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Transcript

PART 2: MORE OF THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT

Memes are famous for being funny or clever or goofy or even amazing, like these things that look like objects but are actually cake.

Memes are fun but what you might not understand about memes is that they are... profound.

Let me school you for a moment. Don't worry – there will be more memes.

Richard Dawkins, seen here in this exclusive footage, coined the term meme in 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene.

"Meme" means "imitated thing." Memes are just ideas that get copied.

And the copies, they mutate, then these meme mutants compete with each other in a global battle royale. And the winner is whichever meme gets copied the most.

So. Memes want your attention. Memes want to spread. Above all, memes want to get copied.

Class dismissed. Here, have memes.

Memes are now the dominant method of broadcast among young people. They're often just photos and text but memes can be anything.

Whatever happens on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or the internet in general is a meme.

Dumping a bucket of ice water over your head is a meme. Skateboarding and drinking juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac is a meme. Swinging your arms from the back of your body to the front of your body repeatedly is a meme. Even buying a stock is a potentially hazardous meme.

The slang words we type are memes.

"Sus" came from people playing the game Among Us.

"Stan" came from just Twitter in general, and was inspired by an Eminem song.

And terms like "Karen" and "woke" and "flex" and "fire" and "slaps" and "yeet" and "lit," all came from black culture. Slang is kinda like the NBA – it's a lotta black people.

It's not just slang words that are memes, every word we speak is a meme that triumphed in the great meme battle royale. The English language, and every language, is a mega-remix of mouth sounds from around the world.

You're paying attention so well. Here, have another meme.

Think of memes like this. Everything you do and then share with the world is a meme.

The gestures you make, the clothes you wear, the jokes you tell, the dances you dance, the emojis you type, the tweets you post, the thumbnails you create, the clickbait you write, the phrases you speak, the nonsense you share.

These are all things we copy and share and modify. They're all memes.

It's our natural drive to copy from each another that creates memes and creates culture. We love to copy and we love it when others copy too – just not from us, more on that later.

Why do we love copying? Why do we love copying? Why do we -- okay I'll stop.

To explain, let's go to the movies.

Title: Part 2: More of the Same But Different

Popular films are all about copying. Pretty much all of them are new versions of old stuff. They are sequels, remakes or adaptations, and that includes prequels, reboots and spin-offs, which are just rebrands of the same things.

Of the top ten box office hits of 2021 thus far, nine of them are sequels, remakes, and adaptations. "Jungle Cruise" is sorta original but it's also based on an amusement park ride -- as most great films are.

Congrats to "Free Guy," the lone original movie in the top ten! Here have a Leo meme.

The domination of sequels, remakes and adaptations is not new. From 2012 to 2021, 92 out of 100 of each year's top ten hits are either sequels, remakes or adaptations. And in four of these years, it's every single film in the top ten.

We have an endless appetite for... more of the same but different. We don't just want the same thing over and over, but we definitely like things more familiar than unfamiliar.

Clip from Free Guy: IPs and sequels. That is the thing that people want.

We've got nine "Fast and Furious" movies and counting.

We've got seventeen Batman films.

We've got 36 Godzilla movies.

We've got roughly 300 Dracula films – I couldn't count them all.

And some movies and shows are now adaptations of fan fiction, stories written by fans based on their favorite characters. If you think that kinda sounds like all fictional writing, yeah, it is.

Oh, and the video you're watching right now is my second time doing this series. Or perhaps third, it's debatable.

Even when movies and TV shows aren't sequels or remakes or adaptations, they're still designed to be like other movies. They stick to the rules of genre, a tres bon French word.

Genre films give us familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.

When you watch a genre movie, you expect certain things. Just like someone playing a new Role Playing Game expects a quest where they level up their stats, someone watching a genre movie expects the story to deliver the standard elements of the genre.

If it's a sports movie, well, the teams gotta suck really bad. They've gotta be truly pathetic, then there's a new coach, but more humiliating losses, then a montage, then a string of wins, then the brink of defeat, then maybe an inspiring speech, then triumph in the end or at least a moral victory.

All genres come with these sorts of rules, these sorts of expectations. The movies don't have to do all these things, but they gotta do most.

The genre that now reigns supreme above all others is the superhero genre. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has grown to become the highest grossing franchise in cinema history, at over 23 billion dollars.

Superhero films are built around... superheroes. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

All superheroes are similar. Like they all have trademark powers. Superman flies and he's crazy strong. Wonder Woman is also super strong but she also has really weird equipment too, like an invisible jet but she wasn't invisible. She was just a soaring seated person.

Sidetracked sorry. So they all have special powers. They protect the public and do good deeds. They have a dramatic origin story. The bad guy is like a superhero but evil. And their costume is kinda like underwear/suit-of-armor/scuba-suit/fetishwear.

And yes, this clip is from a real Batman movie.

But above all, superheroes are all about justice... of the fist. They fight... a super lot. Endlessly. It's they're thing. They could definitely de-escalate more often.

Sorry, sidetracked again.

When we watch a superhero movie, we expect all this stuff and more. Even movies and shows that subvert the traditional genre, still honor these rules.

The character of the superhero is actually the only thing that defines the superhero genre. Superhero films can be a variety of genres--as long as there's a completely mind-numbing amount of fighting. Do they have a daily face-punching quota they need to get? Sorry I keep doing this. But seriously, what is wrong with you people?!?!

