Youtube star

The Internet is quickly defining my generation. Perhaps it already has. Our attention spans are shorter then ever and our shock tolerances are through the roof. I am sent links to videos on youtube by friends and colleagues regularly.

The anonymous people that appear in these two-to-four minute clips I rarely recognize. (Unless, of course, they are famous; Crispin Glover on David Letterman, for example.) But often one wall of a bedroom is the only clue one has to a back-story.

The other day, I was sent a video by an old college friend. I recognized the face, lip syncing “Down in Mexico” in the small youtube box, immediately.

I remember being impressed by Bobby when I first got to NYU. He lived on my floor and he stuck out in the barrage of new faces that I was meeting at the time. He was a film student (like me), and he showed me a bunch of movies that he made in high school. They were better than mine; they had more action, more style and, most impressive, he knew how to do visual effects.

In Bobby’s movies, hats exploded in thin air, bullets ripped past the camera in slow motion and it was all very, very exciting. We became quick friends.

Bobby sort of looked like he belonged in the movie Top Gun. Let me rephrase?he looked like he really wanted to belong in the movie “Top Gun.” He was from Los Angeles, wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and kept his hair cut short. I had an, embarrassing in retrospect, eyebrow piercing.

We would often sit in the hallway and talk about ideas for movies. He had just bought a new camera?a Sony XL1 (the hot camera to have at the time). And we started making little things together. Most notably, for me, was a Reservoir Dogs style story; caper goes wrong, a bunch of people get killed and the remaining bad guys try to figure out what happened. I acted in the film and I got to die from many different angles.

I didn’t see him much the next year; we lived in different dorms.

His videos posted on youtube range in style and effort. Some are the old videos I remember seeing in his room freshman year. Some, I recognize from classes. Some are new and involve him staring straight into the camera and lip syncing or talking. One has him sitting in a suit smoking a cigar listening to opera. All are hard to figure out and I am unable to gauge his seriousness.

Since being sent the link, I have become intrigued and have taken to watching every video that he posts. Recently, he has been explaining why he should be famous. He sits, staring directly into the camera, dressed in a black Johnny Cash t-shirt and speaking in a slow deliberate confusion. He uses a whiteboard with a diagram on it to spell out his plans. Somehow, it all stems from a very secretive need for Kathy Grithin to appear in a movie of his that I don’t quite understand.

At times, he gets disoriented in his own plan’s complexity, saying things like “I’m a little lost, I’m not sure if that made sense, but you are starting to get the idea.”

Sophomore year, I remember he went home for a while. I heard through mutual friends that he was having some problems. Senior year, he was back and we had a class together. It was an editing class with Sam Pollard. He seemed distant; I was concentrating on editing, I hadn’t seen him for two years and we didn’t have much in common anymore. I remember Bobby showing something very late in the year. A made-for-TV doc for PBS about depression, starring himself. In the film, he was very open about his battle with depression and I remember it being very hard to give him comments, but feeling like I knew exactly what he was talking about.

It was the last time I saw him until he popped up on my youtube screen a few weeks ago.

I am searching his videos for information as to how he is doing. He doesn’t seem well. But I can’t tell if he’s being serious or kidding. I’m leaning toward serious and it scares me a little.

His videos serve as a reminder of how crazy we feel from time to time, and I realize Bobby’s youtube videos are no different from anyone else’s. It’s reassuring to see someone that we know is a little crazier than we are. The Internet is full of that. It’s probably why we like it despite our short attention spans and our skyrocketing shock-tolerances. But in this case, in Bobby’s case, the only difference is that I know a little bit more about him than the back wall of his room tells me.

- Zachary Stuart-Pontier