‘Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark…’, I whisper to myself as I gaze upon another meme in my mind palace, twisting and turning it in every which way, decoding the multiplicity of the lore and irony stacked in it, thinking about how nice it would look on my Instagram grid. ‘What do people see when they look at my Instagram grid?’, I wonder. ‘Do they notice the care and tenderness with which I cultivate it, making it so that it looks perfectly aligned with the datafied viscosity of my virtual persona?’ This is cringe. I am cringed out.
remain is anyone’s guess. Why has Patrick Bateman persisted as an icon online? Why does the black and green cyberspirituality of the Matrix go so hard ? Is Barbenheimer the hero we deserve? How does the grid – the feed, the For You page, the Explore page – fit into meme culture and how do we unpick its haunting of contemporary visual culture?
Sara Bezovšek works through some of this memetic abundance in
A Life of Its Own , a series of experimental movies in the form of scrollable web pages. These pages, housed on [permanent beta], are cascading rolls of digital found footage, ranging anywhere from a 10-hour YouTube playlist of
The Lord of the Rings music, a recipe for Bilbo Baggins’s birthday cake, to screenshots of movie merch and Patrick Bateman GIFs. Each web page seeks to reconstruct the plot of an oft-memed blockbuster, namely
American Psycho ,
The Lord of the Rings ,
The Matrix and the internet phenomenon of
Barbenheimer , which refers to the simultaneous release and marketing of
Barbie and
Oppenheimer in 2023. The experience of scrolling down a stable web page, not a For You or Explore page, is both nostalgic (for a millennial like myself) and disquieting. The sheer amount of visual content presented by Bezovšek, all without the numbing aid of an algorithm or a feed to dampen the blow, feels out of this time.
Screenshot 2024-09-20 at 13.55.52.png 4.38 MB Bezovšek’s process of collecting and collaging digital objects is indicative of the postmodern sensibility, as the
introduction to the work notes. However, the case studies, especially
American Psycho and
Barbenheimer , guide the visitor beyond late capitalist postmodernity into the blurred and immediate style of ‘too late capitalism’ of the ‘circulation forward economy’
[1] . In the case of
Barbenheimer , the memes, Twitter discourse, merchandise and instances of memetic marketing assembled by Bezovšek feel highly decontextualised, as they are exhibited outside of the algorithmic visual regimes we are used to. The objects on each web page exist in conjunction with each other, in curated harmony, facing the visitor and themselves in ways that feel unnatural yet comforting. The linear order of the images follows the clearly demarcated narrative boundaries of each movie plot. This sequential, finite image feed is at odds with the everyday experience of platformised content consumption, which can feel chaotic, confusing and overwhelming in its seeming irregularity.
Plucked out of the artist’s personalised content pipeline and imagined otherwise, these images allow for a peculiar encounter with internet time as a linear and bounded experience that is generally out of reach for the average platform user. In
A Life of Its Own, the endless stream of content
is capped with a thematic focus, manually catalogued and presented as a
finished thing . Platformised culture is ordered mainly through algorithms that work to present platform users with cyclical, looping bouts of content which appear to make sense as an extension of the virtual self. Our growing desensitisation to data surveillance seems to be connected to this promise of infinite personalisation, despite constant and unfolding issues surrounding data privacy, censorship, digital nudging and so forth. In reality, most of the content we see belongs to the global genre of digital banality, the kind witnessed in Instagram reel holes which suck you in and spit you out empty-headed and discombobulated two hours later, leaving you with nothing but fleeting memories of fail videos.
[2] This infinite nothingness of the algorithmic feed stands in contrast to the finite and purposeful visual experience imagined by a single content custodian, the artist. Yet as I scroll down the
Barbenheimer page, I feel that
The Algorithm , a folkloric depiction of algorithmic recommendation systems on platforms, still haunts the work.
[3] This semi-mystical interpretation of a platform affordance leaves its affective trace on much of digital-born media today: the ghosts of the platform are haunting screenshots of memes, tweets and TikToks through familiar fonts.
