When I Saw You, or whatever happened to a movie fans after YouTube. The curious
case of the Saw horror series.
Tomasz Żaglewski
It is curious, or rather paradoxical, that the most accurate manifest of a YouTube
culture came from the media, that feels so threat by the coming of new technologies. When
Time magazine was celebrating ‘Person of the Year’ in 2006, it became obvious that YouTube
and other portals alike are something more than just an amusing gadgets. On the cover of
Time from December 2006 we can find one simple message – a PC’s screen with the
characteristic look of a YouTube player on it, including one word, ‘You’. The text below
leaves no question about the identity of a ‘Person of the Year’ – it says: ‘Yes, you. You
control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.’ These three simple sentences captures
the very basics of a YouTube as a multimedia platform as well as a philosophy of new media
technologies and social activities.
In the Time’s characteristic there are three key words which I would like to score
under here and point out as a three areas of interests in my following research. First of all –
You. There won’t be a world of so called Web 2.0, social networks etc. without me, you, us…
Reflexivity and self-reflexivity of both – cultural texts and its users – are the core of techno
cultural proposals as YouTube. Second of all – Information Age. It is not only the matter of
YouTubers and other groups of network society to support the circulation of the elements of
cultural codes – the new forms, as Lev Manovich says, of creation and participation as well.
The new paradigms of culture consuming, that are sustaining by the social network sites,
engages the new strategies of the official suppliers and reforms the capitalistic market. And at
least – the category of ‘world’ that arise from two former themes. World is here, from the one
hand, an utopian vision of a free flux of cultural items than can be an area of remix or readwrite action (both terms by Lawrence Lessig). But world means something more here – it is
the pursuit of the popular mark; the fan-alike devotion to the text in the name of becoming a
part of it. It is finally, according to Henry Jenkins, the Holy Grail of popular culture industry
that tries to create a potentially open (for all the expanding paths) environment of its
proposals.
All of these three, described in the introduction, categories I’ll try to refer to the
YouTube site and specific type of texts that can be found in the portal – the ‘amateur’s’
revisions of the Saw horror series. Before I’ll go to describe the fascinating diversity of all the
non-professional communications based on the movies, I find it crucial to present the way in
which I’ll look at the YouTube (and its content, of course) as a space of social and mediausing activities. Besides the fact of its ‘youngness’ YouTube has already gained a serious
number of publications that describes his crucial determinants. One of the most complete and
challenging works about the site is YouTube. Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean
Burgess and Joshua Green. In its first chapter, dealing with the origins of the portal, Burgess
and Green tries to find out the reasons of YouTube’s popularity. As the authors writes,
following the words of Jawed Karim – one of the founders of YouTube:
The success of the site is due to the implementation of four key figures – video
recommendations via the related videos list, an email link to enable video sharing, comments
(and other networking functionality), and an embeddable video player.1
In Karim’s point of view it is important for the YouTube’s popularity that it is based
on a simple technological solutions, more ‘natural’ in exploitation than the others similar
sites. In fact it is essential for the user to interact with the site in more ‘instinctual’ way rather
than by the complex and difficult solutions. The question is however: is the simplicity of the
interface enough to create a well-prospering web community? In the case of YouTube it is
obvious that more important thing here is the way of using it. As Burgess and Green points
out, the success of the site was not delivered by the system itself, but the using of it. There are
two events that confirms such a statement. First of them is TechnCrunch – a simple pre-vlog
founded on 8 August 2005, which became the first successful blog-alike channel (in this
particular case devoted to technological news). Second event is Lazy Sunday – a clip coming
from the Saturday Night Live and presenting two ‘nerds’ going to the cinema to see The
Chronicles of Narnia. The clip became the first great hit of YouTube and it was viewed over
1.2 million times in the first ten days. These two examples of contents, not a technological
specifications, are – for Burgess and Green – the evidences of co-creation (as a major strategy
of using YouTube) and being a ‘nerd’ (as a main attitude of YouTube community).
