Dear Deleuze: YouTube, Dear Sister, and the
Reterritorialization of Media Violence

Randy Laist
University of Connecticut
English Department

One of the most fascinating viral video phenomena to emerge over the last year has been the proliferation of YouTube videos inspired by a Saturday Night Live video short known as “Dear Sister.” In April of 2007, the SNL writing team responsible for the phenomenally popular “Lazy Sunday” skit from 2005 and the Emmy-winning short “Dick in a Box” from 2006 debuted “The Shooting,” a parody of an extremely stylized scene from the season finale of the second season of the television show “The O.C.” In the original scene from “The O.C.,” which originally aired in 2005, estranged brothers Ryan and Trey are wrestling on the floor of a motel room for control of a gun when Ryan’s sometime girlfriend Marissa runs in, picks up the gun, and, when it looks like Trey is about to kill Ryan by smashing in his head with a telephone, shoots Trey in the back.  The dramatic moment is punctuated by an abrupt soundtrack cue, the hypnotic synthpop a cappella chorus of “Hide and Seek” by the British musician Imogen Heap, which plays over slow-motion footage of Trey looking down at his bloody hands to confirm that he has been shot, his intense look back at the girl who just shot him, and his collapse to the floor.  In the Saturday Night Live parody, six people are shot in the course of a three minute skit, some of them multiple times, and each time a gun is fired, the Imogen Heap song plays as the victim of the shooting goes through a slow-motion routine of looking down at his/her bloody hands, trading a look of betrayal with the shooter, and collapsing dramatically to the floor.  The third generation of the meme – the YouTube reiterations of the parody, of which there are hundreds, with more posted every day – reinscribes the same formula of deadly impact, music cue, and slow motion response into an extremely diverse array of contexts.  While most of the videos are simply more or less faithful recreations of the Saturday Night Live skit, other iterations of the meme incorporate it into death scenes from movies, television shows, and video games, while still others elicit humor and/or controversy by reediting documentary footage of real-world violence to make it conform to the “Dear Sister” format. 

The skit “The Shooting” has never been free of controversy.  It originally aired on Saturday Night Live on April 14, 2007, but, rather than being posted immediately to the internet as SNL digital shorts normally are, it was delayed by copyright issues involving the song.  Two days later, on April 16, the deadliest shooting in modern American history hit the campus of Virginia Tech, and the skit, officially called “The Shooting” and portraying millennial-age celebrities such as Shia LaBoeuf and Andy Samberg glibly murdering each other with guns, never made it to NBC.com and was never officially uploaded onto YouTube.  Despite the official withholding of the video by the studio, enthusiastic fans posted pirated copies of the short onto YouTube and on the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, “The Shooting,” or “Dear Sister” as it came to be known in the absence of any official title, was the second-most watched video on that site. 

The popularity of the video is not surprising in and of itself – these Saturday Night Live shorts have become a staple of internet video-sharing – nor is it surprising that there have been many homages and parodies.  “Lazy Sunday,” which has been credited with single-handedly having popularized YouTube itself in 2005, has also been the inspiration for many amateur imitations.¹ But the response to “Dear Sister” has been unique not only because it has been so massive (there are at least four times as many “Dear Sister” videos as “Lazy Sunday” videos, posted in one third of the time), ² but also because it has elicited a meme that is much more flexible, adaptable, and instantly recognizable.  An act of violence is rendered absurd and meaningless by being represented in an extremely aestheticized manner.  Death, which is conventionally understood to be authentic, singular, and human, becomes, through the interpolation of the video editor, clichéd, repeatable, and posthuman.  I argue that the unprecedented proliferation of YouTube variations on this meme in the immediate wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, almost entirely by millennial students who have lived their entire lives in post-Columbine public elementary and secondary schools, and in the foreshadow of future acts of campus gun violence to come such as the one at Northern Illinois University in February of 2008, suggests a collective attempt to negotiate the relationship between the media violence with which American millennials are perpetually surrounded and the real-world violence by which they are perpetually threatened.