Screenshot 2024-09-20 at 13.54.43.png 3.45 MB The GIFs in Bezovšek’s work lack this mark of the platform, as they are often subtitled movie scenes. In contrast to platform screenshots and videos, GIFs look decidedly millennial and feel Web 2.0. To me, they represent a simpler time, an internet-past where cultural connections were more direct, less draped in networked lore. Hyper-aware, hyper-ironic memes, such as the ones of American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman in A Life of Its Own , are best understood in connection to other memes and meme cultures. The standalone movie GIF can be timeless whereas the meme is part of a wider folkloric imagining bearing traces of its discursive and aesthetic travels. Through careful ordering, Bezovšek points towards Bateman as a sort of communal projection, a character that creates parasocial connections across its user-generators. These kinds of memes are harbingers of a new digital cultural sensibility whose main engine is unpaid cultural producers generating memetic autotheory. A useful way to explain this practice and its various complexities is the case of Patrick Bateman’s trajectory as a digital folklore character towards a seemingly ironic archetype of the lone wolf, or the sigma male . Before we do this though, I would like to introduce what I mean by autotheory.
Autotheory is a literary style that blends personal narrative, self-reflection and critical theory. This style, most notably characterised by the personal essay in contemporary discourse, is, on the one hand, exalted as a messy yet democratised and emotionally vulnerable mode of culture. On the other, it draws ire from some well-known literary critics
[4] , who regard it as a messy
and uninspired, navel-gazing form of writing. In queer-feminist literature and academia, autotheory is regarded as a practice that takes its starting point from lived experience and therefore has revolutionary and subversive power within a field largely dominated by monkish reclusion from ‘real life’ worsened by Ivory Tower elitism. Vulnerability, self-disclosure and reflexive positionality (being aware of your position in societal hierarchies) are seen as valuable and ethical elements of socially conscious academic research and literature. The idea is that we, instead of starting from and arriving at faraway abstractions, can connect our theory-making to real life and most of all, to the self. Critics of this genre however have argued that the personal essay, for instance, declares style as politics. Similar arguments have been made about the academic use of personal testimony for research, and to this day, there are academics who loathe the style and academics who find autotheorising to be an indispensable tool to imagine more just and equitable systems.
the self as is, the unabashed centrality of the author in the work expresses a sort of narcissism that is quite common in digital cultural production.
We have all heard the argument that everyone is a creator online, that we are all now user-
generators because of the platformised transformation of the internet. As a result, the boundaries between real and internet life have become blurred, and we now mostly exist as hybrid people living in the physical and the virtual realm at the same time. This blurriness is echoed in the melding of the edges of real life and fiction in autotheory and personal essays. This general ‘blurred condition’ combined with the so-called ‘libidinal economy’ of social media platforms then shifts us from mere user-generators and ends up making ‘memoirists of us all’
[5] . Now people on social media platforms are highly comfortable with narrating their lives and inner thoughts through their posts, videos, captions and stories. On the platform, oversharing is the default state of the highly online cultural producer. But how does this cultural obsession with autofiction and what Anna Kornbluh calls ‘first personalism’ relate back to memes and Patrick Bateman? The answer lies in the fact that memes are, now more than ever, a medium for autotheory and as such, constant memetic self-narrativising.
Any scroll down Instagram or even TikTok evidences this growing comfort with self-disclosure: think story times, relatable sketches, hyper-aware memes. ‘Dunking on yourself’ is a surefire way of getting likes without the ever-present danger of getting hate for being too confident, delusional, or
delulu in TikTok vernacular. Memes in particular are the ultimate mix of the genre of autotheory and personal essay, the kind you can ‘write’ in less than half an hour. Those memes which take ‘ironically’ relatable characters from blockbusters as their main narrators are particularly rich media objects if we want to understand the self, politics and style in contemporary digital culture. Certain actors, such as Keanu Reeves, Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale tend to depict a certain kind of postmodern masculinity in their films that make them specifically well-suited for memes that deal with everyday insights and thoughts on the ‘introverted straight male’ or colloquially,
the sigma male .
