When I was very young, maybe four or five, I adored the Wiggles. A Wiggles bedspread, Wiggles band aids, a stuffed purple octopus that I dragged with me everywhere. One lucky day, my parents took me to see one of their live shows. They performed, and the crowd of children around me jumped and sang along, while I sat in my chair with what my mother recalls as a “look of concern” on my face.

Fast forward fifteen years or so, and I’m at the Brisbane convention center for a comics expo. Walking between the booths, I see two men standing behind a counter – two internet personalities that I had watched for hours on-end growing up. When I approached, they said hello, and asked if I wanted anything signed – I said no, and then… what? I paused, they looked uncomfortable, I was uncomfortable.

I asked if I could shake their hands. They obliged, and I thanked them for sharing their work for so many years. At the time, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something was deeply strange about the encounter – that I had done something wrong. But wasn’t I just doing what a fan would do? Isn’t that normal?

Digital Friends, the New Normal

The phrase “parasocial relationship” has been written about for years in the world of academia, though it is only recently becoming a commonly-understood phenomena (StrucciMovies, 2017). Horton and Wohl coined the term way back in 1956, using it to describe the new kind of relationships they observed between audiences and the popular personalities of radio, television and cinema. They noted that the audience responded to performers in a way that was “analogous to those in a primary group” (Horton & Wohl, 1956).

I’m having the time of my life doing this stuff, and I never want anything to change too much. I want to still do it for fun, I want to still be… I want to still feel like a friend to all you guys.

YouTuber Jacksepticeye, addressing his at-the-time 4-million-subscribers

Importantly, they also identified a significant distinction between “personality” and “personae” led programs. A “personality” program is a soap opera, a serial drama, a theatre performance. It is an “ambiguous meeting ground on which real people play out the roles of fictional characters” (ibid.). This interaction is described as temporary and magical, even the most engaged and invested viewer knows that Dr. House and Walter White aren’t real people.

This is in stark contrast to the “personae” program, one initially led by “quizmasters, announcers, ‘interviewers’ in a new ‘show-business’ world,” performer’s whose work and role in it is “a function of the media themselves” (ibid.). Here, the personae addresses the camera with “undisturbed intimacy”, speaking to each viewer individually, instead of to a crowd of thousands.

This second approach to audience-interaction began as a novelty, but in the years since has become a new kind of normal. Podcasts, vlogs, Let’s Plays, reaction videos, house tours, day-in-the-life-of videos – this kind of immediate, direct, ‘intimate’ content is everywhere. And it is powerful.

“[The audience] is expected to benefit by [the personae’s] wisdom, reflect on his advice, sympathize with him in his difficulties, forgive his mistakes, buy the products that he recommends, and keep his sponsor informed of the esteem in which he is held.”

Horton & Wohl, 1956

Familiar Strangers

Over the years, we have seen the danger that can come from parasocial relationships taken to the extreme. In 2018, a man broke into the apartment of Free and Turney, two internet personalities, armed with a gun and intending to kill Free (Spangler, 2018). Popular YouTubers Pewdiepie, Jacksepticeye, Markiplier and countless others have reported ‘fans’ finding their addresses and waiting outside, calling out to them, or even scaling fences just for a chance to meet their idols, or for a chance at becoming their friends (StrucciMovies, 2018).

Not everyone is Misery’s Anne Wilkes. The majority of people, myself included, cannot imagine ourselves going to such extremes, or being so deluded. However, that does not mean we are above this phenomenon. Psychologist Stanley Milgrim coined the term “Familiar Strangers” when studying people who routinely gathered in public spaces, like subways. He and his students found that people were able to recognize photos of others that regularly caught the same train, even though the pair had never spoken (Milgram, 1977). He also noted that it was not uncommon for people to “personalize their Familiar Strangers by “giving them names and/or concocting fictitious stories and backgrounds of their personal lives” (Paulos & Goodman, 2004).

This is what the vast majority of parasocial relationships look like; someone who feels a kinship with a stranger, but who can on some level acknowledge the absurdity of that. Heartfelt comments below the videos of massively-popular YouTubers often start with “I know you’ll never read this” or “Please upvote so X sees this!”

While fandom and obsessive behaviour is by no means a new phenomenon, it is clearly a behaviour that is being encouraged or sculpted by the hyper-intimacy of YouTube and similar platforms – “we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us” (Culkin, 1967). Early scholars noted the power that radio and television had over audiences, the immediacy and intimacy; what would they have thought of the smartphone? Of the podcasts that accompany millions of people to work, or the YouTube videos that serve as entertainment over millions of people’s meals?

