or, the Queer Future of Interactive Space Adventure
Phil’s interest in space isn’t new in Interactive Space Adventure; it’s featured prominently in other weird!Phil videos I’ve analyzed, including those with shared themes (like responsibility for ending the world, sacrifice, and the eating of faces) and characters (Sebastian, Lion). But in other weird!Phil vids I’ve looked at, space functions as an abstract infinite beyond. While aliens do make appearances, weird!Phil’s space often carries a sense of emptiness; it’s what’s left after the world as we know it is gone. In Interactive Space Adventure, though, it is an immediate, navigable setting, and one that’s far from empty, populated with an array of characters and sentient-made structures (physical and social).* As in The Mark of Oxin, the choices provided to the player are far from infinite (though much more than the average video or the watch-or-don’t agency of The Silver Button), with deviations from the main path tending to loop back quickly or lead to an immediate end, but for Phil as a creator, this richly populated interpretation of space has room for creativity beyond convention, with no labels and no limits, and along with counting animals and face-eating, that includes... queerness!**
The way that sci-fi freedom empowers queerness in Interactive Space Adventure has a similar approach to The Mark of Oxin. In both, Phil establishes an otherworldly scenario with not-quite-humans, avoids any use of labels, and introduces a strong indication of queerness between Phil/Alex and what reads as an opposite-gender couple (of course, who knows about angel genders or “future people” genders, and we now know PJ not to be a cis man). When Phil encounters the Future People played by PJ and Lex (as with the angel), they initiate things -- PJ orders Phil to “kiss us on the face and leave” -- but Phil not only complies, but says “You are both quite beautiful.” And where The Mark of Oxin leaves the queer moment up to player choice, I believe it’s the only way to survive the encounter with PJ and Lex here.
Or should I say, “to progress past” the encounter? In most of Phil’s branching paths, progression and survival are the same, but the next queer encounter offers what I believe to be the only end to the adventure besides death or saving the world. When Phil encounters a faceless yellow-green man (also played by Phil), he is immediately confronted with the question, “Do you love me?” He’s just an alien searching for love, and if you choose, Phil can live happily even after with him (although Sebastian thinks he’s insane and the face-stroking gets a bit creepy). It’s the happiest ending available, I think (although I guess the world might not get saved, but maybe Sebastian wouldn’t bother to endanger it if he can’t use it to turn you against Lion?). If you choose no, yellow-green man can handle rejection and seems like a reasonably nice dude, so maybe he should just buy Phil dinner first (although Phil does seem a little bit disgusted or at least uncomfortable with him in that version). As with PJ and Lex, there’s no discussion of gender, sexuality, or labels, but the performance choices don’t offer anything to discourage reading the potential relationship between Phil and the yellow-green man as mlm, and whichever path you choose, the yellow-green man is definitely interested. And there isn’t a woman to distance reading it as gay, but there is a whole lot of weirdness/alienness and perhaps the fact that both characters are played by Phil (and that they can’t both be on screen at the same time) could make the scene of two male-coded characters committing to each other still not feel too revealing.
Other potential points of queerness that don’t really fit in, but are kinda interesting to me: The “poke” sequence at the very beginning, which positions the viewer as a separate character making choices for themself rather than for what Phil does, evokes a certain flirtiness in the era of the Facebook poke. It’s an equal-opportunity flirtiness since Phil obviously doesn’t know the gender of the person poking, which is consistent with the flirty “I’ll kiss anyone at midnight” Phil of this time period; however, in this case the poking is quickly established to not be consensual, and he gets hostile if you keep it up, so it doesn’t really convey any queerness on Phil’s part even if the poker is a man.
Also, Sebastian’s assertion that when Phil’s life was flashing before his eyes, “all you thought about was me.” Is our unreliable guide and manipulative mastermind Sebastian trying to flirt with Phil? Phil shuts him down pretty immediately, though. (I may need to rewatch to see if Sebastian gets queer-coded or tries to flirt with Phil in his other vid appearances.)
*Many of the aliens seem to have a shared culture that involves saying you’re from the future whenever you meet someone? But are they actually even from the future if he is just from the past? Is this a topic for another essay?
**As a consumer of sci-fi, I would expect Phil to be familiar with some of the tropes around future societies and fluid sexuality.