According to Burgess and Green, the nerd’s co-creation of YouTube’s materials ‘is
absolutely core business’ 2 for the site’s popularity. First of all, co-creation is a participatory
act desired by both – the producers and consumers – sides of culture economy. What
YouTube reveals (not creates) are the great expectations for searching and sharing various
themes – from movie trailers and spoofs to personal vlogs. What is more, it becomes a
strategy more and more profitable for the ‘official’ creators – so called viral marketing is the
best example of it. As many theorists argues, in that sense YouTube is not a digital archive –
or rather not only a digital archive – but a platform of an endless circulation of the
texts/information. Co-creation happens to be an absolutely basic element of new media
literacy, which demands ‘writing’ skills as well as capacity to read interactive materials. The
role of YouTube here is simultaneously vital and simple. It is – more than anything – a
platform which enable a reversible communication between ‘creator’ and ‘viewer’ but also
between ‘viewers’ only. A culture of critics, that arise from the new paradigm, is a sign of
new media order – place where top-down and down-top information passing is a part of a new
cultural business of co-creativity. This major shift, that brings consumers into the prosumers
activities, links with media literacy – the main condition of co-creation – and makes all the
YouTube’s parodies, false trailers and music videos an acts of a new media language.
A local inhabitants of this YouTube world and the users of its popcultural-media
language are nerds. The term itself refer to the fan subcultures, where it was using to describe
a devoted, enthusiastic and very often socially restrained ‘believer’ of specific text. But the
meaning of the nerd evolves as it becomes an element of new media policy and ‘being a fan’
gets into the mainstream culture consumption. And so, along with the success of DVD and
Blu-ray home theatre systems, its bonus-based acts of movie shows and a discourse of
special/anniversary/director’s editions we comes to a place where, as Chuck Tryon explains:
Regular home audiences were being transformed into movie geeks, a status that was normally
accessible only to a moneyed geek elite that could afford expensive home theater systems or
expensive movie prints or collectible laser discs and VHS tapes, thereby democratizing access
to cinematic knowledge that had previously only been available to insiders.3
In other words, the nowadays cinephiles and participants of a new media culture takes
the norms, that till now were characteristic for the non-attractive nerds/geeks groups. Multiple
readings, searching for a collector’s editions, exploring all the issues about movie productions
thanks to the DVD and Web designed bonus materials and of course a secondary production
allows to re-produce the movie – that’s the landscape of a modern viewers. The same
principle works not only on the movie ground, but the music, games, books and other cultural
businesses as well. Once again, a great amount of information of any kind makes us all nerds
– participants that are going to share, inform or re-model every possible cultural text.
YouTube, thanks to the mechanism that I’ve mentioned before, appears to be a perfect place
for that kind of ‘users’ and becomes, once again, a platform of remixing and sharing. Finally,
as Burgess and Green sums up, the site along with its content and habitants should be
perceived as a digitalized Howard Becker’s ‘art world’ where:
The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of
conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted
for.4
In the beginning I’ve tried to point out three main themes that seems to characterize
YouTube as a site and social event as well. All these categories – You, Information Age,
World – are the elements of both co-creation and nerd paradigms. As a co-creators we are
allowed to rewrite the texts that spreads a wide range of new communications and helps to
expand the original world. On the other hand, we – the YouTubers – are becoming nerd/fanalike models of new participants of the new media world by the process of emerging into the
text-orientated activities. As a Polish researcher – Wiesław Godzic – tries to explain, we can
observe here a two kinds of a long-termed changes. First of them deals with the texts
themselves, where the content of YouTube becomes nothing more than a collection of quotes
– always-opened materials than invites to its re-configurations and re-presentations. Second of
them connects with the user persona as a new way of media text consuming. For Godzic, the
‘isolated TV subject’5 turns into the plural-user that prefers to discuss over to watch; to
comment over to turn off thoughtlessly the TV set. Therefore for Godzic:
YouTube is a new, creative – downright revolutionary – medium for consuming the media.
It’s an interactive form – there are ways to interact and to find an unprecedented modes of the
active participation in the public sphere. Operations like these gives the feel of freedom,
liberates from the rigorous TV schedule.6
After the YouTube’s characterization, I would like to concentrate now on describing a
few examples of the Saw-based materials that links with the major theme of my article – that
is with the evolution of movie-using.
The beginning of the Saw series phenomenon comes from the original short film by
James Wan that was presented at the Sundance Festival in January 2004. The original movie
concentrate on the character of David (Leigh Wannell) – a young man that tries to describe to
the police officer some horrible events. David is one of the victims of the terrifying
psychopath called Jigsaw. The unknown city is terrorized by this cruel murderer that captures
and tortures innocent people by forcing them to ‘play’ a macabre games. David, as a one of
the wretches, wakes up one day in the dark basement with some device attached to his face.
