I Don't Know James Rolfe
Folding Ideas
0:08 I feel a certain amount of kinship
0:11 with James Rolfe we're basically the same age we
0:14 both went to film school we both ultimately
0:17 found ourselves making videos about media for YouTube
0:22 Better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd
0:24 James has this behind the scenes video that I
0:29 can't stop thinking about AVGN Behind the Scenes
0:32 and Nerd Room Tour 2021 There's just so much going on with it there's a light
0:41 stand suspended from the ceiling with craft wire
0:44 a cable hole made in a desk by attacking it with a drill like a slasher
0:49 villain the whole thing begins with an awkward
0:52 disclaimer that the audio is being recorded
0:54 from a different microphone just off screen than
0:58 the one that's immediately apparent I I recorded this entire
1:02 video and realized this mic is not plugged in the shotgun mic is plugged in then
1:09 there's the tripod James expresses a desire
1:12 to keep things out of his way tripods light
1:15 stands and such to maximize floor space
1:18 in his studio A worthy goal I can empathize
1:22 with as I sit here in a veritable forest of aluminum and steel but then he shows
1:29 his solution a tripod head secured to a strip of lumber by two mismatched scraps
1:36 of wood it is a wrong thing a cludged-together
1:41 precarious mess whose wrongness is intuitively apparent even
1:46 to those who have little familiarity with the equipment
1:50 of film making this thing ruined my life
1:55 in the way that only the inexplicable decisions
1:59 of strangers can why was this made why was this made this way what was
2:06 happening that created the circumstances that led
2:09 to this being made the way that it
2:12 was made many of the solutions being shown off
2:15 in the video seemed counterproductive solutions to inefficiency
2:19 more inefficient than the original problem this Glimpse behind
2:24 the scenes paints a blurry yet still identifiable
2:27 picture of a process of endless maintenance a forever
2:32 war James Rolfe is engaged in against
2:36 the twin belligerent of entropy and James Rolfe he
2:40 includes a captivating outake from the recording
2:43 of his 2021 video Shrek Fairytail Freak Down where
2:47 he's tied to a chair and trying to hold an onion in his mouth like a ball
2:52 gag he loses his grip on the vegetable
2:54 and lashes out in frustration cursing the onion
2:57 cursing the ropes cursing Co cursing the lack of hands to help boy I wish I
3:04 had a crew wish we didn't have Co and all this[ __][ __] it is a sincere
3:11 frustration honestly more compelling than the video it's
3:15 from but it betrays a lack of foresight
3:20 a lack of planning and its inclusion feels
3:24 rhetorically misplaced this rhetorical confusion marbles throughout the Studio
3:30 Tour repeated shoutouts given to his multi-channel Network
3:34 Screenwave a seemingly out of left field defense
3:37 of his wife April and a laundry list
3:40 of one-off projects consuming his time James says
3:44 he'll be addressing some complaints in his words
3:47 of the assholish variety which suggests that there's
3:51 something more going on but why say these things
3:57 why make these admissions I thought I knew
4:02 the Angry Video Game Nerd I distinctly
4:04 remember huddling with my film school peers around
4:08 a computer in 2006 laughing over chronologically confused
4:12 and mentally noting that the inevitable had begun serving
4:16 video over the internet was on the cusp
4:20 of viability and the web was already developing
4:24 its own vernacular internet videos weren't just the happen
4:27 stance of virality anymore or out of context
4:30 Clips forwarded via email or repurpose clips
4:33 of shows and movies they were things being made
4:38 for the internet and everything was about to change I may not have been the most
4:45 Ardent fan but it was impossible to not know about the Angry Video Game Nerd
4:50 and by extension James Rolfe The Man Behind
4:54 the pocket protector as The Story Goes James Rolfe was
4:58 a pioneer of New Media while he arguably
5:01 spawned the entire genre of angry reviews and undeniably
5:06 set the tempo for thousands of creators he
5:09 set himself apart from the crowd by being a trained filmmaker having a leg up
5:16 on the skill sets of lighting sound and camera
5:19 work even as YouTuber became a real career
5:23 he never really seemed to embrace the identity
5:27 always seemed apart from it as his peers
5:32 would often detail he wasn't a YouTuber he
5:35 was a filmmaker but how could I square
5:39 that reputation with this admission of his process
5:43 with the light stands arduously suspended with craft
5:47 wire in lieu of a $15 scissor clamp James
5:52 says his camera work has grown stagnant claims
5:56 that it frustrates him most of all before detailing
6:00 an insistence on disassembling an entire rig
6:03 to move from the prompter to the tripod rather
6:06 than using a quick release plate or investing
6:09 in a second camera body only to then
6:13 minutes later admit to having a second camera
6:17 body this made me keenly aware of one thing above all I do not know James
6:28 Rolfe having glimpsed something of his Oddities the distant
7:25 Spectre of the man gripped me with a hunger
7:28 for comprehension a compulsion to know more
7:31 fortunately he had already offered me more in 2022
7:35 James self-published his Memoirs and autobiography A Movie
7:40 Making Nerd circumstances being what they are
7:43 I feel a reintroduction is necessary between 2004
7:47 and 2006 fresh Film School grad James Rolfe
7:50 created a Trilogy of short skits where he played
7:54 a stereotypical nerd complaining about old Nintendo
7:57 games the character lampooned something that James saw
8:01 as inherently funny his friends getting intensely angry
8:05 about video games his university buddy Mike Matei thought
8:09 they were hilarious and in 2006 uploaded
8:11 the videos to the fledgling YouTube where they would
8:15 see enormous success compelling James to make more
8:18 of them and creating what we now know as the Angry Video Game Nerd the brand
8:24 and format coalesced quickly and has remained largely
8:27 unchanged for 20 years for the seventh video
8:30 MC kids their friend Kyle Justin wrote an absolute
8:33 earworm of theme song that is honestly somewhere
8:36 between 40 and 80% of the reason that we're
8:41 having this conversation in the first place [singing]
8:46 'He's gonna take you back to the past' Mike,
8:51 an avid retro gamer with an extensive collection,
8:54 would feed James material and manage logistics like web hosting,
8:58 maintaining the YouTube channel,
8:59 securing partnerships with outlets like Screw Attack,
9:02 and James would handle the video production.
