Late Capitalism

ahouseoflies:

In 1993, a young Edgar Wright cut together this clip, and it’s making the Internet rounds this week. Most of the posts I’ve read have complimented the foresight Wright had to be editing what we would now call supercuts nearly twenty years ago.

That’s true, but what immediately struck me is that the video is a product of tedious VHS-to-VHS editing. He had to fast-forward deck one to the part of the movie he wanted to record, then play it in real-time and record onto deck two, then pause deck two and start all over again. And that’s before he overlaid the sound and put in the titles. Even though this was done in a professional editing suite—the first deck would have had faster forwarding than a consumer player—this was the frustratingly linear type of Sisyphean task that only a complete nerd would have taken the time to do.

I know this because I used to do the same thing. (All-Valley Karate Tournament into Always Be Closing into Jaws Exploding, anyone?) I had a similarly misspent youth marked by analog technology. If you were forced to do something similar, you appreciate this a lot more. When people cut this type of video today, the result might be more comprehensive and technically perfect, but it requires a fraction of the time and dedication.

Why does this matter? Because if everything’s easier to be dorky about, then everyone is a dork, which means no one is truly a dork. Being a geek in a certain discipline used to mean isolation. For example, Wright tells us that this took a long weekend to make. And if Wright explained the absurd process to, say, his mom, she probably smiled and thought he was crazy to do all of that for a four-minute clip. Today she would have spent a long weekend doing something equally obsessive and unproductive. The best parts of our culture used to be built upon this type of uncool obsession, but the sacrifice behind it has been replaced with that brand of consumption being looked upon as sort of cute. Being a nerd is no longer a dirty little secret, so it loses a lot of its power and cachet. This is sort of the thesis behind Patton Oswalt’s astute essay “Wake Up, Geek Culture: Time to Die,” but Wright’s video seems like a perfect reminder and illustration of how true that sentiment is.

[Note: Wright requests that you re-post his contextual explanation if you embed the video. Normally, I would ignore something like that, but I respect him a lot.

“So as promised, here’s my 2nd mash up that I edited on VHS at the tender age of 19.

As with ‘Gun Fetish’ it’s a movie montage set to The Beatles, but this time detailing vehicular mayhem.

But it was edited the same way, locked in the tiny VHS suite at Bournemouth & Poole College Of Art & Design over a long weekend.

The VHS tapes were mostly ones I have recorded off the TV, ones I had borrowed from the college library and what few retail titles I had.

Now, you’ll see a fair amount of overlap from the last montage, obviously, but also quite a few new and some fairly obscure clips.

I’d also say I didn’t have access to some of the key pre 1993 car films at the time, indeed some of the best car chases in cinema I’d yet to see. One I had seen, but could not source the tape at the time (with my limited supply of material and a student bank account deeply in the red) was 1968′s ‘Bullitt’.

Yes, that’s right ‘Bullitt’ is not present. Any commenting ‘No Bullitt? FAIL’ or complaining that the split track audio or video are not perfect, can go fuck themselves. Or send a handwritten note back to the 19 year old me in Bournemouth, Doc Brown style.

Think of this as an exercise in the early 90′s in cutting together car chases without “Bullitt”. I basically made these for myself and to figure out how to edit.

This one is also not completely safe for work and has some spoilers again.

Apologies to any rights holders, I was young and foolish, I didn’t know what I was doing. Please don’t arrest me, I will take it down and step away from the keyboard if necessary.
And that’s it. There is no more.

P.S. To restate, I’m going to enable embedding of the video — but if you do re-blog it, would you mind quoting my blog text too, context is very much king! — Thanks Edgar”]