I was reading about what Ryan Broderick calls the “Youtuber Hollywood Gold Rush,” the ascendance of YouTube content creators achieving some level of mainstream box office success. The occasion for his discussion is the release and popularity of Obsession (I saw it; I liked it) and Backrooms (haven’t seen it; don’t really want to), both of which were created by filmmakers who got their start on YouTube. Broderick also notes the films Sorry, Baby, Iron Lung, Shelby Oaks, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, Skinamarink, and Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie as the major touchstones in this trend. These films are all situated somewhere on the spectrum from horror to comedy, and these typically low-culture body genres seem relevant to the trend that’s developing. In this regard, I also wonder if Weapons (and before that, Barbarian) belongs in this list as well, as it was created by former WKUK member Zach Cregger, who, while not a YouTuber, certainly shares plenty of sensibilities with Nirvanna the Band or that’s a bad idea (the channel of Curry Barker, director of Obsession). Put another way, I don’t know if this is so much a new media/old media divide (is YouTube even new media anymore?) than it is an aesthetic divide, one that is nevertheless shaped by the technological means by which these genres differently circulate.

Over the past year or so, I have found myself spending more time watching YouTube. The site had never had much of a draw to me, but sucked in, first, by the free releases of Taskmaster and then by sketch comedy channels such as Almost Friday, I became interested in the range of releases on YouTube as well as the high quality of much of this material. Almost Friday, for example, demonstrates the production quality that can go into YouTube videos, and perhaps channels like these relate to traditional film as more than the release of short videos for free online. Rather, the accessibility of equipment that allows a group of friends in LA to emulate Fight Club to Social Network–era David Fincher or any given A24 horror movie (as well as the means to distribute that content easily and widely) seems to establish more continuity than difference between these two realms of culture. The trappings of high culture became the basis for its parody but now have been reincorporated into the dominant form upon which the parodies once fed. Put another way, someone like Curry Barker emulated (and satired) elevated horror until his work simply became elevated horror. This phenomenon is about reproduction and emulation, not simply a difference in circulation or reception.

This is as much the result of shifts in the nature of the horror being produced as it is in the way we consume it. I went to see Obsession in theaters, and I was glad I did because some of the film’s best moments were enhanced by audience reactions (the same was true of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie). This capacity for films to be reacted to, watched, and discussed together is hardly new, but it seems to have had a particular relationship to the genres of comedy and horror throughout their history. These kinds of films are those that are often most enhanced by watching in the company of others. They have also, for these reasons, expanded the scope of film distribution. I would need to do a bit more research to back this up, but it seems like horror and comedy probably make up a substantial portion of direct-to-video releases (if not the biggest portion after porn) and those two genres (along with porn) also drove much of the video production on the early internet. Even before the widespread accessibility of internet video, horror and comedy were already pushing the accessibility of film in new directions and the internet therefore built upon rather than invented this phenomenon.

Paul Valéry, writing in 1928, has a prescient account of this shift in what we now call media consumption:

A work of art will cease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual- or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.

The essay goes on to predict the goods and ills of streaming music, including its irritating ubiquity in coffee shops, and Valéry is one of the main interlocutors for Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (or Technological Reproducibility if you’re freaky). I’ll say a bit more about Benjamin in a bit, but if Valéry’s prediction that works of art will be available “wherever we wish” means that movies will be available on our phones, it should also be true that YouTube videos will be available in our movie theaters. Thinking with Valéry and Benjamin lets us understand the movie theater as a continuation of the living room (or the phone screen) rather than the other way around. For Benjamin, “aura” was always a problem rather than the baseline for understanding a work of art, and one of the things that seems to be befuddling the reception of this new crop of horror, comedy, and horror-comedy films is that they seem to have never had much attachment to aura in the first place.

There’s a scene in Obsession, in which our protagonist Barron and his cursed girlfriend Nikki (the former has used a “One Wish Willow” to make the latter love him more than anything in the world, and unfortunately this wish comes true) attend a party in their best friend’s basement, and it’s fairly unremarkable but for the exquisite monologue delivered in its climax. It feels as though it is shot in the basement of one of the film’s cast members or perhaps an extra. A bunch of friends gather drinking nondescript beers while playing a drinking game. It’s not even a party, really, and this seems key to its function for the film. It’s a setting that appears countless times across various sketch comedy-horror YouTube channels—the plot’s pretense to gather a cast together—and the only remarkable feature seems to be its incorporation into a film distributed by Blumhouse. This scene stands out to me for its mundanity, even its boredom. This basement is not the protagonist’s home, yet it’s not altogether strange. Haunted house movies would focus their attention on one of these places—either the residence in which you are trapped or the extraordinary terror into which you wander. But here, it’s just your friend’s basement, a place you go when you don’t really have anywhere more exciting to be.