On the TV screen he observe his torturer explaining the rules of a ‘game’. The strange device
is called ‘the reverse bear trap’ and if David won’t complete his task, the mechanism will rip
his face apart. The key is hidden in the body of David’s co-prisoner. The task is to murder the
other man and find the hidden key. As we can learn from many sequels of this original movie,
behind the Jigsaw character there is an old, dying man that tries – thanks to his inhuman
methods – to learn people to appreciate theirs health and fact that they are alive. Besides the
fact that the original Saw is not a revolutionary nor dazzling case of the thriller/horror genre, it
is a worldwide success and, as I said, it comes with a seven full-length cinematic
presentations (in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 – in every Halloween season).
What can be said about Saw, apart its extremely gory aesthetic and rather straightforward
philosophy, is that the series had become an iconic figure and planted a few well-known
images in the public imagination. And so, every Saw film is a kind of claustrophobic scene
with few people trapped in the murderer’s labirynth. What comes next, there are some bloody
tasks and cruel devices that threats the innocent victims. And at least, there is the main
antagonist hiding behind the horrifying figure of a clown-puppet and using low, chilling
voice. All of these elements are parts of a Saw-universe duplicating and broadening by the
Saw franchise and of course its fans activities.
By typing the phrase Saw into the YouTube’s searching field we can find a wide range
of texts and communications. For my research I decided to concentrate on the first three pages
of the results, each of them including about 20 materials. What I would like to emphasize
here, is the YouTube specification is based on the rotation of the texts, so the reader has to
remember that the content of the first three pages of my research can be mixed up with every
look at it. The forthcoming list reflect the YouTube’s content in the Saw area as it was on the
28th January 2011. The material dedicated to the Saw we can put into the three categories:
quotes, tributes and parodies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that these categories can’t be
mixed, but I’ll try to describe them as unambiguously as I can. The major group of the texts
(over 30) represents the quotes category – they are the trailers, interviews, documentaries,
music videos and short clips from all the movies. Second category (tributes) is represented by
3 materials – video-games walkthroughs and fan’s compilations ‘the best of’. And finally, as a
parodies, we can find circa 15 video-materials which are the fan-remakes and re-presentations
of the original motives. There are especially three interesting examples of such activiyies.
First of them is called Saw-McDrive.7 In this clip we can see a Jigsaw-like character driving
on the bicycle toy to the McDrive station. The original movie music theme is also used in this
parody, what creates even greater dissonance between its original context and revision.
Second clip is called Sponge bob playing saw 2
8
and appears to be a simple animation
including the well-known cartoon characters in the gory scenes from the Saw 2 feature. And
the third clip, Movies in Minutes – Saw 12 9, is an amateur, vlog-like parody of the trailer for
the 12th big screen Saw appearance. The clip is basically a re-imagination of the classical
motives from the movies with its disorganization by the using of humor. All of these three
clips – arising from different aesthetics – happens to be a kind of play with the original
materials. But besides its evident fun-nature, they are also a field of communication for which
the Saw series is nothing more than an audiovisual Esperanto.
For describing the psychological aspect of being a part of YouTube community and
communicating by the quotes-alike materials, Bernard Stiegler uses the term of
grammatization. As author explains:
Grammatization allows for the spatialization of the temporal fluxes that produce an existence
through the writing of the spoken as well as the mechanical reproduction of workers’ gestures,
then through the recording of the sensually audiovisual (the flux of sonorous and luminous
frequencies), and through it, representations of the real past (their memory) and
representations of possible futures (their imagination).10
For Stiegler YouTube’s activism should be perceived as a space of grammatization – a
process of shaping the new cultural codes, which allows the users to ‘speak’ according to this
new media grammar. Stiegler ends his research with a statement, that YouTube and YouTubelike websites are the areas of battle over the symbolic power, which now seems to avoid the
‘official’ channels of distribution. The power comes, whatsoever, into the hands of
YouTubers – the hyper attention community for whom ‘a large part of their experience of the
web ends with the videos they find.’11 Stiegler’s conclusions can be easily related to the Saw
YouTube materials. As we look at their shape – quotes, tributes, parodies – we can see that
the mentioned materials are not a museum-like exhibitions, but rather an impulses, packages
of information that invites us to reshape it. An official Saw trailer exists here just beside its
spoof remake, a shocking end of the first part of a movie saga comes with the Sponge Bob
version of the same scene, in one clip cinematic Jigsaw declares his devilish ideas and in other
a fan in the character’s costume wants to buy a snack in the McDrive. What we can see in all
these cases is the specific ‘talking back’ act that is addressed to the Saw creators as well as to
the others participants. They are the acts of co-creation – remixing and ‘speaking’ via the
movie codes and icons. And even if the message seems to us to be quite shallow, we can’t
forget that its function is strictly ‘nerdic’ – ‘This is necessary in the context of digital media
like YouTube, since so much of what is published in social networks sites is phatic.’12
YouTube along with its materials seems to be a worldwide fanzin (fan magazine) where we
all can play in a game of spoiling, spoofing and reediting. Once again, it shows us the main
principles of this community – with hackability and usability as its basic rules.
