Compilation Nation
By Tom McCormack
According to Know Your Meme—an increasingly important database of meme histories that recently sold for an undisclosed seven-figure sum to Cheezburger Networks, a company that, despite or perhaps because of its absurd name, is starting to gain a lot of power on the Internet—the term supercut was first used by blogger Andy Baio in April 2008. Baio’s post ruminates on this montage created from ABC’s Lost.
Wrote Baio:
This insane montage of (nearly) every instance of “What?” from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.
For lack of a better name, let’s call them supercuts.
The post was prescient. Know Your Meme also says that the first supercut to go super-viral, Rich Juzwiak’s I’m Not Here to Make Friends, went up in June 2008, after Baio’s post. Juzwiak, who maintains the popular entertainment blog fourfour, stitched together a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds of reality show contestants exclaiming, “I’m not here to make friends” or variations thereof. The compendium simultaneously draws attention to the proliferation of the generic expression while highlighting minor differences between iterations. We laugh at the ridiculous banality of Juzwiak’s video even as we become connoisseurs; by the end we notice the idiosyncrasies in attitude, pacing, setting. The repeated phrase creates Steinian cadences, losing significance and turning into pure sound before reversing course and gaining a surplus of mysterious meaning. Halfway through, the characters become self-aware: “That is so typical, so cliché of an answer,” “I mean, I don’t want to be a cliché, but…” The chasm between subject and viewer opened up by our ironizing mockery collapses; there’s a joke, and the contestants seem as aware of it as we are, or more so…(read more)
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