Spoiler Warning! TikTok’s Cinema of the Supercut is Ruining Film Watching
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The other week, while discussing recent Letterboxd logs with a group of fellow film obsessed acquaintances at a party, I found myself participating in what, to the uninformed eye, might have looked and sounded like a meaty dissection of Darren Arronofsky’s The Whale and its surrounding controversies. If you’re living under a modern day rock (aka your Twitter notifications are silenced) the A24 adaptation of the Samuel D. Hunter play of the same name - which heralded the highly anticipated Brenaissance - has been shrouded in criticism from the moment its promotional images dropped. This is for a multitude of reasons - from Arronofsky and his team’s choice to cast a fat suit clad, straight-size actor as a 600 pound man, to the film’s apparent trauma-pornification of queer pain.
My friends and I ravenously picked at the film’s proverbial carcass, weighing up the hot takes and think pieces galore that have dropped, good faith takes and bad.
But here’s the twist - I haven’t seen the movie - at least not anywhere near close to it in its entirety. However, being somewhat plugged in to more chronically online strains of media discourse, I’ve consumed so much of The Whale in fragments, filtered through both professional and public criticisms, and in isolated, more provocative clips circulating in short formats like TikToks and Reels, that it feels like I’m capable of thoughtfully discussing its merits and faults.
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At present, it seems a giddy anomaly to walk into a theatre with little to no knowledge of what I’m going to be watching. The immediate cacophony of online opinion, whether positive or negative, accompanies me into the screening, chattering incessantly at my periphery as I puff my chest and plant my feet, determined to form an uncoloured, truly personal opinion.
On the way home from that party I reflected on the postured artificiality of these exchanges, and moreover, how often it is that I find myself participating in them. It’s not that I doubt the credence of much of the thoughtful and valuable critiques being levied at The Whale and other films subjected to similar press cycles - I doubt the patterns of uninformed, un-critical consumption, that the breakneck, click driven online media landscape often coaxes me, and presumably many other film consumers, into engaging in.
Inflammatory, short form content that isolates the most provocative part of a long-form piece of media is nothing new - widespread disdain for clickbait video thumbnails and article headlines has been rampant from the practice’s 2010s rise, when it became abundantly clear that our clicks were translating to cold hard cash in the pockets of media corporations and advertisers. We can even delve further into the history of media criticism and look to French essayist and literary critic Roland Barthes’ conjectures on the ‘fait-divers’ - brief stories from French newspapers with sensational themes, which he dubbed “the unorganised discard of news”; self contained, reliant on attention grabbing affect, for which there is “no need to know anything about the world in order to consume”.
What are our app feeds if not unorganised, unmonitored discards of information? The isolated, self contained space of the short-form film critique with said movie’s footage chopped and spliced into it on say, TikTok, is a startlingly effective medium for a vexed individual looking to quickly sway opinion on a text, and simultaneously, achieve virality. This is a platform famed for the sheer speed and scale at which content can travel, and doubly, travel to the eyes and ears of an individual algorithmically poised to connect with it amidst the controlled chaos of a feed equal parts random and tailor-made. Seeing a seconds-long controversial snippet or framing of an hours-long film, divorced from its broader context, before quickly scrolling along to an ASMR slime video can, and arguably does, put people off.
This isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, per se. In an entertainment landscape in which content warnings often only come to precede films and shows post-online scrutiny, I couldn’t in good faith blame anyone who chooses to forgo viewing something after seeing, or being proactively warned about, a clip from a piece of media that they know is going to upset or offend them, albeit, estranged from its greater artistic whole, or even framed in an intentionally unflattering manner.
“I find going online and shoving my head into an echo chamber of preemptive and persuasive negativity, or even positivity for that matter, really disrupts this ritual. At its worst, it feels like an assault to one’s critically-thinking senses.”
But this behaviour really thrives thanks to the kinds of media savvy individuals (guiltily, myself included) who love to lose themselves in the noise of a scrutinising crowd. A grassroots TikTok smear campaign can be addictively entertaining to participate in. From the light hearted goofing en-masse surrounding Don’t Worry Darling’s ‘Spit Gate’ or Chris Evans’ Super Mario casting, to the sense of communal moralistic purpose gleaned from lambasting Licorice Pizza’s age-gap romance. It feels good to be a part of something so fast and far reaching, especially in an age of increasing IRL isolation. A type of comment I see consistently beneath Tiktoks of all kinds is the giddy profession that the video at hand has struck such a chord, it’s induced a revelation: “I’ve never had an original thought in my life”. Though this phrase is often deployed with a kind of playful sense of dismay, I think in actuality, the thought brings a great many people comfort.
I struggle to definitively pin down my thoughts on this new media mechanism. On the one hand, I’m not of the belief that we should down right abandon our social mores for arts sake. The image is a powerful thing - and I wholeheartedly believe in its power to cause harm.
Perhaps then, it’s a matter of looking inward. I know for a fact that I personally find it far more fulfilling to actually watch a film, rather than a supercut of its most sensational moments, and let myself marinate in its pros, cons and hairy bits in between, pondering for a good few days before coming to any sort of hard line conclusion. I find going online and shoving my head into an echo chamber of preemptive and persuasive negativity, or even positivity for that matter, really disrupts this ritual. At its worst, it feels like an assault to one’s critically-thinking senses.
Let’s face it, a work of art can never be for everyone, and when hordes of homogenous opinion rises to the top of the visibility food chain, the internet can feel like, for lack of a better descriptor, everyone, everywhere… all at once.
Words: Isabella Venutti