In Potato Prints, Dan and Phil lean into the juxtaposition of child-targeted wholesome craft content and ominous satanic rituals, and in the process, they explore the contradictory messaging that is particularly associated with childhood. While maintaining the stilted "upbeat" delivery often associated with addressing children, Dan and Phil encourage the audience to be themselves and embrace creativity, but also offer harsh criticism and broad, simplistic value judgments. The juxtaposition between the positive, encouraging approach to children and the strict, confined one helps to build the ominous tension necessary for the video's satanic plotline, but also highlight a hypocrisy in a traditional British approach to childrearing that can be particularly harmful to creative and/or queer children, who fall outside expected norms.
I should note here that I am from the US, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'm basing my thoughts on media portrayals―mostly Pink Floyd's of the British education system and old books―and on things in old-fashioned American traditions that I feel like probably come from British traditions. The dichotomy of encouraging and restricting children feels fundamentally true of a root cultural thing to me in a way that is hard for me to unpack, but I imagine looks different if it even exists in other cultures. But it makes sense with at least the school-age struggles Dan has shared and I'm gonna roll with it.
Anyway. The tone, simple sentence structure, broad generalizations, and simplified value judgments reminds me of 19th century schoolbooks for young children (I only know American ones, though). Dan and Phil embrace the concept of childhood not only in the way they talk to the audience, but also how they refer to each other, as "boys." (Even the potato is a "bad boy.") This positions them not as adults speaking to an audience of children from a position of authority, but as perhaps older kids, who have internalized messaging and are repeating it to the next group, eerily passing on the judgments that were placed on them. Maybe Dan's character speaks from experience when he says, "Don't get peel on the floor or Mother will be upset," but either way he makes explicit the presumed role of the audience and the risk of parental disapproval.
The nature of the craft video structure is that they're largely telling the audience what to do, which plays into the cheesy condescension and the role of children as obeyers and absorbers of Moral Truths. The Moral Truths in Potato Prints are a subset of the simplistic generalizations, but appear in the recurrence of describing things as "important" and statements like "Lying makes you go to hell," "Activities are better with a pal," and "Too much folly is bad for a boy." While "Lying makes you go to hell" and "Don't get peel on the floor or Mother will be upset" offer the threat of consequences, most of these generalizations just assert that something is good, important, or bad, without nuance or explanation. And while we hear that "Art is what you make of it, and that is what this craft channel is all about" and "Not everything has to be perfect," we also see Dan and Phil direct harsh criticisms at each other and at the potato, and Phil's beloved "If you make a mistake while cutting, just think about it for the rest of the day."
While the ideas of inspiration and criticism permeate the whole video, they culminate in "What I've learned is it's important to be who you are inside – or should I say, who he wants us to be." This line falls at the key shift toward the satanic, as the ritual begins in earnest and the wholesome craft framing falls away. In this single line, the inspirational and restrictive approaches meld with each other and with our sense of the offscreen ominous presence, who Dan explicitly gives authority over his identity. As an audience, we see a stark contradiction, but the character is deep in his social brainwashing and just accepts it: He must be himself, and he must be who he is told to be, and since both of these things are fundamentally true, his "self" necessarily equals the role he's been taught to fill. (While Phil's character doesn't address his identity directly, his "You've come a long way, Daniel," implies that he may have reached this point before Dan, and his last coherent line, "I can't see, but that's okay because I believe," reinforces his blind trust in the offscreen power and in his own role as the apparent sacrifice.) These themes in Potato Prints seem to resonate not only with Dan's criticisms of his upbringing via both family and school, but also with the broader mixed messaging that "good kids" receive when they're encouraged to be themselves and reach their potential – as long as that means following the strict rules and roles someone else has set.
When I analyzed Snokoplasm, I really should have talked about how the Exo helper represents the idea of gaydar and like, treatment of closeted people. Especially given how much lately he’s been talking about his experiences in the closet, I think it’s important to look at Snokoplasm as, in its coding, specifically a story about a closeted individual. Who is then publicly, and with some judgement, identified with a stereotype that in his case allows a stranger to out him when he’s just trying to buy a necessary good.
It reminds me of his thing in COTY about coming out to people in shops, but from a sadder perspective. This Phil is not ready to be out and he’s being persistently confronted with his queerness in an environment that doesn’t feel safe, where he doesn’t have control, where he just wants to buy the thing and leave. And the Exo helper feels the need to assert being right about Phil’s queerness to the end, like it’s some victory to have correctly identified ~the blue snokoplasm guy~.
It just feels like I wrote a whole analysis but I didn’t get at the way that it’s a story about closeted experiences in a way that seems super related to his actual closeted experiences that were fresh at that time.
