15th October 2020
We worship meaning. Everything has to have meaning and means something. Every piece of art must have a hidden secret to tell us, just as every movie, every novel or music video.
It seems to me that people began to laugh at the idea of meaning itself and started to create stuff that has absolutely no moral lessons to tell us. Well, on the one hand it doesn't seem so hard to produce something meaningless, you just put random elements together. Memes, especially zoomer humor are a great example. You just have to put contradicting, silly motifs together, add a piece of text that doesn't say anything, and poof! It's done. What's the meaning of a Godzilla wearing a sombrero, playing a balalaika and riding on a cat? It doesn't have one, duh. However, the cited example is not the winner of the meaninglessness olympic. No, to do that, you realy have to show that you know the game. To win in the meaninglessness contest, you have to create an art piece that doesn't mean absolutely nothing, but actually seems to be very deep and full of hidden contexts!
Take James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. I'm not going to describe what this book is, just google it and read a couple of sentences. You will get the point. Of course, I might be wrong on this, after all I'm nobody – I'm not a literary critic, nor a writer. However, Finnegan's Wake seems to me like a Bible written for the God of Meaninglessness. It's complete rubbish, just pure nonsense, random words, random senteces, random interpunction, no rules and no nothing. Yet, Joyce has some managed to convinced people that Finnegan's Wake is not meaningless, but so deep and meaningfull that only the wisest sage can begin to comprehend what it's all about.
James Joyce is the clear winner, but we nevertheless have a lot of good contestants, and they have a particularly strong representation on YouTube. Salad Fingers, Double King - this stuff is about nothing, but it manipulates contexts, references, and traditional motives so well, that the viewer is confused and bewildered and is actually spending a lot of time to find the hidden explanation.
One of my favourites is Don't Hug Me I'm Scared – a YouTube video. A whole lot of energy has been devoted to the decryption of it's layers of meaning and I will write a bit about it here. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has no hidden meaninig and no obvious meaninig either. It's point is to confuse and disturb the viewer, while simultaneosly think that there's something deep to be found here.
The way it operates is manyfold. E.g. it introduces elements that aim to distract you and make you think that they mean something, like the focus on „The Right Wing” paper, the stress put on the 19th June calendar or some other objects found in the room.
The second major tool is the breaking of the decorum which characterizes kid's shows. What's that? Small kid's shows have a bunch of rules they follow, for example noone swears, talks about violence and death or sex and so on. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared purposefully hits the viewer in the face with many elements that should not be present in such a video. The most prominent being the blackening of the painting of the clown – after a cheerfull introduction this feels almost as if you suddenly watched an execution video. Some other are the meat cake, death potato stams and the fleshy-mouse creature.
Thirdly, we have meaningless catchphrases. I can't help laughing when I think of the below sentences, which are expressed with complete seriousness, as If they served any purpose:
Green is not a creative color.
I can see a ladder leaning on a log.
Listen to the heart, listen to the rain, listen to the voices in your brain.
It goes on an on.
After the chaotic and disturbing climax the notebook contradicts itself and says that we better not ever be creative again, contradicting it's main point.
The only meta-narrative you can attach to Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is the critique of the silliness of kids' shows. Real creativity cannot be learned from a TV show, but this point is not so strong. Why? Who gives a damn about kids shows? I don't know, so why go to such lenghts (making all the puppets and the scenography) to make a point about something so insignificant?
Anyway, don't look for meaning where there's none. More analyses to come.
dd
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