Me at the Zoo?
I’d have to agree with part of what this documentary is showing, a person struggling with their gender and sexuality on top everything else going on in their lives. And how the internet has played a part in this whole thing but I didn’t really like the documentary. It was pretty focused on Chris Crocker as a youtube personality and his mom not so much centralized on his gender and sexuality struggles. Chris Crocker’s fame is cemented by his number-one-fan status in the Britney Spears pantheon. Like many young people, he indulges an infatuation for a favorite pop star, and in that icon’s struggles with fame and media scrutiny he recognizes a kindred spirit. His vlog identity, likely more flamboyant and histrionic than his everyday personality, makes a tearful video admonition to “Leave Britney alone!” and scores millions of hits. It also visits upon him a smaller-scaled but no less devastating lesson in attention overload, illustrated by a small-town boy skidding out in the biggest of media cities. The ephemera in which he traffics is its own punishment: the words “I don’t know what else I’m qualified to do” have rarely resonated so bleakly. In the years when previous generations were developing their identities, this boy had two, the more fabricated of which was by far the more attractive. There is a vacancy in his eyes throughout most of the movie, a question of self not completely answerable at this stage of his development. His vlog-life plays up his sexuality, his train-wreck of an absentee mother and her own tawdry upbringing, and the ambivalence with which the churchgoing grandparents who raised him view his sensationalist self-invention. And so he and his grandparents get a depressing number of hate messages on video and telephone, as well as national-scale mudslinging from the likes of Mr. Beck and from other YouTube practitioners. As Chris Crocker says at one point, “You can only exist on water, sunshine and mascara for so long,” and his attempt to find a more genuine, less enervating lifestyle constitutes the film’s bittersweet final act. Early on, Chris Crocker speaks persuasively of the ecstasy in watching his favorite celebrity on video: “I get to transform into Britney Spears!” One may not entirely believe him, but still one is outraged that such a beautiful creature would want to be anybody else. Later, an angrier version of himself rails that his fame is “not about Britney!” As he matures, a development captured in efficient, dynamic visual terms by the film’s four credited editors (Jesse Haas, Matthew Sanchez, and the two extraordinary directors), he reflects that in some of his public missteps, “I was playing with perceptions of me that already existed.” As David Quantick once wrote, “pop will eat itself.” But within the perspective of the 1980s from which he wrote it, no one expected that someday pop would begin to eat itself in the shell. The ending was also very ambiguous because you don’t know if Chris Crocker was playing a role the whole time or if that was his genuine self. I was wondering how he felt about everything now after we talked in class and found an article from this year.