Phil’s Own Fem!Phil AU & Violent Femininity in Phillippa
Long before there was the Norman makeup tutorial, before Phil talking about watching Louise's makeup vids, there was Phillippa. Uploaded in November 2009, Phil creates his own sort of fem!Phil AU with an ominous weird!phil edge. The Phillippa AU emphasizes a gendered lens on elements of Phil's persona and typical YouTube patterns, and even riffs on pieces of his own canon.
Visually, Phillippa is illustrated with an attempt at pigtails, smudges of makeup, and Mardi Gras beads. She's accompanied by Lioness, a heart-shaped pillow with other Phil appearances, and the edited-in image of a kitten's face that is emblematic of the cute/creepy vibe this vid plays with. As a '90s kid myself, Phillippa reads a bit violent Lisa Frank to me. In the first few seconds, we're introduced to Phillippa in silence, staring intensely into the camera. The mannerisms and intensity feel very weird!phil, and the expression is highlighted by the instantaneous shift to a smile when the audio and the lipsyncing begin.
The first thing Phillippa does, in the same breath as introducing herself, is express attraction to a man. Joe Jonas had that diagonal brown fringe, and while the primary effect of this bit is to jokingly place Phillippa into a bit of a teenage fangirl archetype, I wouldn't be surprised if Phil very much saw the Joe Jonas appeal.
Phillippa moves on to riff on a typical YouTube structure―the tutorial video―and a bit of Phil canon featured a month before in pinof: the cordless hammer drill. Phillippa starts as if to create a drill tutorial, but then she effectively proposes a masc!Phillippa AU that intersects with the Phil we know, but isn't just looking back at actual Phil. There's humor to the heightened masculinity that Phillippa describes Phil with because we know Phil's "show" and we know that the gendered line she draws isn't so sharp and clear. She describes it as "so manly," an echo of Dan's words in pinof; in both videos, the cordless hammer drill serves primarily as a way to laugh at the idea that Phil could be that type of "manly."
In her list of Phil's manly interests, we get the iconic lions, but also fighting and petrol and blood. And if we didn't yet with her interest in the hammer drill or her love for "blended unicorns" earlier, we quickly get the sense that Phillippa doth protest too much in her delineation of gender roles. She's very excited about the blood she lists as one of Phil's manly interests, and the kitten's eyes turn red before the image grows to block most of the screen briefly. (The cute fuzzy animal going demonic is a weird!phil bit I'm glad we got as recently as Bunny Biscuits.)
The sound of Phillippa's interest in blood is only surpassed by her disconcertingly long reaction to saying the name "Edward Cullen." The violent/cute vibe is very much Phillippa, so what could be better than a sparkly vampire? This moment is the second allusion to male attraction, and it transitions from the topic of blood back to the fangirl archetype and the idea that "sparkly things" are within Phillippa's realm of femininity. There's probably analysis to be done on Robert Pattinson masks, Living With Robert Pattinson, and Phil's Team Edward answer in the Friend Test. He justifies the latter in terms of liking vampires, which fits with the framing here, but we get a sense of attraction through Phillippa that is direct (and slightly creepy) relative to other appearances.
And so we reach... the makeup tutorial. In pinof, the cat whiskers are not gendered in any apparent way, and we see drawing on faces in a non-gendered way elsewhere (e.g., blindfolded cat face game). But the gendered element in Phillippa the focus, so the same act of drawing cat whiskers is presented as a "makeup tutorial." (We do see this association between cat whiskers and beauty YouTube recur a few months later in IF I RULED THE INTERNET...) The tutorial ends with fairly extended meowing, which, wherever you fall on furry discourse, isn't without its appearance in other Phil content. This meowing is marked as more ominous, though, with the kitten's eyes turning red again.
Phillippa leaves us with a return to her brand of violent femininity in "use unicorn blood to paint pretty flowers," but with a final statement (accompanied by traditional weird!phil visual effects) that could be from so many weird!phil vids without a gendered lens: "I want to eat your soul." Of course you do, Phil. Social constructions of gender could never change that.
The earliest instance of "Phil in the Club" is actually Alex in the club, in The Mark of Oxin. Young Phil's heaven features a club, complete with flashing neon lights, vague nudity, and propositions for casual sex with two angels of multiple genders. (It is, however, large and sparsely populated, and no one seems to be dancing.) It also has no apparent narrative significance for the game, but as the only implied sexual content in the game and with the opt-in establishment of our hero as potentially bisexual, it carries weight for the AmazingPhil narrative.