The conventional explanation of repetition compulsion as a project of mastery over trauma owes its origins to Freud and his reading of why a child at play or a war veteran in dreams would choose to re-experience a painful memory.  Freud explains, “At the outset, he was in a passive situation – he was overpowered by experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part.  These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory itself as pleasurable or not” (600).  Freud’s psychological explanation, however, does not translate very smoothly into the context of media studies.  Although it is clear that the YouTubers who are reediting acts of violence into ironic commentaries on the mediation of violence are certainly taking an active role in the synthesis of meaning, there is no originary trauma that can be identified as the “experience” which the YouTube videos repeat.  What the videos repeat is only another video, which is itself a repetition of an earlier video moment.  In fact, the absence of a trauma at the center of the traumatic experience is itself the most striking feature of the “Dear Sister” meme. 

In Freudian psychoanalysis is a system of hierarchies; the original lords over the repetition just as tyrannically as the father lords over his sons.  The power of the traumatic episode is a kind of psychic interiorization of the power of a domineering father which can only be vanquished by the power of the domineering analyst.  In the new media, however, “conventional concerns with power and politics are reworked … so that the notion of super-powerful media industries invading the minds of a relatively passive population is compelled to recognize and address the context of more widespread creation and participation” (Gauntlett).  Rather than a unidirectional influence from corporation to consumer or from traumatic episode to compulsive repetition, the YouTube reiterations of “Dear Sister” recall the conceptualization of repetition as it is articulated in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.  In that work, Deleuze reverses the Platonic centrality of transcendent identity and advances a metaphysics of difference and variability.  Whereas for Freud, repetition signified the mechanical drive of life to return to an inorganic state, Deleuze imagines repetition as a creative act of “becoming” and “mutual de/re-territorialization.” A repetition is not an original mystery in disguise: the repetition or the disguise is there from the first.  Disguises are “the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts” (17) and simulation “is that system in which the different is related to the different through difference itself” (277).  A Deleuzian field-theory of meaning according to which identity takes the form of an interaction of differences is eminently applicable to second-generation digital media.  “YouTube is presented in multiple modalities … reflecting the convergence and intertexuality of media, implying that meanings of produced texts … are constructed by relating them to other texts” (Digital Youth Research).  As an alternative to conceptualizing the post-Virginia Tech “Dear Sister” videos in Freudian terms of trauma and mastery, therefore, the Deleuzian model of repetition as creative resynthesis provides more nuanced insight into the manner in which these videos engage and reterritorialize the culture of media violence.

The most fundamental field of difference which all of these videos negotiate is the relationship between death in its existential character and death as a mediated image.  The “primal scene” from “The O.C.” itself exemplifies the transformation of the meaning of death through the implementation of video editing techniques.  When referring to this scene as “primal” or “originary,” it is necessary to use scare quotes, not only because many of the YouTubers emulating the parody of this scene have never actually seen the “O.C.” scene itself, as is clear from their posted comments, but also because the “O.C.” scene is itself an echo of thousands of other scenes in movie and television history in which two men are struggling for a gun.  The dialogue is as typical as dialogue could be; everything is “stock,” plot, language and character.  But when Trey is shot, the startling soundtrack plucks the scene out of hyperbolic melodrama and gives it a very distinctive quality that exists in the contrast between the soundtrack and the narrative situation.  If the narrative situation is typical, dangerous, and desperate, the soundtrack is ethereal, distanced, and electronic.  The song seems to exist independently of the scene, the way an iPod feeds the same song into your ear whether you’re watching a sunrise or a car crash.  In both the words and the mood of the song, there is a posthuman repositioning of the moment from the tussled blur of ordinary experience to the transcendent distance of the machine.  Death and guilt and passion become repositioned by the perspective of the soundtrack.  The song very much artificializes the narrative moment, but the moment was already so artificialized that the uniqueness of the song actually elevates the television moment into a new conceptual register.  The deliberate stylization of the scene is reinforced by what continues to happen after the song starts playing; the close-ups of intense looks as the characters slowly realize what’s happened, Trey’s actorly response to having been shot in the back at close range, the slow motion slump to the floor.  The deployment of an unusual soundtrack transforms the moment into a memorable piece of video art on the subject of the aestheticization of violence.  Trey dies a death that has been arranged by production designers; it is a highly unnatural death, a kind of television death, a computer death, a YouTube death.  In fact, it’s actually no death at all; Trey starts off season three in a coma, but soon recovers.  The story of “The O.C.” goes on, but the scene remains behind, in the limbo of television memory.

