Teaching Jake about the Camcorder, Jan '97

March 3, 2021 10:30 AM

Never press the rewind button or else you may record over a precious memory.
posted by simmering octagon (24 comments total)

Attaboy.

Was just watching this and thinking, "Oh I wonder if it's made it over to Metafilter yet." Good to know that BDG has extended his oeuvre into making me misty, in addition to rofling and being freaked out.
posted by supercres at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Where are the containment procedures for this artifact
posted by ook at 11:16 AM on March 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

I .... Don't get it? I love BDG and his surreal stuff (his "where is my laptop" song is my favorite). But is there a hidden message or punchline that I didn't understand on this one?
posted by bbqturtle at 1:26 PM on March 3, 2021

I think this one is just meant to be creepy and sad. He said on his Patreon that he "accidentally made a jokeless video". It has a very David Lynch vibe to it.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 2:06 PM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's surreal, sad horror, because grief itself is surreal, sad horror.

It's getting more disseminated in pop-sci that memories change in the course of remembering them. Varying by individual, in little ways, in big ways. Memory's much less a video recording than a story that's reconstructed each time we tell it to ourselves. Here, the video recording alters with every watch. Little ways, big ways. Grief memories, trauma memories, they're prone to twist as they're remembered, both consciously from things wished said and fantasized about, and unconsciously. Obsessively 'replaying' memories of loved ones lost, when the wound is fresh, often has the horror of the loss lurking subtly or overtly in them. And one of the things is: yes, constantly 'rewinding' isn't doing you any good, Jake...but it's not like if you stop watching, that the suffering doesn't intrude right outside the frame as well. Because the frame of that screen is inside you.

Good stuff!
posted by Drastic at 2:18 PM on March 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

i enjoyed tracking the several ways it draws the viewer into participating - the fore- and background variations in its world - the father's words, appearance, affect, the items in the closet or on the nightstand, the unexpected visitor, the extension of its world beyond the frame and ultimately the bedroom. i have only watched once, but on second viewing i plan to see if there is some discernable pattern in how the tape "dis-integrates" or succumbs to the uncanny, despite the father's pleas to stop. then there's the whole question about whether the father is a discrete entity or only a projection, or some melding.

the mother never appears

in the much-hated soderbergh solaris, an alien intelligence forms material entities from the characters' memories, e.g. the clooney character's ex-wife, who took her own life prior to the movie's timeline, is generated from what he knows of her *and only what he knows*. and to him she is therefore monstrous.

this has a similar thing going on. a memory too much, or too painfully, revisited is inevitably a curse.

in an article on civil war re-enactments, an essayist turned santayana's maxim on it's head...those who cannot forget history are doomed to repeat it.

borges, etc
posted by Caxton1476 at 2:32 PM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

in the much-hated soderbergh solaris[...] this has a similar thing going on

I really appreciate that comparison. (For the record, all that also happens in the highly respected original Solaris directed by Tarkovsky. (except it happens slower and in Russian))
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 2:58 PM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

For those not already familiar with the oeuvre of BDG, you might also enjoy learning how to make jorts. Or how to earn $20 every month by being your own boss.

I do feel that he and Karen Han are writing a full-length horror film in 5 minute segments, and I am 100% here for it.
posted by ourobouros at 3:06 PM on March 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

I hadn't seen any of this person's other stuff, so went into this with no expectations, and found it fascinating and chilling. Thanks for posting!
posted by The Baffled King at 3:12 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was really surprised when it turned out that Jake was the family guinea pig. Didn't see that twist coming.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:42 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

But is there a hidden message or punchline that I didn't understand on this one?

I thought it was deeply affecting, but I have a hunch that there's no real "message" to unlock. I think it's a lot of random weirdness that adds up into something that's eerie and sad.