When we arrive at the club, it's notable that the sign says "Pub." It seems from my limited research that RPG Maker has a default pub sign and not a default club sign, so that's probably all there is to it. It seems highly unlikely that he didn't know the difference between the two, but that thought does remind me of a cultural reference he did have for a somewhat baffling club: The Bronze in Buffy. It blurred those pub/club lines while also sometimes functioning as a coffee shop and largely catering to teenagers and the supernatural, so there could be traces in Phil's pub/club.
Inside the club, we have catgirls and the naked man. I don't have the background to dig into the cultural influences young Phil's catgirls may have had; from my research, there are catgirls in some Final Fantasy games; based on Phil crediting Shawna with introducing him to anime, I'm guessing that video games would be the cultural inroad for him. For Phil, though, meowing and cat ears definitely came up throughout his early YouTube years, and it's hard for me to imagine that they didn't appeal to young Phil. People much smarter and more knowledgeable than me have done some great analyses of The Furry Question re: Phil, and I'd love to be able to say something more significant about young Phil and catgirls from a furry perspective, but my feeling is that the catgirls in Phil's club were NPCs that Phil introduced to relate to rather than oogle, but that also served an SMG-esque purpose of Straight Illusion. The "naked man," on the other hand, (looks like he's wearing a loincloth to me) seems to fall on the queerer side of things. Because in the club, young Phil was definitely walking a line of dipping a toe into queerness in front of his friends, but with room for ~heterosexual explanations~ of Phil the goofy teenager.
Because, yes, the most notable thing about the club is the angel threesome. The closest we get to a romantic plot is something Alex wants to tell Emily and doesn't, but as soon as he walks into the club, he's presented with a vague sexual invitation specifically for an encounter with a female and a male angel. It's not the stereotypical straight male fantasy of a threesome with two women; it's the queer element we were all looking for, perhaps using the idea of that fantasy as a shield. Just as Dan discussed in BIG, there seems to be safety for Phil as well in talking about bisexuality before he could fathom telling his friends he's gay (as also with old formspring answers etc.). Through the threesome, he could give his hero a sexual encounter with a man without focus being put on that (we never see the man) and with the "balance" of a sexual encounter with a woman very much present. And maybe he was still, at that point, figuring out his sexuality beyond knowing he liked boys and potentially trying to fit into a mold that said he should like girls (it was the same era as The Breakup). Beyond the genders involved, the threesome has the benefit of making the whole thing feel a little over the top, something easily laughed off, as Phil does in the video, as him being a silly teenager. It's a smart sort of plausible deniability way to make his friends interact with fictional queerness and for him to put it down into this game, to give it a sort of space outside of his head.
I think the question of how innocent Phil was or wasn't in his youth is always interesting, and the threesome is an interesting angle to look from. We've got the potentially bold choice to include a threesome with strangers Alex met at a club – definitely not bringing the "I wanted to go on a real date" vibes – but also the manner in which he handles it. The words he chooses are very vague; the fact that the implication is clear really lies in how little is said at all. Because anything but the Taboo Subject of sex would be more specific about what's being joined and thanked. It's a fade-to-black sexual encounter, without any sense of where they go or what they do besides... it's sexual. There's a kind of (age-appropriate) innocence in that, in having vague cultural ideas about things like threesomes, but avoiding really saying anything about it. (I'm probably personally biased here because I relate to throwing around vague sexual humor for the approval of my peers while I was actually a grayace girl still years away from a vague sense of maybe what sexual attraction means. That is obviously not Phil's situation. But we do know that he wanted to fit in and have the kind of firsts his friends were having, and we've seen some of his awkward attempts at a relationship at the same age.)
Overall, this brief scene that doesn’t seem to have plot significance has a lot to dig into: an approach to queer representation as a closeted teenager who was trying to date girls, playing with sexual humor from a fairly innocent standpoint, and even touches of the great furry debate. Maybe, if you want to see plot significance, Alex’s sexual compatibility with angels could foreshadow the fact that he’s half angel, or it could normalize casual sex among angels that could explain what Shila and Satan were doing procreating (and leaving the kid with mortals). Maybe?
Because @danslawdegree mentioned them in the tags before (I’m pretty sure that’s right but the reblog is gone so sorry if I’m wrong) and inspired me to analyze some weird!phil vids!
The brilliance of this video is in its use of Phil's own format (life anecdote chats and skits) to gradually immerse us in a weird world and show lots of things that we're never told. We have a familiar set, and the first words "Funny story" could be a "normal" vid, but we get a hint of what's to come in the star sharpied on his face and the tie tied around his head. We gradually get matter-of-fact info about the world, not being explained to us, but being taken for granted.
