So It’s Come to This: A Skibidi Toilet Movie

Words: Henry Luzzatto

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Death rides on a pale horse. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Michael Bay is making a Skibidi Toilet movie. Even if it’s not the end times, exactly, it’s pretty good evidence the centre can no longer hold — at least in Hollywood. Despite its multi-billion-view success on YouTube, Skibidi Toilet isn’t an obvious choice for adaptation. The series proves basically inscrutable to any but the most internet-poisoned, like one of those high frequencies only audible to children or dogs. And besides, it’s hard to imagine a grown adult asking for that ticket in a theatre. 

Skibidi Toilet dominates with kids, though. My teacher friends describe hordes of students singing the theme song at each other, to the point where administrators have had to ban any mention of “skippity toilet” (as the un-hip millennials constantly pronounce it) outside of the playground. But Skibidi Toilet’s role in the Gen-Alpha zeitgeist doesn’t come from anything specifically child-friendly to its themes, but more due to a combination of deep internet context and “turn your brain off” action that is specifically tailored to a generation raised online. .

It won’t be the first online sensation adapted to film — Five Nights at Freddies and every attempt at a Slenderman film come to mind — but Skibidi Toilet would be the most uniquely online property ever given the theatrical treatment. But there’s one major problem: Skibidi Toilet doesn’t really have a story.
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Over the course of 76 episodes, the show pits a species (or whatever) of humanoid figures with cameras, screens, or speakers for heads (Cameramen, Speakermen, etc.) against singing human-headed toilets in an ever-escalating battle over…something. It’s never made clear what the stakes or goals are in the actual text of the series, as it’s almost entirely wordless - except for the titular song. If you’re used to more traditional storytelling, it can be difficult to tell which side you’re supposed to root for, or why. 

The show almost forces you to read into it. It’s eerie, almost dreamlike, to be placed in the middle of a conflict without explanation. The perspective makes you pick sides based on gut feeling without the necessary information, which feels redolent of Orwellian propaganda. It’s even creepier that the assumed protagonists of the story are the technology-head humanoids, with the implication that the target audience of iPad kids will sympathise more readily with the anthropomorphised screens instead of an en-toileted human head. 

The toilets themselves feel psychologically targeted at kids, synthesising Freudian childhood scatology with contemporary technology fetishisation. And then there’s the technological pseudo-realism of the conflicts, the barren urban landscape, and the general feeling of violence devoid of context, all reflecting an aesthetic moulded by two decades of war experienced through screens. While watching them, I couldn’t help but see the shorts as uniquely postmodern art — conflict as pure spectacle, devoid of context, yet with semiotic density that is only legible for those raised in the information age. Baudrillard would have a field day. Or maybe Foucault. Deleuze? All those French guys blend together for me. 

It’s this wordless, cryptic nature gives Skibidi Toilet a universal appeal. The show’s lack of dialogue makes it equally legible to a multinational audience because if there are no words, there’s no chance that you’re missing anything. It’s just as strange and story-free for everybody else. The lack of clear narrative doesn’t just translate to a passive, explosion-obsessed audience, though. Instead, the ever-expanding but constantly inscrutable story leads thousands of fans to exhaustively name and categorise the lore. 

The density of work involved in the Skibidi Toilet wiki is almost heartwarming. Even the most obscure background figures are named and sorted, and the wordless series spawns paragraphs of theories that attempt to tie together the action scenes into an imagined greater context. The exegetical analysis in YouTube videos and Reddit comments is almost Biblical in focus, pulling hours of theorising from small details. And maybe that’s the human instinct that is essentially missing from the show itself: the audience. The protagonists are cameras and screens because, in true postmodern internet fashion, it’s the collective that must provide the human element, taking the bits of information and doing the conceptual construction needed to take something fundamentally alien and make it personal again. 

There is, of course, plenty of fanart of the Skibidi Toilet “characters,” occasionally in… compromising (and yes, very human) positions. It’s something that only the internet can do — expanding a wordless action series into something that can contain even the physical act of love. But even with the lore and fan art, Skibidi Toilet’s actual story still falls way short of the fundamental ingredients needed for a film adaptation. 

This isn’t an unfamiliar situation for Michael Bay. Transformers was always just an excuse to sell toys, and then an excuse to do action sequences, with occasional fandom nerds who cared about the story, but nothing set in stone in terms of character. Bay’s solution was a good one, for 2007 — put Shia LaBoeuf in there. But unlike Transformers, Skibidi Toilet doesn’t take place on an Earth populated with humans. Its characters don’t talk, they aren’t grounded in emotional power struggles that make them fight, and there isn’t even an AllSpark-type MacGuffin to fight over.  

“It’s this wordless, cryptic nature gives Skibidi Toilet a universal appeal.”

There’s no human face, no fish out of water, no first act, no backstory. There’s no plucky down-on-his-luck Cameraman who just can’t catch a break, no evil Skibidi Toilet who is secretly his father. No fundamental flaw to overcome, no arc to grow into, no hero’s journey to fulfil, and no Megan Fox to kiss at the end of it, that’s for sure. There’s no place for it. There’s no room for a human, because humans don’t exist in the world of Skibidi Toilet, unless they pop out of a toilet, and once they exist outside of that context, the integrity of the Skibidi universe begins to fail. 

Skibidi Toilet is popular not because the concept is irresistible or the action is groundbreaking, but because it satisfies at the same time it mystifies. It feels like a glimpse into a secret world, an alternate future, at only minutes at a time, leaving it up to a million obsessive eight year olds to sort out the narrative. Adapting it feels like it misses the point entirely, like the act of constructing a story would remove the weirdness that makes Skibidi Toilet worthwhile.

We can only hope that Michael Bay has it in him to make a film that embraces the unique artistic quality of this uniquely online phenomenon. But, in my opinion, Skibidi Toilet isn’t served best by a Hollywood action approach, but by a fractured, experimental New Wave style. Like Godard. Or maybe Truffaut? Varda? Whatever. All those French guys blend together for me.