There are many, many ways to interpret what we see. (Spoiler warning:) Is the mysterious, dark stranger some manifestation of Jake? Does the father somehow escape the video at the end, and that's why the lights get weird around the TV? There's even a moment when the father looks kind of alarmed and says, "You're not..." and I wondered if Jake isn't even actually the one watching this. My take is that Jake is both watching the video and kind of inhabiting it, the dark figure is a manifestation of him. Jake is so lost in self-loathing he's become monstrous in his own mind, he's a creepy nothing. So when the father is screaming or he looks horrified by something behind the camera, that's kind of Jake projecting how horrified his father would be, if Daddy could see his son now.

There are all sorts of interesting possibilities here but very few answers, and I find the video a little frustrating as a result. It's haunting, but I'm not sure if even the filmmaker was sure what was going on with that tape. I was waiting for something to click into place and give the story a little more shape, but it never happened. (At least, I didn't see it.) It was very well done, for all that, and definitely not something I expected coming from BDG.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:12 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

there's a short line that gets cut off by a rewind about two-thirds through that's some silence from BDG followed by "...you're not--" and I do like the idea that the person watching the tape isn't Jake.
posted by flatluigi at 12:36 AM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

BDG is great. Funny as hell--I watched him make popcorn--rather, pepcorn--for ten minutes and it was highly entertaining. And he seems to have some dramatic chops as well. Is he a theater person?

Anyway, Hollywood, put this guy in movies/TV shows already.
posted by zardoz at 2:48 AM on March 4, 2021

the person watching the tape isn't Jake.

I mean: I watched it. I'm not Jake.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:25 AM on March 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

He Is Only The Imposter: "(For the record, all that also happens in the highly respected original Solaris directed by Tarkovsky. (except it happens slower and in Russian))"

For the record², it also also happens in the Stanisław Lem book which both movies are based on, except in prose and in Polish.
posted by signal at 7:45 AM on March 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

zardoz: " Is he a theater person?"

My son, huge BDG-stan, says he's talked about being a 'theater kid' up to the age of 25.
posted by signal at 7:46 AM on March 4, 2021

For those of you not familiar with BDG's other works, here he is discussing and then performing a modern update of the Pokérap, doing a book report on all 337 books you can read in the video game Skyrim, and explaining how to make jorts.
posted by rifflesby at 8:41 AM on March 4, 2021

My computer decided to crash to a BSoD right at the end of the video. Took me a few seconds to realise it wasn't part of the video. BDG would have been delighted.
posted by Acey at 10:31 AM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

After the first or second rewind I thought we might be in an SCP-1733 situation, but it went a different direction.

Eerie! I was pretty sure that the person who shared it with me would have warned me if there was a jump scare, but I turned my volume way down just in case.
posted by jomato at 1:58 PM on March 4, 2021

For the record², it also also happens in the Stanisław Lem book which both movies are based on, except in prose and in Polish

Came here to say what signal said, except not the Polish part. There’s plenty of translations of Lem to a variety of languages, including English. Lem’s work in general is pretty great. I don’t read Polish, so I have no idea how much is being lost in translation; but I certainly enjoyed what I did get out of it.
posted by nat at 2:14 PM on March 4, 2021

I thought the dark figure was death coming for the continually resuscitated shade of the father.

It's chilling, but also a bit heartworming.
posted by benzenedream at 4:32 PM on March 4, 2021

Hmm. Hadn't thought of the dark figure being the grim reaper. Perhaps the "Attaboy" at the end was the father expressing his pride and gratitude for Jake finally releasing him from the tape. The father seemed terrified by the figure, but that could be because he didn't know what he was looking at, or it could be Jake kind of expressing his own terror, through this imagined persona of his father. There's no telling if this is a story about a ghost trapped on a tape, a story about a guy watching the tape and having a breakdown... or both.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:29 PM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Is he a theater person?

Is the pope, as they say, Catholic?
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:44 AM on March 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

WandaVision Easter Eggs Marvel Doesn’t Want You To See! by “Tom”
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:49 AM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]