9:05 The show’s comedy hinged, and really still hinges,
9:08 on a combination of acidic vulgarity,
9:12 casual violence, and an excess of juvenile machismo.
9:18 this game is worse than a Mischief Night prank Mischief Night is throwing
9:21 toilet paper all over someone's yard
9:22 this game is the equivalent of throwing toilet
9:24 paper after you wiped your ass it's as refreshing as a horse's anus[ __]
9:28 The Crow up it's bird ass and[ __] you you[ __] clown face Joker
9:32 Kiss makeup wearing King Diamond Beetlejuice Alice
9:35 Cooper Marilyn Manson[ __] but it wasn't
9:39 James's first creation James did not apparate EX nilo in 2006 and a movie
9:46 making nerd is an opportunity to delve into that prehistory Now is as good
10:00 a time as any to mention the odd conflict that swirls around James.
10:04 He has attracted a not-insubstantial audience of cankerous hate-watchers,
10:09 self-styled truthers, who have made a hobby of disseminating what
10:12 they see to be the “truth” of James Rolfe:
10:15 that he is a man of hubris, ungrateful for his success on YouTube,
10:19 and dismissive of the very fans who gave him a career in the first place,
10:25 alternately a know-nothing failure of a filmmaker
10:28 or a cuckolded visionary who could
10:30 have had it all if he hadn’t been laid low by his bitch wife.
10:34 I am far from the first person to ask
10:38 the question “who is James Rolfe?” James is,
10:42 by reputation, personally extremely offline,
10:45 he values his privacy and sees social media as a distraction from his craft,
10:50 tries to keep his personal life personal.
10:53 That is an admirable quality, but it’s also not a hard line.
10:58 Obviously I’m holding his self-published autobiography.
11:03 Whatever secrecy James enjoys by not dropping selfies
11:06 on the gram every day he makes up for with infrequent,
11:11 but overwhelming trips into his personal affairs.
11:14 He may not go often, but when he goes he goes big.
11:18 And maybe that is why it has wormed its way into my brain.
11:22 Not all of the fascination with the historical arc of the AVGN is odious.
11:28 There is something profoundly compelling about James:
11:32 people who become aware of his quirks find themselves enthralled.
11:37 anyway that's all I have to say for now
11:40 there's 10 more videos to make on this subject
11:42 but that's James Rolfe and the dvx100 People
11:45 talk about James in a very specific way,
11:48 my friends talk about James in a very specific way,
11:52 and I have developed a very strange, adversarial relationship with that.
11:58 The cultural impact of AVGN is undeniably far reaching,
12:01 he is without question the direct inspiration for many,
12:07 many imitators and derivatives.
12:09 AVGN set the tone that all YouTube reviews
12:12 would in some form or another respond to.
12:15 Two decades on the cultural impact of AVGN is deep in the DNA of YouTube.
12:22 But it is also likewise easy to overstate
12:25 the uniqueness of The Angry Video Game Nerd,
12:28 as though James captured something that would have never otherwise existed.
12:34 The concept of media critique as entertainment did not begin with James Rolfe.
12:41 “The bottom line is this: Swamp Buggy Racing is one of the most
12:45 inexplicably bad pieces of software ever mass produced for the consumer market.
12:49 Do not buy it.
12:50 Do not rent it.
12:51 Do not even pick up the box.
12:53 I’m going to go launch the game one
12:56 last time to get screen shots for this review,
12:58 and after that I’ll be giving the game
13:00 disc to the four-year-old who lives downstairs
13:02 so he can turn it into a colourful Frisbee.” 6% PC Gamer, May 2000 Classic.
13:11 Basically as long as the review has existed as a literary
13:15 form writers have sought to make them entertaining for their own sake.
13:21 Even disregarding that long legacy, the DNA of the Angry Video Game Nerd follows
13:26 in a lineage with Siskel and Ebert At the Movies,
13:29 Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Stomp Tokyo, and Seanbaby dot com.
13:34 Culturally AVGN was right in line with Penny Arcade.
13:38 In 2006 Jerry and Mike were entering their eighth year of success
13:43 with a webcomic whose comedy hinged on acidic vulgarity, casual violence,
13:48 and an excess of juvenile machismo,
13:51 a formula that had proven so successful they were able
13:55 to spin it off into its own expo in 2004.
13:59 There were many people putting out the same kind of material as James,
14:05 but his filmmaking background gave him a critical
14:08 advantage in the early days of YouTube.
14:11 Simply owning a digital camera and having a basic grasp
14:15 of audio separated him from his competitors filming on webcams.
14:20 James Rolfe was perfectly positioned, and by coincidence,
14:23 struck an iron he didn’t even know was hot.
14:28 Like all YouTubers, he got lucky, he got insanely lucky.