Screenshot 2024-09-20 at 13.57.08.png 5.14 MB These memes seem to be some kind of communal, folkloric projection of a unified sigma male voice that emerges out of a fast-paced, bountiful and self-narrativising memetic culture. The many meme-makers, or user-generators, find themselves represented in the kind of subjectivity communicated in movies such as The Matrix , American Psycho and even Barbie (a movie which is an intentional pastiche of memes itself). In return, they make the characters speak for them and those like them, through a crowd-sourced, memetic vernacular voice, which presents a way of thinking and seeing yourself with others . Let’s take Patrick Bateman’s trajectory from literary character to cult movie figure to memetic narrator of sigma maleness to understand this digital folkloric practice and its discontents.
In memes, Patrick Bateman is a self-standing wojak unmoored from his literary and filmic unity. He is a stand-in for a crowd of wojaks, sigmas, lone wolves who believe in their weirdness as well as their specialness. If we speak of the ‘lure of the meme’, the lure of Patrick Bateman is the ironic narcissism that he represents as a character in digital folklore. Neo from The Matrix also does this, albeit with a disassociated twang. Neo is chosen, special, individual but his specialness comes from a place of omniscience, he knows better. Neo is a doomer, a chooser of the red pill, while Bateman chooses the blue and rejoices in his own artifice. That is the punch line , taking the blue pill is simply funnier – it’s postmodern, y’know.
Bret Easton Ellis, the author of
American Psycho , is known for his own brand of autofiction and his penchant for irony. His books and ideas about the world emerge from a highly contextual setting, both temporally and societally. He takes on what he knows best – narcissism, the 80s, America, rich assholes. His characters, including Bateman, fit into this context and offer cultural critiques and social truths about the topics the author writes about. In the book, Bateman is a ridiculous villain, one that is offered up to the readers to revile, to laugh at, to dismiss. But to relate to? Perhaps not. His relatability develops over time and squarely within the bounds of the platform, outside of the book and subsequently the movie. Patrick Bateman is a figure beyond his literary origins, he completes his personhood online and on meme pages. These days, he appears most commonly in memes, particularly in TikTok videos making the so-called ‘sigma face’. These videos have millions of likes across platforms, simply because they depict an idea of masculinity that hordes of highly online men and boys (and sometimes women, too) find to be relatable or funny – but only ironically, of course.
Screenshot 2024-09-20 at 13.59.54.png 6.66 MB The sigma face, a furrowing of the brows and pursing of the lips in ironic smugness, is a gestural meme that is part of a wider memetic ideology and genre of humour perhaps best described as the ‘sigma mindset complex’. In meme culture, a sigma male, or a man who has a sigma mindset, is assumed to be a heterosexual cis man who is an independent, powerful introvert. The “sigma, alpha, beta” rhetoric emerges from a now debunked study of wolf pack hierarchy
[6] taken to extreme political lengths online. This hierarchy initially applied to animal behaviour was adopted by incel communities online to explain sexual and social dynamics in contemporary Western society. The framework then became common folkloric knowledge for many internet users and later entrenched itself within meme culture. It is difficult to say who engages with this framework ironically and who does so genuinely. Suffice it to say that it has had an impact on how highly online people understand so-called sexual hierarchies and in particular, the relationship between romantic desirability and masculinity. This hierarchy is something along the lines of:
Alphas are strong and healthy men with leadership qualities who can provide for their family. By contrast,
betas are weak men who are content taking a backseat in life. They are weak-willed, accommodating, and depicted as being socially progressive.
[7] The sigma mindset, on the other hand, describes a kind of masculine personality that is easier to aspire to than the alpha personality, as it values independence, a rich and nuanced inner life and a quiet strength that may not be immediately visible to the average passerby. In fact, the idea is that a sigma would not even want to be a part of any social hierarchy. The sigma is ‘rugged individualism’ in meme format, he is the
lone wolf .