Anyway, superhero films can be different genres and "Avengers: Endgame" actually has scenes in multiple genres. There's even a moment that feels like a quirky indie film.

Beyond the character of the superhero, these movies aren't aren't that different from any popular film. They aren't that different from Frozen or Moana or Dune or The Hunger Games or The Lion King or Avatar or Harry Potter or The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings or The Shawshank Redemption or Ground Hog's Day or The Godfather or The Silence of the Lambs or Spirited Away or Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland or Seven Samurai or To Kill a Mockingbird or It's a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz.

All these and loads more are just versions of what Joseph Campbell called The Monomyth or The Hero's Journey, a series of common plot points found in myths. This underlying structure has been used around the world since prehistory.

Superheroes are simply the newest, most sophisticated, most spectacular, most face-punching-est version of this ancient formula, the mother of all genres.

Genres are sets of loose rules that define different types of films. Writers and directors play a game with the viewer where they follow these rules or twist them or outright subvert them.

All movies build on the movies that came before them. In a way, all movies are sequels.

Here is what we want.

We want characters we know, we went stories we know, we want the familiar. Why?

We want familiar things because we use old things to understand new things. Just like you use words you know to understand words you don't know, we use old stories to understand new stories.

Douglas Hofstadter argues that: "(We) make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known..." (Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter)

Hoftstadter claims this process of analogy is "the fuel and fire of thinking."

One of the ingenious abilities of humanity is seeing connections between similar but different things. At the very core of the human imagination we are seeking similarity, we are comparing new things to old things in order to understand them. And we understand new stories better when they are made to resemble old stories.

And now, here is the point of all this.

Jurassic Park clip: Hold on to your butts.

The reason memes and sequels and genres are so overwhelmingly popular is because they make new information easier to understand. They play to our desire for familiarity. And just like we understand new things by building on top of old things. we create new ideas by building on top of old ideas.

When we consume, we mostly consume more of the same but different. And when we create, we are mostly creating more of the same but different.

There is only one way to start creating and that is to start copying.

Some of the most innovative, influential and popular films did a lot of copying.

"Star Wars" pioneered a new genre of science fiction by merging together sci fi with adventure serials, westerns, war films, and samurai films.

Quentin Tarantino's early films clearly copied elements from countless other films.

Jordan Peele's "Get Out" followed the template of "The Stepford Wives" and transformed the feminist horror-drama of the original into a nightmare about secretive racism.

And the best superhero film was created in this same way, by remixing ideas from the past to create something that is both new and familiar. That film is-- I am so sorry, that is not the right clip. That film is "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."

"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: All right, let's do this one last time.

"Into the Spider-Verse" is inspired by a pair of disrespected American art forms that have conquered pop culture: hip hop and comic books.

The movie has a strong spirit of early hip hop and uses a kind of sampling throughout. It copies from live action film, from 2D and 3D animation, and especially, from comics.

First and foremost, Into the Spider-Verse is a movie version of a comic book.

All the graphic elements of comic books are here:** the panels, speech balloons, captions, these squiggle things, words for sound effects. This trope is so old they made fun of it in the Batman TV show from 1966.

Into the Spider-Verse loves the printed quality of comics. Like it uses Ben Day dots throughout. These small dot patterns are used in printing to create different colors. Roy Lichtensteinn did a version of them at large scale and made them a style.

There's actually a lot of dots in the movie. The portal to the multiverse is inspired by the dot patterns created by Jack Kirby.

The movie also uses misregistration, which is when printed colors didn't quite line up. It's used throughout to create blur. Sometimes it kinda looks like a 3D movie without the glasses.

Into the Spider-Verse is strongly influenced by classic hand drawn 2D animation and anime.

The film uses lines to create definition, which is typical in 2D but rarely done in 3D films.

Even more unusual, a lot of the animation is done "on the twos", that means the characters move on every second frame, which is how classic animation was done, and it gives the movement a sharp, snappy feel.

Lastly, the movie pulls lots of techniques from live action film.

There's a lot of roaming camera movement. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is the biggest influence on this style in modern film.

There are timelapse shots. Requiem for a Dream was innovative here.

There's even zooms, which is when the camera doesn't move and the image just gets magnified. This was a popular technique in the seventies, especially in kung fu movies.

You can't really point to anything in this movie that is original.

"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: How many more spider people are there?

And yet the sum total is original. What makes Into the Spider-Verse unique, fresh and innovative is its combination of influences.

And the film isn't the isolated creation of a single genius. It's the product of many, many, many artists and writers, who draw from the deep lineage of Spider-Man stories and copy countless ideas from comics, movies, music and art.

Copying is the wellspring of all creativity. This is where it all begins. As we copy and copy and copy, our own voice and our own style emerges.

Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has said: "Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.”

First we copy, then we create. Stephen King began writing by copying the text from comic books into his notebooks. "At some point I began to write my own stories. Imitation preceded creation..." (Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft)

18-year old Olivia Rodrigo has been harshly criticized for copying from other artists. But this is what every artist must do. And sometimes young creators will go too far. Would we prefer that they not go far enough.

But copying alone is clearly not the answer we seek. There is obviously a lot more going in great creative works than just copying. How does the magic happen? How do innovative ideas emerge from the seemingly derivative act of copying?

We find out in Part 3.