Just treat it like you would treat the TV show Madmen. You shouldn’t form a relationship with me, at the end of the day I’m entertainment – if I stop entertaining, you stop watching. That’s it. That’s what I want from you guys, because I’m not your friend. I will never ever hang out with you, and I don’t care about you – because I don’t know you, I can’t. There are 13 thousand people here, I can’t care about all of you because I don’t know any of you.

Twitch streamer ‘Ludwig’ when asked by a fan how to avoid forming a parasocial relationship

If more people are willing to ask questions of themselves, to challenge their habits and stay conscious of the way they think and speak about their favourite personalities, perhaps there can be a comfortable medium between the obsessive and the recreational. The trouble, as is so often the case, is that there’s nothing profitable about a healthy mindset; obsessive fans are reliable, and valuable. 

An algorithm will never ask you to disengage from it, and neither will a content creator.

Bibliography

Culkin, J. M. (1967). A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan.

Horton, D., & Richard Wohl, R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. psychiatry, 19(3), 215-229.

Milgram, S. (1977). The familiar stranger: An aspect of urban anonymity. The individual in a social world, 51-53.

Paulos, E., & Goodman, E. (2004, April). The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 223-230).

Spangler, T. (2018, February 13) YouTube Star Couple Targeted by Gunman in Home-Invasion Attack. Variety. https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-couple-gavin-free-meg-turney-gunman-home-invasion-attack-1202697698/

StrucciMovies (2017, August 28) FAKE FRIENDS EPISODE ONE: intro to parasocial relationships [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vD_CAYt4g

StrucciMovies (2018, August 12) FAKE FRIENDS EPISODE TWO: parasocial hell [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLA-uFKjQ-g

“Cal can have periods where they will struggle with feeling anxious.”

Student Services Adviser

I refer to the time between March and October of 2020 as “the really bad stretch.” You reading this aren’t my therapist, so I’ll spare you the details. During this time, I would be checking Twitter and the news for an hour or so before bed, and for upwards of an hour in the morning. This began the moment I would wake up.

My best friend lives in America. In COVID America, in the Thin Blue Line America. I met this friend through Twitter, and we are so close I cannot imagine my life without them in it.

I uninstalled Twitter from all my devices and blocked it on my computer at the start of 2021.

In my life, it has been a source of joy, levity, cruelty, compassion, outrage. I found community through it. I saw video of the Beriut warehouse explosion only two minutes after it happened. In Australia, it was 1 am.

I cannot possibly speak on the merits of Twitter. If it is ever put to trial, I would be too invested to serve in its jury. All I know is what it has done to me, or what it let me do to myself.

I am glad to be rid of it.

I miss it.

I don’t know what to do without it.

On October 10th, 2010, the third episode of Season 22 of the Simpsons aired – MoneyBART. In it, Lisa becomes the coach of her older brother’s little-league baseball team; the ensuing hijinks are familiar and routine¹. MoneyBART scored a 6.6 among users on IMDB; the average score for episodes released in the same year is 6.662². By all accounts, the episode is nothing to write home about – save for, of course, one obvious exception.

Setting the Scene

The Simpsons is the longest running primetime scripted series in history³. It is a household name, its characters immortalized on t-shirts, in games, on novelty cups and band-aids. One could argue about which of Storey’s six definitions of pop-culture it fits into, but you’d be hard pressed to find somebody that objected to the term being used⁴.

When one talks about pop culture, and cultural products, one inevitably must broach the subject of the “Culture Industry”. The term was first coined by two Marxist philosophers – Adorno & Horkheimer – in their seminal work “Dialectic of Enlightenment”⁶. It refers to the sum of all creative and cultural works produced under capitalism; a gargantuan machine that uses its hulking size to justify itself ad-nauseam. It is “a mechanism of psycho-social control.”⁷

Which makes America’s favourite nuclear family a cultural product of this culture industry. Storey believed that these cultural products both reflected and reinforced the economic, societal and industrial environments that they were created in; they “are deemed ideological to the extent that […] they implicitly or explicitly support the interests of dominant groups who, socially, politically, economically and culturally, benefit from this particular economic organization of society.”⁸

Ideal and Ideology

So what is the ideology of The Simpsons? While the show portrays a comically-dysfunctional, reckless, fiscally-irresponsible family – and many of its jokes come at their expense – it ultimately supports and reinforces traditional American values: the nuclear family, the providing patriarch, the nurturing mother.⁹