Two years later the scene becomes the inspiration for Saturday Night Live’s “original parody.” The most basic joke is that people who remember “The O.C.” moment will enjoy the recognition of something that they may not have thought about for years but which is instantly recognizable.  This kind of quotational humor according to which simple reference to an obscure but memorable media moment is inherently funny is ever more common in the age of increasingly dense media structures; the quotational joke discloses and rewards the audience’s own psychic investment in those structures.  But in “Dear Sister,” this joke is wrapped up in a more elaborate, almost Borgesian narrative that has nothing to do with “The O.C.” As the scene opens, two guys are sitting in a room.  They are not struggling for a gun, but having a casual conversation.  Keith tells Dave that he’s writing a letter to his sister.  “It’s weird,” he begins to confess in a disarmingly intimate way, “because I haven’t seen her in a long time and …” Bang, cue the music and the familiar sequence of slow-motion camera shots; Dave has shot Keith a propos of nothing.  When the familiar refrain of the song has elapsed, Dave stands over Keith’s corpse briefly before … Bang, cue the music and the familiar sequence of slow-motion camera shots.  Keith has recovered sufficiently to shoot Dave.  A third person comes into the room, saying “I just thought of the funniest thing,” and he is shot by both Dave and Keith; then, the eponymous sister shows up to be similarly gunned down.  Every time a trigger is pulled, the song starts over again, along with the choreographed response of expressions and images.  Two policemen enter and one of them reads the letter that Keith had been writing.  “Dear sister, By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.  This is how I think it will happen.  Dave will shoot me, then I’ll shoot Dave, then Eric will enter and get shot by Dave.  Then you’ll come in and get shot by Eric, Dave, and me multiple times.  Love, your brother Keith.” In a post-script, the letter goes on to predict that the two cops will then shoot each other, and just as one of the cops begins to laugh at the absurdity of the prediction, he is shot by his partner, whom he then shoots in turn, and now there are two overlapping tracks of the song playing simultaneously as both cops collapse to the floor in slow motion.

Beyond the simple pop culture reference, the skit introduces the theme of repetition into its appropriation of the “O.C.” scene.  The comic version reinforces the original scene’s impression of having reconfigured a human moment into an aesthetic and electronically mediated spectacle.  But whereas the artificiality of the “O.C.” scene is an extension of the artificiality of the entire narrative, “Dear Sister” imposes a very stark continuity between the ordinariness of guys hanging out, talking about their issues, and making small-talk one moment, and then suddenly acting out the roles of televisual killers and murder victims in the blink of an eye, as instantaneously as a gunshot, a cut from one camera shot to another, and the abrupt soundtrack cue.  The humor relies on our appreciation of the difference between ordinary life and televisual death.  But in the comic excess of repetitions of the same joke, the skit also comments on the repeatability of aesthetically mediated death.  The kind of death played to this soundtrack is a kind that can be repeated over and over again, predictably into infinity in a mechanical loop.  The same way you can keep pushing the play button on your iPod to get the song to keep starting over and over again, so people can get shot repeatedly, and the horror of the accumulating bodies is comically mitigated by the repetition of the music.  The song that had given an unusual pathos and uniqueness to the shooting of Trey in “The O.C.” now becomes an ironic signifier of the anonymity and comic reiterability of televisual death.

The narrative device of Keith’s letter that predicted this absurd concatenation of events serves to redirect our understanding of the time-sense in which this kind of repetition occurs.  In the same way that “Dear Sister” is an echo of “The O.C.” and the scene in “The O.C.” is itself a repetition of an infinite ancestry of love-triangle shoot-em-ups, the shootings in “Dear Sister” are not originary events, but echoes of a prediction already cast in writing.  The deaths of these characters are always already reiterative, simulacral, and hyperreal.  In an ontological atmosphere characterized by this bottomless precession of images, the motivations of characters are rendered irrelevant by the demands of the medium: their deaths are scripted in advance, just as they are standardized and endlessly reduplicated in post-production.  The humanist-existential notion of death as meaningful, unique, and transcendent is systematically eliminated from the world of “Dear Sister,” and, in the process, a meme is born; the bridge to “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap becomes a kind of aural modifier capable of transforming any media representation of death into a commentary on the artificiality of media representations of death.