It ultimately becomes a story about differences in color perception, at least for the teller, which feels like a familiar, comfortable thing to ask followers about (even though this was many years before The Dress, and before D&P would argue about the colors of things on DAPG). But for us, it's about piecing together what we know about the world. A world with stores called A47 dedicated to the sale of snokoplasm, where Phil is served by a "new Exo helper," which sounds potentially like some kind of robot to me (if one who likes to argue with customers about color perceptions), but is only really distinguished by two diagonal lines across his face, a higher voice, and she/her pronouns.
Whatever snokoplasm is, it's something people in Phil's world keep on hand, since he assumes it's normal to restock when he runs out. It comes in one standard quantity, and it costs 14 million kropogans. The A47 sells multiple colors, which are associated with some kind of stereotypes about the user, implicitly related to gender expression (or possibly the body). The Exo helper in the store assumes that Phil uses blue (and won't be convinced otherwise), which Phil responds to with nervous laughter and defensiveness, and his arm muscles are evidence that he uses yellow (or green) instead. This muscle moment relates to the hammer drill, to moments of Phil joking about his own deviation from a kind of expected masculinity. We also get a sense that there's stigma against blue snokoplasm use, not just in Phil's defensiveness, but in the Exo helper's whispered assertion that "he's just gonna buy the blue snokoplasm off the internet." We don't get any info on gender or sexuality in this world, but we're watching from our world, where the discussion of blue snokoplasm has queer overtones. But the vid ends with Phil using the yellow (or green) snokoplasm, rubbing it on his face and emitting potentially technological noises. (Is Phil some kind of robot or cyborg too?) And it's ominous. His behavior is less human, his eyes wide, the sound cues building to a storm. Is all snokoplasm use like this? Is it specific to the color, or to Phil, or is he using it in an abnormal way? I don't think we know. But there's no blue snokoplasm in sight, and he's covering his face in the "normal" kind (smearing his sharpie), and it seems like it's not taking him anywhere good.
Heroes, like games, are defined by action. The Chosen One archetype, though, is defined passively: a choice thrust upon them, inevitability from prophecy or birth. The mark of Oxin designates a Chosen One whose path is largely controlled by forces beyond his knowledge or control, and The Mark of Oxin similarly leads the player through a story that is interactive, but largely predetermined. A game doesn't work if the player refuses to act, and the world can't get saved if the Chosen One refuses to act, but ultimately, if the story is allowed to play out, the individual's agency is limited by larger forces.
While young Phil had likely encountered the Chosen One archetype in many contexts, Buffy in an appealing reference point to explores the term and its relationship to agency directly. In the first act of The Mark of Oxin, Alex's importance is teased, but kept vague, and the story moves from quest to quest in a way that evokes a "Monster of the Week" structure with little arc significance. The player's agency in the first half seems (we can't know every option from a single playthrough) mixed; Dan comments on times where Emily takes Alex places whether he likes it or not, and even tries (unsuccessfully) to reject the game's path when sailing. But there are mazes to navigate and battles to fight, and while the biggest shifts in the game aren't rooted in player choice, they are often at least rooted in player accomplishments.
As we move from the first act to the second, though, we get the biggest shift with the least player agency: Alex dies without any chance for the player to save him. It's a Whedonesque plot twist; if I did my math right, Phil was creating The Mark of Oxin the summer directly after Buffy's second death on the show. Young Phil teases us further by taking us to Alex's funeral in Emily's point of view, so we have time to wonder if that's it for Alex and what that means for the story before giving us the resurrection and, in doing so, bringing the mark and Alex's Chosen One status to the forefront. The game's approach to storytelling shifts to prioritize discovery, for Alex and for the player (although "I now understand the dreams I've been having" indicates that Alex knows more than we do), about the mark and Alex's Chosenness. The Monster of the Week gives way to arc significance, and even more than in the first act, key moments happen in cut scenes without player agency. Even though the ultimate choice of the game, whether to take Satan's offer or not, is offered to the player, Dan's playthrough reveals that it makes basically no difference.
There are, of course, benefits for young Phil in creating a game with one ending and limited options for the player to veer from a primary path, especially as the end of the summer approaches. But Young Phil doesn't seem to be going for maximum efficiency in his game design (e.g., the red herrings and random NPCs with dinner parties); it seems to reflect the central story as increasingly the priority above player agency. In the way that Chosen Ones embody larger forces in conflict (and that Buffy explores how that affects her agency), Alex and the player both serve as vehicles for the story, and the more aware both hero and player are of that role, the more set the key moments are. Once we accept that such a turning point as the protagonist's death can happen entirely outside of player agency, we opt into a second act where story takes the reins, blurring our memory of the first act's individual quests in contrast (Dan summarizes it all as "the beginning of the journey"). The game and Alex's identity both become about discovery of destiny more so than any choice left to the Chosen One.