The first full-length episode of the Simpsons was “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”; it showed the family running the gambit through various Christmas troubles – keeping the focus on financial anxiety and the stress that comes from parents trying to make their kids happy. In the end, Homer and Bart bet everything they have on a greyhound race – thirteen dollars that Homer earned working his second job as a Mall-Santa. 99-1 odds, “a miracle” as Bart calls it – but they lose everything.¹⁰

If the show were trying to subvert or question a traditional Christmas, this could be how the story ends. Can a family be happy without presents? Would Homer be welcomed home, having “failed” at performing his role in the family? But these questions are never asked, because despite the neck-wringing, the shouting, the “why-you-little”s, The Simpsons always holds the family unit as sacred. In a chance encounter, Homer and Bart take home the greyhound that they bet on; the rest of the Simpsons clan are delighted to meet their newest member. The episode ends with them all singing Christmas carols, and the status-quo is maintained. Speaking of…

The Couch Gag

The “couch gag” for “MoneyBART”, conceived and initially storyboarded by UK street artist “Banksy”, was the subject of much discussion when first aired – as was likely the intent. Banksy was allegedly inspired by the Simpsons prolific use of foreign-outsourced animation studio “Akom”¹¹, located in Seoul, South Korea. While the imagery is clearly absurdist, there is a clear history of worker exploitation being rampant in OEM (outsourced-export-markets) like Akom; a 2005 report by China Daily suggests that South Korean animators were paid “about one-third what their US counterparts make.”¹²

So – Banksy has done it again. Another scathing critique of the powerful, a big middle-finger to Fox, calling attention to important issues, making a positive change in the world… right?

As of this report from 2015, Akom was still a massive part of the show’s production – 120 full-time animators and technicians spending a total of three months taking an episode from initial layout to a full-colour final draft, which is promptly sent back to the US¹³. The episode featuring the inciting intro is entirely mundane in every other regard; there was no spike in ratings¹⁴, there was no shift in the tone or production of the show.

In fact, it seems as if some critics weren’t even sure what to make of the grim sequence. Tanner Stransky of Entertainment Weekly wrote: “How did the show get away with airing this? It puts both Fox and The Simpsons in a bad light, whether or not the reports about South Korea are true. Is this simply the rebuttal? Is this supposed to be funny? Are we supposed to laugh at this? Should The Simpsons be co-opting criticism of their show and making light of it?”¹⁵

“Is this supposed to be funny?”

Imagine instead: the camera pulls back from the family on the couch, and we see a South-Korean woman drawing over lineart. She works in a cubicle, not a dungeon: she is overseen by deadlines, not men in sharp uniforms. She works until late, boards a full train, and arrives home exhausted. She dips her hands into a container of ice-water, puts bracers on her wrists before she goes to bed. When she arrives at work the next day, she sits back down to a new frame – and the camera pulls back to show the other hundred-or-so people working on the same sequence as her.

In his use of absurdist imagery, in his cartoonish displays of violence and despair, the sequence entirely avoids the true discomfort of its subject matter. How must it feel to storyboard a sequence where rows of identical South Korean artists draw cartoon cells in a dungeon, and then send that very same storyboard to Korea? How must it feel to receive that storyboard?

In the end, nothing changes. Once we pan back from the dystopian Fox logo, the Simpsons fanfare blares loud as it always has; a few minutes in, we’re joking about gluten-free coffee and how unpopular Hall Monitors are¹⁶. Reports of horrific overtime, terminated contracts and manipulative workplaces continue to arise from the animation industry, but Detective Pikachu still grossed over 400 million internationally¹⁷.

And, as an aside, the animation studio that worked on Pikachu, 2019’s the Lion King & 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog closed down in late 2019, leaving untold numbers of employees jobless right before Christmas¹⁸. Maybe they should head to the greyhound club too.

Walter Benjamin believed that mass culture, though typically a degradation, offered “the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction” – that it could be a force of “emancipation”, a tool used by the people for the people’s liberation¹⁹. While this is a decidedly more optimistic outlook than that of Adorno & Horkheimer, and a much more palatable one – Benjamin likely wouldn’t look to The Simpsons for his revolution.

16. “MoneyBART,” The Simpsons Wiki, Fandom, updated July 18, 2020, https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/MoneyBART

17. “Pokemon Detective Pikachu,” Box Office Mojo, accessed June 24, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt5884052/?ref_=bo_se_r_1 

18. Kara Dennison, “MPC, Studio Who Worked on Sonic and Detective Pikachu, Closes Its Doors,” Crunchyroll, December 14, 2019, https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2019/12/13-1/mpc-studio-who-worked-on-sonic-and-detective-pikachu-closes-its-doors 

19. Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, (Penguin UK, 2008), 6-7.