The YouTube redramatizations of “Dear Sister” extend its sensibility of aestheticized death into the bedrooms and dormitories of millennial YouTubers.  Most of these videos are strikingly unoriginal.  One might expect some unique twist or witty reappropriation of the SNL skit’s content, but if they are not direct reproductions of the original skit, they are generally pretty uneventful.  Someone is doing something – studying, playing Guitar Hero, talking on the phone – when someone comes in and shoots him or her, cue the music.  Then the one who was shot shoots the first shooter, cue the music, then someone else walks in and is shot, the music starts again, and so on until the amateur drama troupe is out of friends.  It’s a kind of postmodern cops and robbers shoot-em-up game, without good guys or bad guys and without any moral narrative.  Everyone in these videos is a Meursault who kills without reason, out of a profound moral vacuum.  To the extent that these videos are inspired by anything, it is by the opportunity to become a part of the joke.  The frisson-inspiring contradiction in each case is the superimposition of the space of absurd media violence against the ordinary living spaces the actors inhabit.  In the same way that the game of Cowboys and Indians turns a suburban backyard into the Wild West, so the “Dear Sister” game converts your parents’ living room or your frat house’s common area into the absurd existential landscape of media violence run amuck, a kind of televisual space of motivationless homicide, rendered especially humorous in post-production by the incorporation of slow-mo effects and of course the signature soundtrack.  Everyone who posts such a video on YouTube is well aware that, in contributing their own video to the hundreds of others like it, they are participating in a massive project of repetition; of “The O.C.,” of SNL, of each other.  The fact that these videos are being enacted in the wake of the real-world shooting in Virginia, the perpetrator of which was himself “quoting” an earlier school shooting, which itself “quoted” an allusive vocabulary of media representations of mass shootings, establishes unsettling parallels between the “real” world available at YouTube.com, the “real” world available at CNN.com, and the “real” world in which the YouTubers act out and edit their own mass-murders.  To create and post a “Dear Sister” video is to engineer a personal continuity between these various spaces, while simultaneously preserving an ironic and satirical recognition of the difference inherent between physical death and media-managed death. 

Another genre of “Dear Sister” videos extends the joke of formulaic media death out into the sphere of popular culture by singling out tragic moments in movies, television shows, and video games and reediting them to include the Imogen Heap song and, sometimes, slow-motion effects.  In some cases, these videos clearly represent a commentary on the superfluity of media violence.  Every time the gun shoots, the song starts again, so the conceit becomes a way of keeping track of how many bullets are fired, and works best with an all-out bloodbath, such as the final scenes of Bonnie and Clyde or Reservoir Dogs.  The mechanical inauthenticity of the tear-jerky editing of the death scenes, the supposed empathic filmmaking that the slow-motion close-ups and plaintive music are supposed to communicate, is undermined by the mechanistic repetition, as if pulling the trigger of the gun were the equivalent to pressing a button (again, again) on your iPod.  Death, especially violent and tragic death, is one of the most common spectacles in American television and film, and yet the filmmaker’s challenge is to make each death unique and meaningful.  The “Dear Sister” meme contrasts the manufactured empathy with which movies portray death against the mass-murderous abandon with which Hollywood slaughters its creatures.  In other videos, the satire is directed more at the original text which is being supplemented with the O.C. soundtrack.  Frequently, as in the “Dear Sister” versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, the slow-motion effects are already there in the original image, and the YouTuber has merely replaced one manipulative soundtrack with another.  This incarnation of the meme seems to be intended to demonstrate the underlying formularism of texts which have become so canonical and ubiquitous that their dependency on formulaic devices has become difficult to perceive. 