But what changes are coming with this YouTube society for the sphere of film art? For
Iwona Kurz, YouTube is a kind of cinema’s parasite for which:
Cinema is an item of manipulation, a box with building bricks; it is not something
materialistic, but it is an object of relocation, reedition and reconstructions that are achievable
thanks to the digital tools.13
What comes with that kind of statement, is that YouTube turns into the new kind of
cinema of attractions – it becomes a space of de-narrativization and de-fragmentarization of
the cinema by turning it into the collection of a quotes that has to be a quick and intense type
of nano-cinema. Saw – just like all the others movie examples – exists on YouTube in the
shapes of (non)official ‘snacks’ that can be quickly assimilate and resend by the smartphones
and iPods. What is interesting, these types of consumption paradoxically brings the users
closer to the movie worlds. Makes them more open for the more-than-viewers individuals
thanks to the open-sourced policy. As Burgess and Green sums up, after the statement of
Henry Jenkins, YouTube is a kind of a modern vaudeville – a place that is ‘a noticeable focus
of video as a technology, and on the showcasing of technique rather than of artistry.’14
At the end of the YouTube analysis, there is still one thing that has to be remind. Apart
from its new media-like environment we can’t forget that YouTube itself is not a complete
revolution in the social experiencing of culture. It just gives the new, more and more
advanced tools for practices that has been a part of ‘using’ audiovisual culture since the very
beginning. It’s well accented by Henry Jenkins when he recreates the process behind the
nowadays YouTube’s popularity.15 As he writes, YouTube is the final element in the chain of
domestication of the movie experience. Without the first Kodak’s movie projectors from the
late 1920’s, VCR’s, personal cam-recorders and a long tradition of a garage/punk cinema
YouTube would be nothing but a container without an essence. And so, as I’ve tried to
explain, YouTube – as a Web 2.0 phenomenon – binds all of the new media’s attributes and
tries to mix them with our old/new customs of a movie watching. Nonetheless, the site is only
the platform for the very old human aspiration – aspiration to broadcast (show) ourselves.
1
Notes
J. Burgess, J. Green, YouTube. Online Video and Participatory Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge,
2009, p. 2.
2
Ibid.
Ch. Tryon, Reinventing Cinema. Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, Rutgers University Press,
London, 2009, p. 17.
3
4
J. Burgess, J. Green, op. cit., p. 61.
W. Godzic, Nano-film czy giga-kino?, in Kino po kinie. Film w kulturze uczestnictwa, A. Gwóźdź
(ed.) , Oficyna Naukowa, Warsaw, 2010, p. 406.
5
6
Ibid., p. 407.
7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZp2NY7jmG0 [28. 01. 2011].
8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2miD8XgbqQ [28. 01. 2011].
9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QwZqbLpVlM [28. 01. 2011].
B. Stiegler, ‘The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy’, in The YouTube Reader,
P. Snickars, P. Vonderau (ed.), National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, 2009, p. 42.
10
11
Ibid., p. 55.
J. Hartley, ‘Uses of YouTube: Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge’, in YouTube. Online
Video and Participatory Culture, J. Burgess, J. Green (ed.), Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 137.
12
I. Kurz, I got you tube. Kino a serwis YouTube – odmiany kinofilii, in Pogranicza audiowizualności.
Parateksty kina, telewizji i nowych mediów, A. Gwóźdź (ed.), Universitas, Cracow, 2010, p. 429.
13
14
J. Burgess, J. Green, op. cit., p. 52.
See: H. Jenkins, ‘What Happened Before YouTube’, in YouTube. Online Video and Participatory
Culture, J. Burgess, J. Green (ed.), Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 109-125.
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