VIDEO ESSAY REVIEW: "The Invisible Illness We Don't Understand" by Ro Ramdin.
video essays are a strange medium, though their strangeness has been somewhat obscured by their digital ubiquity. what was once the niche documentary-esque indulgence of the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles (though their genre was technically "the essay film") has exploded into a popular if not dominant mode of expression in the age of online video. this current transmutation of the form grew out of the vlogs of the 2000s and 2010s, when it was enough to just sit down in front of a camera and talk about your life. the vast majority of video essays lean pretty heavily on the "essay" part, owing to the fact that online video is the medium through which an essayist is most likely to have their work seen. but the very act of presenting oneself on camera delivering information is interesting, in a way that is quite distinct from the written essay. even a creator totally disinterested in the art of editing or public speaking is, by necessity, performing for a hypothetical audience. and once you decouple that form from the strict televisual structure (and network oversight) of something like At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert, you open up the door to a much more personal and subjective form of expression in the act of delivering an essay.
this is the dynamic that has drawn me to video essays from the very beginning. it's the reason i believe they're worth writing about. they provide a unique opportunity to blend art and criticism, two disciplines that have long been considered in academia as oil and water (when i went to film school in 2014 with the explicit desire to do film work while also studying the form academically, i was surprised to learn that this was unusual if not explicitly frowned upon).
but for all the artistic potential of the video essay, and the ambitious works of those playing with the emergent form in the 2010s, in practice they've settled into a fairly safe and predictable genre. there are many rote economic and sociopolitical reasons for this, but they largely all boil down to one simple truth:
making videos is a lot of fucking work. lighting, set dec, camera position, editing-- these require a measure of skill to do well, and likely a lot of specialized equipment. which says nothing of the act of writing a compelling script in the first place, an entirely separate skill in itself. i've often felt that it's unfair to the essayist that they're all but required to hybridize their own production, adding exponential layers of labor on top of an already challenging process or otherwise forcing you to pay out of pocket for others to do that work for you (with no support from a studio, network, union, or federal arts grants). there's a reason many successful video essayists only release a few videos a year. many who started out with wild experimentations mixing narrative with analysis have since shed virtually all of those hallmarks for the safety of a locked off tripod on a single static background. and it's hard to blame them. there's only so much you can do on a youtuber's budget before you're just making a movie, and who watches movies on youtube?
i bring all this up because Ro Ramdin's latest, an 18 minute reflection on obsessive compulsive disorder, is strange in all the ways that make the video essay so compelling. is it an informational essay about cultural misconceptions of OCD? is it an art film exploring the subjective experience of OCD? is it a fictionalized drama about one woman's frustrations with the logistical challenges of being a youtuber while having OCD? the answer to all three is, beautifully, yes and no. you can't pick it apart piece by piece and analyze it strictly on the merits of any one videographic tradition, because it's never so much of one that it fully eclipses the others. that's what makes it a great video essay, rather than a great art film, informational essay, or fictionalized drama.
Invisible Illness opens on a shot panning up the length of an incense stick, the camera lingering on the swirling vortexes within the smoke as Ro reads out the prompts on a questionnaire meant to diagnose OCD. we proceed with extreme closeups of flipping pages, fingers running over lines of ink, her teeth nervously gnawing on the end of a pencil, her eyes flitting from side to side, all gorgeously shot with a shallow depth of field and lit to be suitably high contrast. the style here is not a pointless flourish but the tone indicator to its relatively flat-toned narration. add in the music (evocative of a ticking clock and discordant wind chimes) and foley work (scratching pencil on paper, pages turning and crinkling rapidly, a subtle whoosh to underline the sneaky match cut between two angular panning shots), and these opening minutes effectively convey a sense of panicked claustrophobia.
we then jump to talking-head direct address footage of Ro speaking with the sardonic confidence typical of her usual videos-- except it's playing on a screen that is being filmed, and rather than being full-screen it's instead displayed within the interface of video editing software Davinci Resolve. we want to be invited in by this footage, as this casual delivery offers a reprieve from the tension of the opening sequence. but then we cut to Ro-as-editor looking skeptically back at the screen, chuckling mirthlessly at her own jokes. we see her feet tapping nervously next to a daily pill organizer, while Ro-as-performer delivers her sarcastic monologue on mental health with an energetic staccato rhythm, underscored by a jaunty Animal Crossing-esque instrumental track. typically this fast-paced delivery style is a way of carrying us through to the end of an essay on a breathless whirlwind of maximum edutainment value (a la CJ The X), but in context here it feels uneasy, unhinged, perhaps even unwell. Ro-as-editor seems to agree, pausing playback in frustration, shaking her head, and saying "This is too cynical. Who's gonna watch this, man?"