Benjamin’s essay documents the effects on a work of art after it can be reproduced and distributed widely. Once upon a time, works of art were magic by dint of their sheer uniqueness, and the specialness we attributed to that uniqueness, their aura. Today (or in 1935), they are mundane, meant to be experienced rather than revered. First photography, then film, expanded (but did not invent) the technological reproducibility of a work of art, and the latter form provides a useful case study for understanding the effects of such a technological shift. For Benjamin, the place of the camera distinguishes film from theater. The actor no longer performs to the audience but to the camera, and herein lies a world of difference: “For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else.” On stage, an actor can dissolve into their character, yet once cameras get involved, it is strangely impossible for the actor to disappear. So often when recounting a film, you will use the actor’s, rather than the character’s, name to describe the actions depicted on the screen. The film industry tries to preserve aura through its cult of the movie star, yet for Benjamin this project was and is always destined to fail as the reproductive form of cinema tends towards the representation of the self rather than the persona. This is perhaps what is so refreshing about a film such as Obsession, in which Inde Navarrette, more or less unknown prior to the film’s release, produces an incredible performance as Nikki. And it is difficult to separate the lack of a cult, star status around Navarrette from the incredible nature of her performance. Film provides the means to estrange the experience of the self, to break it into component parts and therefore rearticulate and reexperience everyday life. By watching actors on screen, we are also watching the ways that we could ourselves act. The mediation of the camera forces such an estrangement.

This is one reason why Obsession is an interesting film for examining this cultural shift. From the unremarkable settings to the unknown characters, it plays on the fact that this is very much a story in which its audience can see themselves. It’s the story of a doomed relationship, of a woman’s agency overwritten by the man who pines after her. This abuse destroys them both, yet the consequences are unequally distributed, to put it mildly. The film’s lack of recognizable stars seems crucial to this point. The star system has always been corrosive, destructive of the very people it hallows, destructive because it hallows. Nikki does not want to be the object of adoration; she wants to be a person, to be loved rather than revered. For everything else it does, Obsession, in this way, provides an allegory for the problem of aura in our present moment. Barron’s inability to genuinely love or be loved by Nikki derives from his imbuing her with something not unlike the aura with which we often invest a work of art. Once he possesses her magically, emotionally, and sexually, this aura evaporates. Barron must grapple with the fact that this is not a relationship but instead his manipulation and control over a woman who was once his friend.

In one bleakly comic scene, Barron calls the customer service line for One Wish Willow to see if he can undo his curse, and the agent informs him, “Just because you chose this for her doesn’t make it less real.” The line sticks with you, and for all of its repercussions within the film’s world, it also informs the shifting relationship to the work of art and its aura today. Aura was always a wish we had for the work of art, a means for us to make it special and to possess it by making it special. There are limits to this allegory with the relationship in Obsession, surely, but on a certain level, the film depicts the revenge of aura, the way that it consumes and destroys the very people who had invested the work of art with aura in the first place.

For Benjamin, though, the shift in film’s technological reproducibility affects not only the representation of the self but also the world that self inhabits. Throughout history, architecture has been the medium of collective experience, and just as film disarticulates the self and its movements, and it is through the analogy of film and architecture that Benjamin understands our reception of a work of art as a matter of habit. Through how we receive the work of art, we understand our reception of the world around us. And here the breakdown between high art and low art, that which demands concentration and that which facilitates distraction, starts to break down. For Benjamin, the public becomes critical at the movies, even without the concentration (is it too cute to call it the obsession?) that a work of art once demanded. “The public is an examiner,” Benjamin writes, “but an absent-minded one.” This need not be a problem, and in fact it is the art lover’s concentration, devotion, and obsession that Benjamin aligns with an asocial behavior, an individualistic relationship to the work of art. The cultivation of critical distraction, of entertainment, for Benjamin, marks a crucial new faculty for the politicization of the masses. By incorporating even the basement hangout into cinema, we might cultivate a critical relationship even to this ordinary setting.

All of this is not to say that Obsession (or Backrooms or Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie) is a great work of art. They are not even doing anything all that new. But it is to question whether they should be. It seems like these are films (or maybe videos, even content) that are asking us to engage with them in a different way. They ask us to let go of some things we have held dear, and I think some of these things may be worth letting go. There are many ways to receive a work of art. One is to revere it; another is to live with it.