14:34 While the early YouTube subscriber numbers look modest by modern standards,
14:39 JamesNintendoNerd was briefly the eighth largest channel
14:44 on YouTube in 2008 with 125,000 subscribers, and the channel’s three,
14:50 almost four million modern subscribers are respectable but somewhat mundane,
14:56 the subscriber numbers don’t betray just how popular the Nerd really was.
15:03 By the time the AVGN movie was announced
15:07 in 2011 the channel had nearly 300 million lifetime views.
15:12 He didn’t just have viewers, he had fans,
15:17 passionate fans who made fan art, not just fan art, fan video games!
15:23 It is no overstatement to say that the Angry Video Game Nerd was a phenomenon.
15:31 The book is structured around James’s career as a filmmaker,
15:35 taking it as a given that James is, in fact, not a YouTuber.
15:42 Even AVGN is conceptualized as a Cinemassacre production,
15:45 just one of the many things that James has made.
15:50 James has been making movies since he was 8 years old,
15:53 and in the telling of the story James chronicles his career
15:57 from that point through film school to the first performance of his band,
16:03 Rex Viper in October 2021.
16:05 The shocking thing, really, is how absent the Nerd is in the book,
16:09 to the point It’s hard to articulate how little weight is given to the subject.
16:15 You learn more about what James thinks of the film Wavelength
16:20 than you do about his thoughts on the web show that is,
16:27 holistically, his career.
16:39 Wavelength is a 1967 experimental short film,
16:42 created by Canadian multi-disciplinary artist Michael Snow.
16:46 Wavelength as a film is relatively easy to describe but difficult to explain,
16:51 it functions as something of an ink blot test for critics as the way in which
16:55 you go about explaining it will inevitably betray
16:58 something about the way in which you approach film.
17:01 Some critics praised the film as the Birth
17:04 of a Nation and Citizen Kane of underground films;
17:07 while other critics heckled the film and many walked out.
17:11 Michael Snow, for his part, found this hilarious.
17:14 Wavelength, like many avante-garde films, is what you bring to it.
17:18 Is it a 45-minute long shot of a wall,
17:21 or is it a film about film and its relationship to time?
17:25 That is an exercise for the viewer.
17:28 This versatility has allowed the film to be used
17:31 as a foundation for complex discussions in film theory.
17:33 But despite its importance,
17:35 Wavelength is perhaps better known as a foil for students,
17:39 the archetype of heady, pretentious films to endure in film school.
17:44 Students prime themselves to reject the film,
17:47 but even in rejection, they engage with Wavelength.
17:51 The only constant in watching Wavelength, is the act of viewership itself.
17:56 You must physically experience the film to understand it.
17:59 If Wavelength could be said to have a core theme, it would be reflection.
18:04 The film uses boredom and frustration to force the viewer to engage.
18:09 A wandering mind is in its own way an intended response.
18:14 The viewer is compelled to reflect on their role in proceedings,
18:19 their role as a viewer.
18:21 The movie, in essence, holds a mirror up to the audience.
18:25 In cursing the time lost, and in describing their tortuous experiences,
18:30 even the most checked-out students unknowingly engage with the film’s ideas.
18:36 That is the unique power of Wavelength.
18:39 Even in rejecting it, the viewer learns something about themselves.
19:01 James’ profile as a filmmaker is ultimately dominated by his one feature film,
19:06 crowdfunded in 2011, shot in 2012, and released in 2014.
19:11 Summer 2024 will be the tenth anniversary of The Angry video Game Nerd:
19:16 The Movie, a truly bizarre and intriguing piece of outsider art.
19:22 All movies are miracles, but this one is a bit more of a miracle
19:26 than most- by all rights it should not exist.
19:29 The production was troubled in all the ways that productions are,
19:32 and then on top of that in a number of ways that movies typically aren’t.
19:38 It is, on sum, not very good, but that much has been said before.
19:42 It is, as a story, rudderless and confusing,
19:45 an unresolved conflict of creative fascinations,
19:48 external pressures, and foundational bad decisions.
19:52 It’s tempting to get caught in the quagmire of those decisions,
19:56 but for the most part it can all be traced back to boring foundational issues.
20:00 In learning of all the myriad ways in which the budget was poorly optimized,
20:05 in seeing the dated and weak humour,
20:08 in watching an actor who isn’t enamoured with the mythology
20:12 of James Rolfe pronounce the name “Death Mwauthzyx” to little success,
20:16 it’s easy to latch on as though those details
20:19 are the thing that makes the movie what it is,
20:23 but the true problem is much more basic.
20:26 [Mandi] hey now don't get your panties in a wad
20:30 [McButter] I'm not wearing any panties [Cooper] Hot!
20:35 The script was written haphazardly by James and his high
20:38 school buddy Kevin Finn over the course of almost six years,
20:42 originating shortly after AVGN itself in 2006.
20:45 It is trying to be a supersized episode of the web show,
20:49 and a flex of James’ skills as a filmmaker,
20:52 and a self-aware b-movie version of a blockbuster,
20:56 and just something altogether not the web show.
21:00 This is the foundational problem:
21:02 an inability to decide on what the project actually was.
21:06 Without a creative vision, an actual big picture creative vision of what
21:12 the finished product is supposed to be,
21:15 the end product lacks focus, lacks intent,
21:17 lacks the backstop of feedback that would tell
21:20 the two of them that Death Mwauthzyx as the name
21:24 of the film’s ultimate kaiju villain is an in-joke
21:28 between the writers that just isn’t very funny.
