100-page Monograph on Distracted Boyfriend
Hello! Here’s a PDF link to my thesis about Distracted Boyfriend. It’s the reason I started this blog: I see the posts here as me elaborating on things I began thinking over while researching and still haven’t figured out. Things I want to write through and drill deeper on. Things I’d love to hear feedback on. Mistakes I need to make on the way to the correct thing. Ideas I think are absolute bangers. After writing this, I am confident that I am the world’s leading authority on this particular meme, which I guess is a weird flex but ok.
What I’m trying to do isn’t just to figure out this individual meme, but to develop a set of approaches that work for studying memes in general. In this respect, one thing I wonder about is how it must look from the outside to “study memes.”
When thinking of an academic audience, it’s hard not to start from a defensive crouch. You feel the need to insist on taking this cultural tradition seriously, declaring “it’s not just funny pictures on the internet! It’s more than that!” Then, after you insist it’s not just funny pictures on the internet, you find yourself falling into some kind of self-righteous “I study popular culture” position that implies everyone else is out-of-touch. I don’t think it’s productive or accurate to start from either of those places — defensive or self-righteous — and so I’m trying to find a chiller tone.
When thinking of an audience that loves and uses memes, I worry the idea of “studying” them seems snobby, or altogether unnecessary. People already know what memes are and what memes mean to them. What I should really say here is that I’m not unique in studying memes: everybody who likes memes studies them in some way or another, and my way of studying them — which I characterize as “academic” — is no better or worse than their way. But it accomplishes different things, is aimed at different goals.
A Close Reading Approach to Memes
I did not really like memes until 2017. It’s no coincidence that I wrote my thesis on a 2017 meme — this was the era that I first fell in love with, my golden age. I’ve also always loved normie memes like Distracted Boyfriend more than niche or ironic ones, because I am a normie. In particular, that generation of object-labeling memes like Distracted Boyfriend appealed to me because they were so rigidly structured but people were always screwing with that structure, flipping it on its head, pushing against its limits. There was this tension between a fixed form (always the same picture) and game-like practice of recombining it, thinking through it differently every time with the labels.
What I really love is poetry. If you asked me what I wanted to do with my life in 2017, I would’ve said “become a specialist in 17th century English poetry, in particular John Donne.” I was unbearable. What I loved about that era of poetry was the same thing I loved in object-labeling memes: rigid structure — fourteen lines in a sonnet, arranged one way — but people always screwing with that structure. I loved John Donne in particular because he’s funny, ironic, intimate, complex — and his deep faith in God is tempered with a shitposter’s sensibility.
In both memes and 17th century poetry, I saw everyone playing this chaotic game with artistic form, riffing on forms that were rigid one way and liquid another way. And once I learned what they were doing, it was the most fascinating thing to watch. I loved the concreteness of it: a stressed syllable here, like a dab of paint in a complementary color on a painting or a minor third in a song, can change the whole balance and give a new feeling.
English wasn’t just a thing that I turned over in my head and had my feelings in, it was a system outside of me and smarter than me. It was like the story about the fish learning what water is, and realizing that it is surrounded by something that has very particular qualities and has structured its life in particular ways. That’s what getting into poetry did for me with language.
However much I loved 17th century poetry, though, I swam in the world of memes more than in the world of John Donne. So I started reading memes the same way I read poems: how does it work structurally? How does it pace a reader’s attention? How does it use the features — visual, aural, social — of the physical material it comes on (whether page or screen, platform or book) to hold the reader’s attention? What other choices could the author have made, and why didn’t they make those choices? The interest here is less in what is meant or said than in what is done in the the text. Where does it place us, and how does it direct us to that place?
The way I describe this is “close reading.” I guess it’s kind of a joke that nobody can exactly describe close reading, and it means something different to everyone. There’s a scene from one of my favorite movies, Wit that describes it well:
This is the kind of attention I try to pay to memes, and it’s why I am so enraptured by them — you learn something by looking at a meme this closely, and it’s a deep something.
The fact that I come to memes from poetry is part of why I have a certain ambivalence towards studies of memes that seek to explain some social phenomenon through memes, that come at memes from sociology or political science. Of course we need to know where the alt-right comes from, how platforms are changing art, and how online identities form. But to me, memes are the social phenomenon in and of themselves.
Posting is the thing which happens before all these other things, everything flows from the text, the crucial site of exchange and transformation. It is, above all else, an aesthetic question — and we pay a steep price for not taking aesthetics seriously, for putting artistic expression off to the side of how we see the world instead of at the center. Memes examine themes that are timeless: like in Distracted Boyfriend, the choice between an old way of doing things and a new way of doing things. Or, also in Distracted Boyfriend, the ways we judge one another’s behavior. And the ways that men are gross. A meme can teach us as much about these things as any poem or empirical study can, it just teaches them in a different way.
The difficulty is in that difference — how do you study a text when there is no clear author? How about when the archival record is spotty, deteriorating, impossible to make coherent? What about when the text is not static, but “live” — a post on a platform, changing and spreading as you watch it? Where does the meme end — at the edges of the image, in the comments section, in the platform at large? Is the meme the image and text, the social game around that, or all of the above? These are all problems which are frequently dealt with in literary and media studies, but applying them to a meme is something that seemed underdeveloped to me. So I tried to get at these questions in my thesis, and still am. Thanks for hanging out with me as I work on it!