Dreams of the Future: An Amalgamation of All Things Weird!Phil
-Starts off with a Silver Button-style moral interactivity bit; by watching the video, you’re disobeying its very first lines. (Read that analysis for more; it’s largely relevant here as well.) More on this later.
-There’s a hint of flirty early Phil in “I don’t know if I told you already but you look really beautiful today.” It gets a creepy edge from the perspective of the end, when we know he’s stealing our soul with the camera. It also establishes us having prior interaction with him, before the start of the vid.
-”I must’ve figured out a way to talk to the past” presents his power as both accidental (he’s assuming rather than knowing what happened) and within his agency (”figured out”). I want to say he figures it out in the future’s future, but then how is he using it before then? Maybe he’s trying to present himself as less powerful than he is so we don’t suspect...
- Set in 2047 (when Phil will be 60). Future Phil dresses normally and films a video diary in the same bedroom even though they sleep in cryogenic chambers every night. (Foreshadowing bedroom-as-set? ha.) I guess this would slow aging? And potentially eliminate dying in one’s sleep.
-Robots everywhere. Of course, we have particular associations with WALL-E through phan goggles; this vid was between pinof and them watching WALL-E together in Dec.
-Sparkles when he likes something. Could be an Edward Cullen reference? And playing with effects, of course.
-Secret he immediately tells you in evil/distorted voice: he’s not actually human
-Phil with markings warns us against watching, listening to "normal” Phil with the camera and tell us he isn’t as he seems.(I swear we’ve seen similar markings in another vid, but the ones I’m thinking of look fairly different.)
-Phil has the ability to show us the inside of his head, an idea that gets a much less weird but still v. cool treatment in A Tour of My Brain years later.
-This ability in turn gives him time traveling abilities; definitely a theme. Traveling into the past to “warn you,” just as Sebastian does to Phil in Sebastian: Defender of the Universe. It seems equally ineffective because we, like Phil in that vid, ignored him at the beginning of this vid.
-Phil as Creator: He takes us to the beginning, “time to create something.” One Phil has “been on this planet for thousands of years” and another specifies “2047″; is time measured from his arrival? Also, we see The Basket in here; shout-out to that anon who saw Phil as Creator in that vid! I’m fairly convinced.
-That classic Daniel Ninoa music! This highlights The Basket connection, but also appears in a bunch of other Phil vids around this time.
-Phil as destroyer: Phil has collected our souls with his camera for the final plan to destroy everything. Things (e.g., Wall-e, the world) getting consumed by the garbage bag continues the thread of strong Basket connections. Phil-as-destroyer is, I think, broadly connected to his theme of responsibility for mass destruction. But the audience is to blame for watching, as in The Silver Button, and we don’t get remorse from Phil about it (which aligns it more with If I Ruled the Internet and less with The Basket).
-”Like dreams, not all stories have a happy ending.” Makes me wonder if Phil had a lot of nightmares. We hear about wacky dreams from him, but this also makes me wonder how much of his weird! content was inspired by his actual dreams.
-Earth gets consumed and then the eye opening parallels the shape. It feels like a reemergence, a sort of rebirth.
-Riff on “it was all a dream” ending, but it doesn’t fully allow for a sense of relief that it wasn’t real. He wants to wake up, and he seems to, but it ends abruptly and the surreal creepiness of it remains and in that way, it doesn’t undercut his story the way “it was all a dream” often does. We don’t actually know if everything’s okay or what the state of the world is.
-I want to talk about visual effects, but I don’t really know stuff. It’s a vid full of such striking visuals and weaving of classic/repeated Phil strategies (sharpie on himself, color changes, stop motiony things, and the snow effect we see in other vids, and voice distortion but that’s not visual) with ones that I’m not sure we see anywhere else in weird!Phil. The “seeing inside my mind” visual effect feels different, and his experimentation with ripping a garbage bag and stretching it over his face also isn’t ringing a bell for me with any other vids. (Actually, the face thing reminds me of a number of different visual effects in movies, but none that are clicking for me as a point of inspiration for Phil.) Not sure about the pouring things into a glass; it feels familiar from another vid maybe?