21:32 The entire movie bizarrely revolves around the Nerd
21:35 being compelled in some way to review E.T.
21:38 for the Atari 2600, the fragmentary shards of the movie as a supersized episode,
21:44 but clearance for the actual E.T.
21:46 intellectual property was never secured requiring
21:49 the movie to revolve around a spoof instead,
21:52 which undercuts the verisimilitude of the movie as a big budget episode.
21:59 The core plot never makes much sense,
22:02 the motivations of the Nerd are incoherent,
22:04 and the core conflict seems to be that the Nerd doesn’t want
22:08 to review the game because it gave him nightmares as a child,
22:12 which itself appears to be an episode
22:14 lifted from James’ own childhood as a version
22:16 of the scene is one of the recurring nightmares
22:19 James describes in the first chapter of the book.
22:21 The production itself was plagued with indecision:
22:24 James was wearing a lot of different
22:26 hats that placed tremendous demands on his attention,
22:29 requiring a level of delegation that he was simply unprepared for.
22:34 The process stretched out years longer than anyone wanted and left
22:38 James thoroughly burnt out and disillusioned with the whole circus.
22:43 Some AVGN viewers wonder why the film
22:46 introduces two new characters, Cooper and Mandy,
22:50 in lieu of using Kyle, Bootsy, Mike,
22:52 or any of the other day players that featured in AVGN episodes.
22:56 But, like, the answer is obvious:
23:00 imagine Mike Matei trying to act in a feature film.
23:05 No.
23:06 Just… no.
23:08 James himself struggles through the entire film because… he’s also not an actor.
23:15 Like, well, he is an actor in the literal sense,
23:19 he performs a character on camera professionally,
23:22 but he is, and always has been, an actor of convenience.
23:29 The only reason he is the nerd is because
23:32 he didn’t have anyone else to be the nerd instead.
23:37 That’s not to say James isn’t good at being the Nerd.
23:40 It takes work to be a clown.
23:43 James has skills as a performer,
23:46 his ability to suppress his self-consciousness and yell,
23:50 scream, fart, and vomit for an audience isn’t to be downplayed.
23:54 Do you have… any idea how hard it is to get mad on camera?
24:00 There’s a whole instinct of embarrassment, of self-preservation,
24:03 that you need to bury in order to sit alone in a room
24:08 and howl at full volume for an audience that doesn’t even exist!
24:12 They can’t see you, the real you,
24:14 sitting on the floor of your basement debasing yourself for them!
24:18 They’re just phantasms off in the future
24:21 that are going to consume some ghost of you spewed out at them by their phones
24:28 as a crass homunculus of photons and digital audio!
24:33 It’s easy to postulate on what the movie maybe should have been instead,
24:38 a low budget horror movie or creature feature,
24:40 literally just a big budget YouTube video
24:42 in the same vein as the Channel Awesome anniversary specials,
24:47 basically anything other than what it actually was,
24:50 but I have mulled on and dismissed the notion that AVGN:
24:55 the movie is an aberration.
24:58 While there are undeniable conflicting incentives in the mix,
25:01 the whole thing was clearly an extension of the Angry Video
25:04 Game Nerd because that was the thing the crowd would respond
25:07 to, the thing they could raise money for, I think what
25:11 we got is ultimately truthful to James’ instincts as a filmmaker.
25:16 Jame’s earliest filmography has been lost to the inevitable rot of VHS tapes,
25:22 but conveniently the book preserves many of them as anecdotes,
25:26 lessons, and technological milestones in James’ journey as a filmmaker.
25:31 The book, by volume, is mostly concerned with, second,
25:35 the shooting of AVGN The Movie, and first,
25:39 the documentation and preservation of over two dozen home movies James
25:44 produced in the 1990s between the ages of 12 and 18.
25:48 James, from his own telling, draws a lot of energy from being the director,
25:53 which in the nebulous hierarchy of the playground is less
25:58 a creative visionary and more the child who leads the play.
26:03 These home movies, which James pointedly and explicitly calls films,
26:07 are, from their descriptions,
26:09 basically what you’d expect from a child let loose with a camcorder.
26:14 They’re improvisational, loose, unfocused, and shot in linear order.
26:20 In short, filmmaking as a form of play.
26:24 “Getting friends to act wasn’t easy.
26:26 Everyone was busy.
26:27 Next time I got some of them over was “Snix” (1993).
26:30 I quickly thought of a spontaneous story about an ancient warlock, Snix,
26:35 who died centuries ago but left behind a mask (made of paper and feathers).
26:39 In the present day, the mask is discovered and possesses
26:42 my friend with the warlock’s spirit when he puts it on.
26:45 He stalks me and tries to kill me.
26:47 We made up the plot as we went along,
26:49 but it was cut short when his mom called him home to dinner.
26:52 After that, I had to complete his scenes
26:55 by puppeteering the mask in close-ups only, and performing Snix’s voice myself.
27:00 Again, it was complete garbage, but it survived.
27:03 It’s my oldest existing movie to feature
27:05 live actors besides myself and has become, sort of, in a strange way,
27:10 a classic of mine.” His actors were whatever neighbours were available.
27:14 In spite of his pleas, the filming of “Dinomen from D4” (1994) rolled over
27:20 from Saturday into Sunday and had to be abandoned,
27:23 because his friends just didn’t want to do a second day.
27:27 “A Night of Total Terror” (1996) was the first
27:30 movie where James felt his friends wanted to be there.