But these videos also seesaw on the brink between parody and homage.  Both readings are evident in the blog responses of other YouTube members.  While one viewer comment might read a “Dear Sister” video as an effective indictment of the formulaic schlockiness of the original visual text, another will express admiration that the addition of the Imogen Heap song unironically supplements the emotional impact of the original narrative moment.  The differentiation between critique and homage seems to lose its appropriateness at such an intricate level of self-referentiality.  The culture of violence that makes death and murder so normatively a component of media narratives is simultaneously revealed, satirized, and perpetuated in these videos.  It is also impossible to avoid the impression that these YouTubers take a kind of sadistic glee in becoming themselves the authors of these characters’ demises.  In the process of creating and posting a “Dear Sister” video, the YouTuber becomes his or her own administrator of media death, the gatekeeper of all the contradictions between politics and Dadaism, between moralism and aestheticism, and between celebration and critique of media violence.

Inevitably, the “Dear Sister” videos incorporate not only movies and television shows, but also filmed historical events.  The Zapruder film gets the “Dear Sister” treatment, as does footage of Bill Buckner’s famous error from Game 6 and the clip of the “Don’t Tase me, Bro” guy getting tased.  There are at least two “Dear Sister” versions of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.  Of course, the double-impact of that event lends itself to the repetition element of the “Dear Sister” meme, and the stunned reaction of 9/11 onlookers invites a formal parallel to the stunned gazes of the participants in the “O.C.” shooting.  In a way, “Dear 9/11” seems like the inevitable, final permutation of this meme, as if, with this video, the joke has run its course and exhausted its possibilities.  As a moment of spectacular media violence, 9/11 subsumes Virginia Tech, Columbine, and Oklahoma City as the supreme metonym for filmic-televisual trauma.  Incorporating the familiar 9/11 footage into the “Dear Sister” formula provokes reflection on the relationship between real-world atrocity and the electro-mechanical reproduction of atrocity. 

Although most of the viewer comments to the “Dear 9/11” videos angrily condemn the joke as tasteless and crude, many others address the manner in which the montage challenges categories of response.  One writer suggests that what is exploitive to one viewer may be therapeutic to another; “I don’t know it jus [sic] depends on the person if they see this as Terrible or a way to help the bad memories of 9/11.” Another clarifies that the target of humor is not the event, but the conventional representation of the event; “I’m not laughing at the fact that people died, but the way in which the idiot media and US Government over dramatizes [sic] everything.” Yet another writer challenges the applicability of moral sensibilities to the activity of video editing; “Sure it’s sick and twisted, but is it morally wrong to show the tower getting hit with the OC music over it?” Each response represents an attempt to negotiate the open-ended suggestiveness and ambiguity which are inherent in the genre of short video itself and are magnified by this particular juxtaposition of a national tragedy and a dumb joke. 

Just like the videos themselves, the responses participate in the project of working through the diverse and contradictory meanings of living in a culture of media violence.  The “Dear Sister” meme is a kind of cognitive tool for examining the difference and the lack of difference between the trauma in our lives and the trauma we experience televisually.  Toward the end of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains that “The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be interjected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate – namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death” (293).  In their repeated juxtapositions of consumer culture and casual atrocity, the “Dear Sister” YouTube videos participate in the reterritorialization of images of media violence, discovering new syntheses and differences through the strategy of repetition.  Rather than signifying a Freudian death drive, the inventiveness and variety of these reiterations, their multiple and circular networks of referentiality, and their interactive jouissance all suggest a recycling and a regeneration of the digital image-world, accomplishing to some extent Deleuze’s sense of the role of art in consumer culture. 

Notes

•¹“In the weeks after ‘Lazy Sunday’ hit, YouTube’s traffic increased by 83%” New York Magazine. “Three Easy Steps to Comedy Stardom.” Adam Sternbergh.  7/16/2007.  http://nymag.com/news/features/34738/

•²A YouTube search done on 5/14/2008 yielded 259 results for “Lazy Sunday SNL” and 1,680 results for “Dear Sister SNL.” “Lazy Sunday” debuted in December of 2005 (29 months ago) and “The Shooting” premiered in April of 2007 (13 months ago).

Works Cited
•Deleuze, Gilles.  Difference and Repetition. NY: Columbia, 1994.

•Digital Youth Research.  “Informal Learning and Social Development of American
Youth on YouTube.” http://www.digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu.  2006.

•Gauntlett, David.  “Media Studies 2.0.” http://www.theory.org.uk.  2/24/2007.

•Freud, Sigmund.  “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Freud Reader.  Peter Gay, ed.
NY: Norton, 1989.