most striking of all about the cut to her face here is that she is not looking directly into the camera lens when she says this. instead she's looking just slightly off, an expression of tempered woe damp with sweat on her face, hair unkempt and greasy. we are not meant to be in the room for this moment. her refusal to acknowledge our presence is profoundly disarming, especially when Ro-as-editor lacks the pixelated off-color distortions of the screen behind which Ro-as-performer is contained. we want to be let in, want some kind of release from the tension of our ambiguous viewpoint, and yet Ro systematically refuses us that luxury.
a deliciously slow pan up with a zoom cuts to a closeup of a screen playing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, a haunting film about an enigmatic hypnotist compelling random people to murder their loved ones and themselves. the reverse shot is Ro (again looking just slightly off from the lens's line of sight) seeming to enjoy the film, as her long hair billows in the breeze of a fan that must be hidden just below the frame. the untranslated dialogue of the film gives way to a static tone and the overlapping whispers of Ro mumbling about whether or not her OCD diagnosis is true. the image then concedes to a series of fades, cutting slowly between various closeups as we fall further and further into a subjective psychological reality where spaces and objects seem to meld together in a dissociative fugue. a voice mail plays of a representative of Ro's advertising sponsor for this video calling to check up on her after a long absence with no contact, pointedly expressing how bad this makes them look to their "clients" while still trying to be accommodating to her mental health. this accommodation doesn't stop her from bursting into tears anyway.
i'll refrain from detailing the rest of the video to quite this extent because you and i both know we only have so long on this earth. suffice it to say, Ro moves back and forth between modes, delivering this informational monologue about the nature of OCD one minute, talking humorously with a friend in the bathroom about how she definitely doesn't have OCD the next, then at last having an emotional discussion with her mom about how youtube videos are always about "you" and yet she has less to say about herself than ever. and all the while, every aspect of the medium is utilized to build up and release tension in measured waves, like a metamodern breathing exercise. the lighting and photography remain skillful and polished throughout, evincing a keen eye for poetic images within the mundane confines of her day-to-day life at home. the music (also by Ro, because to be a successful essayist these days you apparently not only need to be a good writer, performer, and filmmaker, but a good composer as well) has a playfully jazzy tenor that underscores the unpredictability of the video's stylistic mode from start to finish.
i am going to make a comparison that Ro herself probably dreaded hearing from the instant she started the production process, but: Invisible Illness possesses more than a few shades of Bo Burnham's Inside, itself a glorified video essay elevated beyond its proper place on youtube by a devil's bargain with netflix. i don't mean to imply that Ro's work is derivative by any means, but rather that it shares a similar mediated claustrophobia, and carries itself with an artful confidence that surprises you with how deep its reference pool actually is. Ro Ramdin's success here is clearly owed to her having put in the work, watching the classics, reading the history, studying the medium. but never does it feel like Ro is embarrassed of making a video for youtube, as can sometimes be the case when an artist wants to be making movies but has to settle for being a content creator. this is an excellent, heartfelt utilization of the video essay form to explore a multifaceted series of personal psychological dilemmas. it is a near-perfect intersection of all the disparate elements that make video essays interesting, but more importantly it is a successful art object on its own merits. you don't need my analysis to know that it's good, because none of what of i've praised here was deployed for any reason other than that it was the appropriate creative choice to convey the emotion she wanted to convey.
it's the kind of work that inspires me, makes me want to get back in the saddle. it can be easy to forget just how limitless the possibilities are for this medium at a moment when it has become hyper-commercialized, its artistic potential quashed by the omnipresence of capitalist realism. not many people are willing to take this kind of risk, and unfortunately it seems to be for good reason: at time of writing, Invisible Illness is a day old and only has 6,700 views. Ro Ramdin has 164,000 subscribers. audience metrics have always been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but it has become more true than ever that no amount of "established audience" guarantees success. youtube as a platform is actively hostile towards any content which does not hew to the statistical center, and indeed any creator whose style, schedule, or ideological predisposition doesn't reasonably approximate those of the median top level google executive currently kowtowing to a fascist regime to secure billions of dollars for a chatbot that tells children to kill themselves. don't worry, i'm sure the free market will get us out of this pickle any day now.
indulge me in uttering the shameless mantra of all us lowly professional youtubers: please go watch this video in full (mute it in another window if you have to), hit the like button, leave a comment, share it with your friends, and subscribe. these are not pointless or frivolous actions, they directly influence any given video's ability to break containment and are the closest thing to material support you can provide aside from giving someone money on patreon. also, everyone loves hearing nice things about their work. Ro is unbelievably talented for how young she is, and it takes a lot of guts to make something this vulnerable no matter who you are. in my opinion, that's the kind of work that should be rewarded, shared, and talked about, not punished and buried. until such a time as we have more direct control over the platforms that define the creator economy, it is up to us to keep the art we want to see in this world alive in whatever small ways we can manage.
Every time Ro Ramdin posts a video essay, I feel like I'm a prisoner in a deep, dark dungeon beneath a castle, and I finally get my morsels/rations after banging on the bars for weeks.