27:33 It was, in his own words,
27:35 a blatant rip of Raider of the Lost Ark and The Maltese Falcon,
27:38 the MacGuffins of those films replaced with a cursed genie lamp.
27:43 His films eventually settle into a routine
27:45 of James hanging out with a few friends, making stuff they find fun.
27:49 James learned to treat the films with soft hands,
27:52 as his friends refused to learn lines, rarely respected continuity,
27:56 and occasionally would just overwrite the tape and destroy the footage.
28:01 This informed his style as a director.
28:04 James says he likes to work in small crews,
28:07 treating actors as “close personal friends”, and encouraging them to improvise.
28:12 This informal style, where productions are measured in hours rather than days,
28:17 and the enjoyment of the actors is given priority,
28:20 was well suited to the Angry Video Game Nerd series.
28:23 Mike could goof around to make James laugh,
28:26 and it would translate well to YouTube.
28:29 But the AVGN Movie exposed the flaws in James’s filmmaking approach.
28:34 Union actors in Los Angeles don’t want to be the director’s friend,
28:39 and the shooting schedule of Snix Returns does not prepare
28:43 you for 28-days of principal photography for a feature film.
28:47 The AVGN Movie is, spiritually, just another home movie.
28:56 So, I may have misrepresented the book,
28:58 though maybe you already figured this out.
29:01 It’s bad.
29:02 But.
29:03 In the constellation of awful YouTuber autobiographies,
29:05 which range from shamelessly improvisational
29:07 to active attempts to obfuscate crime, A Movie Making Nerd doesn’t really rank.
29:13 It’s not that kind of bad.
29:15 But it is also impressively self-destructive.
29:18 As I went through its pages I found myself tempted
29:21 to make sweeping claims about how James sees the world, how he sees himself,
29:24 but stopped when I realized that I couldn’t tell
29:27 the difference between statements that implied a total lack of self-reflection,
29:31 a mind that still held juvenile opinions 20 years after
29:34 the fact as sincerely as the day they were first formed, and the weak writing.
29:38 Large swaths of the book are very basic in their construction,
29:42 pages of paragraphs of six to seven word subject verb sentences.
29:46 Page 146: The most fun class was acting.
29:47 The instructor was very serious about it.
29:50 He was like a drill sergeant.
29:52 Page 228: The fans take an active role in the movie.
29:54 They’re the ones requesting the Nerd to review the game.
29:57 I think that’s a great thing.
29:59 The fans helped create the idea for this movie.
30:02 But my character, the Nerd, doesn’t want to review the game.
30:06 He feels pressured.
30:07 Page 96 Not all of the assignments were fun.
30:09 Some of them were rudimentary, like painting grey scales or color wheels.
30:13 All were tedious, messy, and basic.
30:15 Some of the textbook classes required writing boring essays to explain
30:19 “why time is like a grain of sand.” In other words,
30:22 do your best to come up with some[ __].
30:25 Over 430 words are dedicated to a failed location scout for a boiler room set
30:30 during the filming of AVGN the Movie that could be funny if it were well told,
30:34 could be a trivial event that details a state of mind or just elicits a chuckle,
30:39 but is delivered with the narrative intensity of a grocery list.
30:43 I don’t doubt that the book is a reasonably accurate accounting
30:47 of factual events more or less in the order that they occurred,
30:52 and that it contains certain insights into James,
30:55 his life, his way of thinking, and his relationship with himself,
31:01 but at the same time I don’t think it can really be trusted for much else.
31:06 It is not a bad thing that it was self-published,
31:09 but it is a keenly present thing.
31:12 It is self-serving, as all autobiographies are, but equally self-destructive.
31:18 The portrait painted by the book is one
31:21 of a stagnant man with limited capacity to self-reflect,
31:24 a poor understanding of how and why things happened the way they did,
31:29 and a general lack of curiosity.
31:32 A Movie Making Nerd compels us
31:34 to conceptualise James not as a revolutionary YouTuber,
31:38 but as a failed filmmaker.
31:42 James Rolfe, the main character of the book,
31:44 reflects back on university two decades after the fact and seemingly
31:48 has no new insights into what his instructors were trying to impart.
31:52 There are no lessons that were obnoxious
31:54 in the moment but made sense years later,
31:57 there is no appreciation for the exposure to cross-disciplinary fundamentals,
32:02 nothing to suggest that being made to draw basic household objects with the cold
32:07 precision of a draftsman gave him
32:10 an appreciation for the geometry of camera optics,
32:13 no reflection that being made to write about film as art, as metaphor,
32:19 gave him tools that he has called on in his nearly
32:24 twenty year career as the host of a show deconstructing creative works.
32:31 He tells a story about a technical exercise in his first year of university,
32:36 an assignment meant to familiarize students with the basic operation of the 16mm
32:42 Bolex cameras that were standard film student tools of the day,
32:46 that he hijacked in order to remake A Night of Total Terror.
32:52 His own framing of the story makes him look like an egomaniac.
32:57 The assignment is to simply use the camera successfully,
33:01 to create an image of literally anything.
33:04 James pitches an elaborate shoot with costumes and lighting.
33:08 The instructor kindly explains that it’s not that kind of assignment.
33:14 James says he found the assignment annoying at the time,
33:19 but on reflection it was really valuable.
33:22 Because it taught him to stand up for himself.
33:25 Because he ignored the instructions,
33:27 showed up on the day with a box full of halloween costumes,
33:31 and hijacked the entire class
33:34 and the instructor just kinda caved because, whatever.
33:40 It’s not entirely clear from the book,
33:42 but the implication is that he spent the entire time as the director,
33:47 no one else got a turn with the camera, they just got to be his actors.
