thinking a lot abt success of Baby Yoda & Gritty versus the manufactured unpleasantness of things like Baby Nut and the lesson is, I think, that of the lead casket:
you cannot fake chaos; you must risk ugliness; give and hazard all
you cannot fake chaos; you must risk ugliness; give and hazard all
a lot of this links to kawaii theory - that the truly cute must be a little ugly - but i think it goes to some of the stuff I was trying to say in that Babadook is Gay piece a few years ago: it only works if it exceeds the capacity for marketing to contain/control its meaning
Baby Nut has risked nothing; it is empty ZOMG Epic Bacon garbage, and the public can smell it.
(baby yoda's charm will evaporate when he becomes marketable, as soon as toys hit the shelves - his energy is in the thousand ways he moved laterally, landed unexpectedly. He felt underloved, and so the public loved him.)
(this is also why Herzog intervened so specifically - because of course the corporate impulse was the exact wrong one: to CGI away the lumpy imperfection of the puppet)
anyway, authenticity is everything: if you can fake that, you're set
(unfortunately i have tweeted what should probably have been an essay, so the usual point-scoring decontextualized QT dunks have already arrived. Of course all of these are huge corporate ventures; I just think there is a pattern to which work and which do not).
The question when we do our screenings is always "will you be doing this again?" and i do not think that is ever answerable, bc the point of a meme is its potential energy cannot be measured until it is exhausted: it has work to do we can't see til it is done.
exactly so!
book to read abt this is Ngai’s, which posits cuteness is understandable firstly as aestheticization of powerlessness, and if we sense the object does not need our love (that is, power), we will feel betrayed by it.
Baby Yoda needs us; Baby Nut does not.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-za…
Baby Yoda needs us; Baby Nut does not.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-za…
(this image makes some of these points faster than i did i think)