_{(Full bibliography on second page)}

Okay, what was next? A cup of coconut milk, sugar, and… fish sauce? Fish sauce?!

He turned around in the kitchen, the bench cluttered with the debris of a recipe’s first attempt. Cutting boards, knives, bowls, spices. He moved towards the pantry before realising he needed to wash his hands (again). He spun around, nearly knocking over a bottle of cooking oil.

How does a fish even make sauce!?

Things were going well.

A recipe book lay face up, a bookmark resting in the center, block capitals spelling out ingredients and instructions across yellowed pages. This was the fourth kitchen it had been used in, and likely the least organized one. The book was patient, however; content to sit idle, waiting for the young man to remember the stove amidst his panic.

As if on cue, he turned to the pot resting on the glass stovetop. Eyes shooting wide open, he rushed to take it off the heat, opening the partially-ajar lid to a burst of dark smoke and the overwhelming aroma of curry paste burning within. He had a poor sense of smell, difficulty multitasking, and a frequent tendency to lose track of time. Cooking was an ordeal.

Alright… soy sauce is probably fine, right? It’s… sauce? We’re doing it.

Some moments later, the kitchen had entered a blissful state of calm. The decisions were made, and the ingredients had finally made their way into the pot (in the correct order and amounts, for the most part). It still looked as though a bomb had gone off, and in his attempts to “clean as you go”, the sink had become just as cluttered. Now all that was left was to stir, and wait.

It’s funny, the rituals we create for ourselves. He never used to like cooking; it was messy and tricky and quite often disappointing. And, years later, it was still all of these things – but it was something new now; it was cathartic.

The book’s author, the one that slowly made corrections or suggestions to their own recipes over the years, wasn’t around anymore. He couldn’t ask for clarification, for replacements. He was vegetarian now, so he found himself swapping and changing ingredients as he went. Often with dubious results, but slowly making progress. With each cook, he was getting a little closer to how he remembered it tasting.

As he turned off the heat, began filling plastic containers with a week’s worth of food, he looked over his shoulder at the book. He was nearing the end, now.

He was reading a book the other day (fiction, this time), and found a bookmark near the end. He had stared at it for what felt like an hour, breathless. Another kind of ritual.

He filled a bowl with rice and curry, leaving the mess for later. He took a bite.

…Huh.

He picked up a pen, paused for a moment, and made a note in the margins.

The wind howled, and a coyote joined it. Linus lay still, flat against the dirt. Though the sun had set hours before, the ground was still warm – even the stone was stubborn, out here. Proud.

He looked to his left, to a man that had once held him at gunpoint. To his right, a young woman bearing the curse of the moon and wolf – a woman he’d once tried to hang. They nodded at him, with the kind of confidence that he’d spent years imitating. He saw in their eyes it was genuine, that they knew what they were doing.

He only wished he could say the same.

He had been stationed here a few years ago, a quiet mining town at the far borders of the Kingdom. There was a sheriff, but when they’d met, Linus had thought him a man with too kind a heart; unable to enforce the law with the firm hand it asked for. He’d brought with him a second – members of His Majesty’s Inquisition always travel in pairs. Edith.

A lot had happened in the years since. They weren’t welcomed out here; a pair of “city folk”, come to ensure the steady flow of silver and gold – one from the mines, the other from their pockets. They should be grateful, he had thought; their tax money would be sent to the capital, where it could be distributed by those with a greater understanding of where it was needed. Drought relief, the construction of new roads, supporting the Royal Army. The same army that marched towards them now.

His sword lay in his hands before him, a leather wrap preventing the moon and stars from betraying their positions. He had always kept it in perfect condition; training every day, remembering stances and tactics and oaths. He wondered if the soldiers on the road were as diligent. 

They could hear the footsteps, the laboured breathing of horses, joining the sounds of the wind and cicadas. He had spent his whole life believing that people were made to be ruled, that it fell to the privileged few to choose for the guileless many. Now, though, he had seen what that could do. The lives that can be trampled over, swept away and left behind by those with a “greater understanding”. Edith had held on to her principles until the end, but… he hadn’t.

And now he was flat against the earth, ten feet from the marching boots and banners he’d once been a part of. He’d known what their formation would be, how the horses would scatter at the sound of gunfire, how the green soldiers would behave in their first true battle. He knew the sheriff to his left and the rebel to his right would fight to defend their homes. His training told him how this fight would happen.

He saw glints of swords, guns drawn. Figures slowly standing, silent. He held his sword tight in his hands. He didn’t know what he would do.