33:54 he let me have my way coaching me through
33:57 the bulky 16 millimeter technicalities but letting me shoot my little
34:00 narrative as intended directing a room full of 20 students
34:03 gave me a positive Rush the energy and excitement was high
34:07 and nobody here was goofing around like some of my younger
34:11 experiences here they were all 100% Cooperative it made me
34:16 feel like a director It’s a heartwarming story about how
34:20 if you just ignore the instructions and disregard your peers you,
34:24 too, can get to feel important for an afternoon!
34:27 He would then re-make A Night of Total Terror again
34:31 in Junior year,his third crack at the story by my count,
34:34 the cursed skull being replaced with a cursed cat statue.
34:38 Seemingly every movie James makes revolves
34:41 around an inanimate object that’s either cursed, alive, or cursed and alive.
34:47 A conspicuous chunk end with the protagonist being
34:51 pursued by a demonic doll or action figure.
34:56 He just..
34:57 He keeps remaking movies he made when he was a literal child!
35:03 If not remakes then sequels!
35:05 There are six Snix movies!
35:07 His most recent crack at something not AVGN related was The Head Returns,
35:13 a 20-year-later sequel to a home movie he made in high school!
35:18 And it ends with James being chased by a haunted doll!
35:23 Boring anecdotes are interspersed with bizarre claims that seem rooted
35:27 entirely in an understanding of the world that calcified decades ago.
35:32 Speaking of high school James states that in 1997 he got into “the kind
35:38 of music you don’t hear as much on the radio” like Metallica.
35:43 Metallica.
35:47 Metallica in 1997 was one of the biggest bands in the world,
35:52 every weirdo nerd our age had a Metallica phase in the mid 90s,
35:58 I had a Metallica phase in the mid 90s.
36:01 Just to seal the absurdity James name drops King Nothing,
36:05 a top 10 single on the US hot 100 from an album that was
36:10 number one in eighteen countries in a decade where people still bought albums.
36:15 If you wanted to communicate the irony of a character in a film,
36:19 someone with a self-mythology of outsider status
36:23 while ultimately being no less in step
36:26 with extremely mainstream tastes you would
36:29 drape the character in a Metallica t-shirt.
36:33 An editor would have caught this immediately.
36:36 The actual substance of the book is largely a chronological
36:40 catalogue of over two dozen of James’ home movies,
36:43 many of which are sequels and outright remakes of his own prior movies.
36:47 In a roundabout way this, actually,
36:50 seems to have been the original impetus behind writing the book,
36:54 or at least one of the books that became this book.
36:59 There’s evidence scattered throughout that large chunks
37:02 of the book are lightly adapted from contemporary documents.
37:07 Though by evidence I really mean James basically says it outright on page 150.
37:12 “Now the trauma has long faded, just as the VHS tapes have deteriorated.
37:17 I never digitized or preserved them,
37:19 since the tapes have no purpose to me outside of the college circle.
37:23 This text is the final preservation,
37:24 which I first wrote down while the incidents were still fresh in my mind.
37:28 It was the catalyst that made me want to write a book in the first place.
37:32 Sure it took decades to finish and publish,
37:36 but those decades have given me plenty to add.” This is… weird, right?
37:44 The admission that this “was the catalyst that made me want to write a book
37:49 in the first place” and that that catalyst was still an animating force in 2019?
37:54 That you’re just adding stuff to something you started two decades earlier?
38:00 Is this autobiography legitimately a project he began in 2002,
38:05 long before the days of his public success,
38:10 and uncritically picked up sixteen years later and just
38:16 started tacking more on to as though the Snix sextology,
38:21 getting suspended for an academic year,
38:24 and launching one of the most influential
38:28 YouTube channels ever are all equally weighted events?
38:33 The trauma he’s referring to is an episode
38:35 that consumes much of the middle of the book.
38:38 Over fifty pages, about a sixth of the volume,
38:41 are dedicated to James getting kicked out of university at the end
38:45 of his first year due to a whole chain of events where
38:49 he had these roommates who were trashing their dorm room and he
38:54 began taping them “documentary style” so they began performing for the camera,
38:59 escalating their behaviour, and then at the end of the year James took
39:03 all the tapes he had of them lighting trash on fire,
39:07 putting holes in the walls, and throwing things out the windows,
39:12 and cut it all into a pseudo documentary which
39:15 he sent copies of to the few other people involved,
39:19 and one of these copies made its way to the dean, who expelled them all.
39:25 The entire episode isn’t completely devoid of accountability,
39:29 he does at times express some remorse for, well, mostly his inactions,
39:35 but these statements are seemingly stapled on, with the vast majority
39:41 of the event is talked about as unfair accusations and guilt by association,
39:46 a thing that was done to him, and he even speculates that the school
39:52 was deliberately malicious in their timing,
39:55 as the letters of expulsion didn’t arrive until
39:58 too late in the summer to appeal before registration.
40:01 He insists throughout that he was just a bystander,
40:04 and doesn’t really contend with the fact that if you point a camera at someone,
40:09 and they turn to the camera and go “check
40:13 this out” before jump-kicking a light fixture until it explodes,
40:18 you are a participant.
40:20 But is all this an expression of a True James, or just bad writing?
40:28 Is self-reflection absent because James doesn’t experience it,
40:33 or is it merely his weakness as a storyteller?
40:37 Is it the lack of an editor to point
40:40 out that he’s ultimately just talking to himself?