For instance, characters that Ryan Gosling has played in movies are often seen as primary examples of this sigma male personality, such as the unnamed protagonist in his 2011 film Drive or Officer K who is the main character of Blade Runner 2049 . These characters are people who do not speak often, and who deal with life’s problems internally and matter-of-factly without leaning on social support. Ryan Gosling, for one reason or another, is great at depicting this calm strength and rich inner life that people believe are important characteristics of a sigma. A Reddit user even goes so far as to ask on the aptly named subreddit r/moviescirclejerk : ‘Anyone else feel really betrayed when Ryan Gosling plays non-sigma characters?’ If you are starting to think that this description does not exactly fit the character Patrick Bateman, you are right. In an interesting and contradictory turn of meme culture today, Patrick Bateman, who is rather a ‘failed alpha’, appears as one of the faces of the seemingly ‘positive’ sigma mindset.
Screenshot 2024-09-20 at 13.59.26.png 6.43 MB Patrick Bateman is a social-climbing serial killer and sociopath. To his own detriment, he is obsessed with social status and weak-willed in everyday situations. He is materialistic and lazy. He talks too much, and with too much artifice and deception. He may have a rich inner life, but it is not marked by a calm and quiet strength. In truth, his life is driven by pathological anger and despair. Regardless of the fact that he does not fit into the sigma framework, Christian Bale’s depiction of Patrick Bateman is still an important visual symbol for the sigma mindset. Bateman should be seen as a pitiful wretch of a person and an exaggerated literary figure that works to demonstrate the ridiculous excess of American yuppies and their greed. Instead, he has been memed as a ‘self-care king’ who uses a multistep skincare routine and exercises a lot. He is largely unmoored from his literary origins and has become a communal, non-ironic projection of young men and boys struggling with values and ideas around manhood, masculinity, love and social mores. Bateman is not a literary or movie character anymore, he is a figure in digital folklore that represents a dark lone wolf, or an ‘evil’ version of Ryan Gosling’s sigma. If the meme is a medium for autotheory today, then Bateman is a vessel to express the worst and most confused parts of the digital masculine psyche.
The sheer amount of memes that Sara Bezovšek has collected and exhibited in A Life of Its Own is a testament to how digital culture expands and in turn swallows other forms of cultural production. The meme is the ooze, it spreads and subsumes all that it touches, shifting meaning and politics into a slippery mess. Moreso, memes become communal autotheory and in the process also start to represent truths about the state of culture. This work’s exploration of the relationship between digital culture and its folkloric practices as well as high budget, institutionalised, mainstream cultural production is particularly thought-provoking. Bezovšek urges the spectator to consider the blurriness of the boundaries between the online and offline, meme and non-meme, film and critique, the self and the collective. All of this, when situated within the growing power and reach of platforms, should make us deliberate if and how blockbusters are in intimate conversation with memes. The vernacular voice emerging out of memes is now in the movies, speaking back at itself within the movie and outside of it. If no movie is safe from the ooze of memes, where does ‘culture’ lie then if not within the grasp of the internet?
[1] Anna Kornbluh,
Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London/New York: Verso Books, 2023), 12.
[2] Asaf Nissenbaum and David Freud, ‘Which Person Walks into a Bar? A Typology of Globally Spread Humor on Twitter’,
International Journal of Communication 15 (2021), 5208–5228.
[3] The Algorithm is a collectively imagined understanding of any platform’s algorithmic recommendation system. This social construction is different from the technical structure of said system, because it is a collection of users’ projections of what they might think the recommendation system is capable of. For instance, content creators feel that they must appease
The Algorithm by posting certain kinds of content within a certain timeframe or else they may be punished by it for their indiscretions (see:
shadowbanning ). The mysterious nature of platform companies’ recommendation systems makes these user projections speculative as well as emotionally charged. We can therefore refer to
The Algorithm as a mystical presence that runs professional content creators’ content-creation decisions.
[4] See: Merve Emre, Andrea Long-Chu, Anna Kornbluh, Virginia Woolf.
[5] Kornbluh, 97.
[6] David Mech,
The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1970).
[7] The
soyjak is a classic representation of beta masculinity.
