By Aurore Antoun
The rise and ubiquity of social media in the twenty-first century is accompanied by the staggering abundance of memes. Memes are texts, images or videos that are copied and spread rapidly on the internet. There can be different variations of the same meme, and they are most often humorous and relatable. The very flexible and changing nature of memes allows them to be understood by anyone with access to social media. Memes can be about news events, celebrity events, natural disasters, athletes and anything that might interest anyone in so many different parts of the world. Moreover, memes can be about movies or TV shows. Sometimes, when a movie is “memeable,” i.e has scenes that are eccentric or funny, screenshots are snagged from it and dispersed on social media. These memes can become a subtle form of advertisement to the movie itself, and possibly increase its viewership and popularity. In this essay, I will first focus on the “movie memes” and their evolution, and then move on to discuss their possible power to attract a bigger audience to the movies they are about.
The rapid and far-reaching spread of memes contributes to their many variations and their evolution to new meanings. Originally, the screenshots that are snagged from movies and turned into memes still relate, through the captions, to the movie or TV show itself and are generally reactions to it. The meme becomes an iconic message where you need some sort of cultural knowledge to understand it, according to Roland Barthes in his book Image, Music and Text. In order to get the meme or the joke, you need to have watched the movie or show.
This meme, taken out of the very popular TV show, Game of Thrones, features a character that is very evil and associates him with Covid-19, which is also a nuisance, to say the least. This meme is not understandable if someone hasn’t watched the show and knows who this character is. However, the images from movies or shows can very quickly detach from the context and take on very unrelated meanings that convey funny reactions, feelings or punchlines. After the movie has lost its hype and has been forgotten, the meme continues on and keeps circulating and changing until it becomes difficult to trace back where the screenshot was taken from. Take this example of a snapshot taken from the movie The Great Gatsby featuring Leonardo Di Caprio, a movie that came out in 2013. This screenshot, with a caption that does not relate to the context of the movie at all, still lives on and is widely used until today, transcending the film itself.
This concept relates very closely to Barthes’ notion of the linguistic message, also discussed in his book Image, Music and Text. He argues that in the days of mass communication, the linguistic message is present in every image and it helps focus the gaze and understanding of the image. Memes, with different variations of texts, take on very different meanings and contribute to removing the screenshots out of the context of the show or movie.
Moving on, the concept I want to focus on is to what extent movie and TV show memes attract more audience and contribute to an increase of viewership. The 2018 Netflix Original movie Bird Box starring Sandra Bullock is a great example to notice the effect that memes have as a kind of advertisement or publicity. Bird Box centers around a post-apocalyptic Earth, where people need to cover their eyes when they go outdoors because seeing the entity that hovers outside leads to the character’ insanity and eventually suicide. Thus, they are always wearing blindfolds as protection. Bird Box is rated 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb which is a pretty average score, a score that does not explain Netflix’s own published stats that the movie amassed a total of forty five million views in the seven days following its release. Many critics are suspicious of this number and wonder why Netflix, who is notorious for not giving out stats, chose this specific movie to brag about and not others that are higher rated. Many argue that Bird Box’ viewership comes from the very rapid spread of memes that relate to it, especially the ones featuring a snapshot of Sandra Bullock blindly rowing a boat. The clumsy actions of the “blind” characters obviously became a cause for mimicry on the internet. According to Alyssa Bereznka in a The Ringer article titled The Bird Box Effect: How Memes Drive Users to Netflix, the prevalent Bird Box memes on all social media platforms made it hard for users to avoid it. Some memes could not be understood if a person didn’t watch the movie. This relates to Guy Debord’s concept of situationism in Society of the Spectacle, where people watched Bird Box because of external factors like the memes and the fear of missing out they instill in mass media users, and not because they themselves enjoy this type of movies, for example. This intentional or unintentional function of memes does benefit Netflix or any media producer economically by influencing people through mass media to watch their new releases and to alter individuals’ perception and towards their products. Watching Bird Box might have become a necessity for social media users in order to fit in. This link between mass media and the economy, where media content becomes a need for users to consume, benefiting large corporations, is discussed extensively by Guy Debord in his book Society of the Spectacle. Personally, as someone who hates horror movies, I did feel like I had to watch Bird Box because everyone was talking about it and sharing memes about it. The memes became so popular that many critics also accused Netflix of paying meme makers or creating bot accounts on twitter to share Bird Box memes as a form of publicity or marketing strategy for the movie.
This prevalence of memes and their contribution to the increase of viewership is very common surrounding Netflix TV shows or movies like the more recent YOU series and Squid Game. Memes have become a primary form of communication in mass media, one that is understood by virtually anyone who is present on the internet. It could be a very powerful tool for subtle marketing of movies, TV shows or even products.
Bibliography
- Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana, 1990.
- Bereznak , Alyssa. “The Bird Box Effect: How Memes Drive Users to Netflix.” The Ringer, Jan. 2019.
- Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1967.
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