40:42 To tell him his emotions, however deeply felt, aren’t making it onto the page?
40:49 The way he talks about unfinished home movies
40:52 from when he was 12 is just really weird,
40:55 because he treats them as completed objects
40:58 that are of the same stuff as everything else.
41:02 AVGN the movie (2014) and Crazy Carnage (1996),
41:07 the sequel to Mighty Joe Rampage (1996),
41:10 left unfinished when the camera battery died, are not strictly treated as equal,
41:16 but it’s insane that they’re being compared at all.
41:20 I keep coming back to Jame’s camera setup.
41:24 The longer I stared at the beast the more it consumed me.
41:29 What was going on?
41:32 Why was it?
41:34 Does he even know?
41:37 Maybe if I built it myself, if I held it in my hands, I could understand.
41:46 Is this the fruit of obsession?
41:48 Is this where compulsion takes us?
41:50 Are the damned and the damnable all doomed to wander to Home Depot?
41:56 Building something kinda the same isn’t enough.
42:00 A half-assed, cynical replica isn’t enough,
42:04 if you build it out of malice you inject it full of all your own prejudices,
42:09 it ends up bad for reasons you’ve created, and it tells you nothing.
42:16 James’ board is planed and square, so my board must be planed,
42:21 squared, and sanded, taken seriously, a good faith replica, not just a joke.
42:29 This thing is very strange to build, physically confounding at times.
42:33 Two strips of scrap wood and some three-inch carpentry screws hold
42:38 the fluid head in place by gripping a flange around the base,
42:42 a thing only possible because of the odd
42:46 profile of the Davis and Sanford FM18 fluid head.
42:49 I’ll admit that by the time my replica was
42:52 complete it felt more secure than I’d assumed from photos,
42:55 but simultaneously precarious.
42:57 I didn’t think it was at risk of spontaneous self-destruction,
43:01 but still there’s a looming sense that I shouldn’t push my luck.
43:07 My screws had already started to bend during the tightening,
43:11 so done was pretty much done.
43:13 The thing I struggled with from the very beginning,
43:16 the thing my brain chafed against like cheap khaki, is that the end goal here,
43:22 a camera head mounted to a board,
43:25 isn’t some far off concept, isn’t some radical use case:
43:30 it’s a thing the thing is already made for, already designed to do.
43:36 Thousands of commenters saw this build and knew,
43:40 immediately, intuitively, that it wasn’t right,
43:43 but plowing through the comments and the commentary of the assholish variety,
43:48 seemingly none of them knew why:
43:50 that the head already has a hole in the bottom for a bolt.
43:54 You can take the lumber and just drill a hole in it.
43:58 In the industry it’s called a low hat.
44:01 Cardelini will sell you one made out of anodized aluminum for almost $600,
44:05 but these aren’t very popular.
44:08 Everybody knows you can get away with $10 of wood and bolts.
44:13 It’s so simple, so straightforward, that I can’t stop making them.
44:19 I keep drilling holes in wood and bolting camera heads to them.
44:24 The thing that’s confounding about it is that this is low-budget filmmaking.
44:30 Like, that’s James’ thing, right?
44:34 Scrappy, low-budget filmmaking, practical effects,
44:37 all the movie magic that can be worked with styrofoam,
44:42 hot glue, some plywood, and a drill?
44:46 So why are his low-budget rigs so… bad?!
44:57 I have been watching Angry Video Game Nerd episodes for days now
45:02 in a tsunami of diarrhea and nostalgia for games I never played as a child.
45:09 I find myself at times uncertain about what it is that I’m actually watching.
45:15 Maybe some of the beauty of internet videos is that it demolished a lot
45:20 of corporate ideas about what genres are and what a show looks and sounds like;
45:25 we now have so many things that never could have existed
45:29 in a framework of network television
45:31 where someone needed to describe their vision
45:34 to a fifty year old man in a suit who hasn’t watched
45:38 TV since he was twelve and convince him to pay for it.
45:43 AVGN is one of those things.
45:46 It is, across time, formulaic,
45:49 but ultimately very loose with its structure and identity,
45:53 and the longer I think on it the less I believe that it’s even a review show.
46:00 I’m probably not the first person to notice
46:02 this, and maybe I’m even late to the party, but it occurs to me now,
46:06 as I psychologically wade hip-deep thought buffalo turds,
46:10 that AVGN is at its heart a skit show that uses
46:14 the premise of video game reviews as little more than a framing device,
46:19 and as such there’s scant allegiance to the games themselves.
46:23 But even that’s not entirely true because that would
46:27 suggest a level of consistency that doesn’t exist.
46:31 Really it would seem that the show is both review and skit in whatever
46:37 ratio James and his co-writers are compelled by at the time of writing,
46:42 though it’s unclear to what extent they are aware of that about themselves.
46:47 The game serves as fodder for jokes and skits,
46:51 and the videos are rarely a comprehensive overview of the subject because they
46:56 just kinda work the material until they’ve got a video worth of stuff.
47:02 It is what it needs to be in order to exist,
47:07 the Nerd was never a sincere expression of James’ obsessions,
47:11 the Nerd was always a character,
47:14 the critiques are as authentic or performative as is convenient.
47:20 Superficially the membrane of performance makes
47:23 AVGN useless as insight into James,
47:27 but the hitch is that James just isn’t a good
47:31 enough writer to divest himself fully from the end product,
47:34 to write wholly and organically in the voice and mind of The Nerd.
