online videos as shorthand for the disgusting vapid banality of culture. Your cutaways to your own face and the score serve the exact same purpose as Jimmy's gormless gaze in instructing us how to watch, except the attitude is one of horror, of disgust, of bafflement. This makes you out not only as a puritanical buzzkill who discredits dance and fun as culturally valid, as your "Old Man Yells At Cloud" gag acknowledges, but even as a coded sexist. Your immediately proceeding verbal argument counterbalances this by explicitly saying "this is not a critique of the whole white girl who dances on TikTok economy" because of proclaimed ignorance of the subject, but firstly, this is against your TH-cam description which says on face value that you're building towards exactly that verbatim, and secondly, singling out white girls is unexamined, when to my awareness the TikTok dancing economy is far from exclusively white nor female. The video only comes around to constructing the actual argument, a good one correctly centering Jimmy Fallon as conductor and audience surrogate and unpacking media grammar, after about 3 minutes of, first, implicitly making a different, worse point with your own media grammar - the one close-up on Jimmy in the intro doesn't cut it, seeming on first encounter peppered in there as a minor variation for variation's sake and not an emphasized rhetorical maneuver - and then second, a disclaimer that the points you could be read as making is not the one you are making, correcting cinematic shortcomings in the refuge of more-carefully deployed traditional language.
hey - thank you for watching. And, this is a really fair -- and good -- criticism, reflecting a failure of my own editing (or in other words a failing of my own grasp of, as you put it, media grammar). I think I'll get rid of that joke in the description precisely for the reason you've pointed out. I really appreciate you taking the time to bring this up, and it's something I'll absolutely be coming back to when trying this kind of criticism in the future.
the sound slaps
h*ck yeah
@@JonTheLitCritGuy I just found your channel thanks to Reddit. Only critique is that this video is a bit short, heh.
Nice points, though.
People referencing Fisher always get's me a little excited - I've only interacted with "Captialist Realism" until now, always grateful to learn more
@@SickOfItAll1988 there will be longer videos coming soon! (Which willl absolutely feature more Fisher) thank you so much for watching!
Hey, here's a comment to boost your algoritm 😉👍
Always appreciated 😊😊🙂😊
Your intro has me thinking that sometimes, words are just for chumps 😶
don't need to say it, sometimes we can show it
the whole beginning was so cringey ugh. i can see why he's the most popular cause cringey mindlessness is what americans want.
you didnt have to make us sit trough the whole segment at the beginning, just sayin