47:40 The way that James talks about Wavelength,
47:43 both in the book and in a standalone video as himself,
47:48 is largely indistinguishable from the way
47:51 that the Nerd would talk about Wavelength.
47:54 Wavelength is long, it’s grating, it’s abrasive, it’s boring,
47:58 it doesn’t make any sense, there’s no story!
48:02 They tease you with a dead body but then nothing happens!
48:05 It’s just a picture of some waves on the wall!
48:08 Is that why it’s called wavelength?
48:10 The length of time it takes to get to some waves?
48:18 Why would they do this, what were they thinking?!
48:33 I feel a certain amount of kinship with James Rolfe.
48:36 We’re basically the same age, we both went to film school,
48:40 and we both ultimately found ourselves making videos about media for YouTube.
48:44 We both have an enduring interest in the aesthetics of old media,
48:48 be it VHS camcorders or vintage video games.
48:52 And we both feel the pressure of creation,
48:55 the sense that there’s just never enough time
48:58 to do everything we want to get done.
49:01 better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd James
49:03 has this behind the-scenes video that I can't stop
49:06 thinking about AVGN behind the scenes in nerd room
49:10 tour 2021 there's just so much going on with it
49:14 there's a light stand suspended from the ceiling
49:16 with craft wire a it's not all weird though
49:19 James has all his studio lights on the same
49:22 power bar so he can turn the whole setup on and off at the same time a kind
49:27 of obvious yet still clever trick that inspired me
49:30 to rewire the lights that I have over
49:32 my workbench so so I've got this idea the video
49:35 ends the video ends with James cataloging a Litany
49:38 of reasons why he doesn't have as much time for AVGN as he used to In addition
49:43 to this behind the scenes video James has an autobiography,
49:46 A Movie Making Nerd, which he self-published in 2022.
49:49 These glimpses James allows into his private life have
49:52 become the locus of an entire para-audience of hate watchers,
49:56 the Cinemassacre truthers,
49:57 who have memified and dissected them to truly bizarre levels
50:01 of hostility and entitlement that I don’t particularly care to fully unwind.
50:07 It’s the usual soup of in jokes piled on in jokes piled on in jokes.
50:12 Almost as compelling as Rolfe himself is this community that swirls around him,
50:17 seemingly offended by his continuing existence,
50:20 though they will absolutely take offence
50:23 to that characterization and insist that they’re not hateful,
50:26 fatphobic misogynists, they’re just too edgy for woke soyboys,
50:30 and it is merely their unwavering commitment to free
50:33 speech that compels them to allow the hateful,
50:36 fatphobic misogynists to stick around.
50:38 You know the song and dance.
50:40 Thing is, though, that Cinemassacre broadly has
50:43 provided them with a lot of red meat.
50:45 Mike Matei who handled moderation of the studio social presence for years is
50:49 kind of an edgy[ __] himself who would pick fights go on aimless
50:55 banning sprees and other misbehavior he once posted a photo of a penis
50:59 not necessarily his penis but certainly framed to imply that it was his penis
51:04 to his Twitter account to win a literal dick measuring contest with rowdy
51:08 commenters in the shame-soaked aftermath he
51:10 tried to scrub this event from history and as the moderator of the cinemas
51:15 subreddit went on a Banning spree there which
51:17 led to the formation of the splinter
51:20 sub The Cinemassacre Truth As production of AVGN:
51:23 the movie dragged on through 2013 and 2014 James contracted
51:27 with multi-channel-network Screenwave to manage more of the channel’s back end.
51:32 Now, okay, in the book James mentions that he has not,
51:35 in fact, made his millions, that during the time where AVGN was at its peak
51:41 cultural relevance their ability to monetize that success was pretty spotty.
51:45 Their relationship with YouTube, as a platform, wasn’t the best,
51:49 and while they were able to be grandfathered into the now long-defunct
51:54 Director program and retain their ability
51:56 to post videos longer than ten minutes,
51:58 they weren’t in the first, or even second,
52:01 or even third wave of channels admitted to the Partner program.
52:05 Merchandising, the publication contract with Game Trailers,
52:08 and various one-off contracts provided an income that made
52:12 AVGN viable as a job, but James claims, and I’m inclined to believe,
52:17 that this did not manifest as the kind of wealth drawn in by the likes of Smosh,
52:23 Shane Dawson, and other early YouTube contemporaries.
52:26 James is justifiably proud of AVGN: the movie,
52:29 a film that by all rights shouldn’t exist, that should have fallen apart,
52:33 that very well could have ruined the channel,
52:36 ruined his finances for the rest of his life,
52:40 ruined his marriage, and ruined his friendships.
52:42 A lot of people helped make the movie, but very few championed it.
52:48 AVGN: the movie, for all its faults,
52:50 isn’t the product of a miracle, it’s the product of James Rolfe.
52:56 And it nearly destroyed him.
53:12 So I have this theory that in 2014,
53:14 when the movie did not manifest greener pastures,
53:17 when James realized that he kinda hated making movies at that scale,
53:21 loaded up on credit card debt from finishing the movie,
53:24 someone at Screenwave said “we can fix your monetization problems.” Because what
53:30 follows in 2015 through 2022 is just an absolute frenzy of content.
53:35 Podcasts, clip compilations, panel shows,
53:37 round tables, vlogs, full season videos,
53:40 basically every form of content possible that could either be
53:44 offloaded entirely to an outside editor or would otherwise maximize efficiency,
53:48 stuff that takes an hour to record and forty minutes to edit.
53:52 Cinemassacre goes from publishing a little over one video per
53:55 week in 2013 to publishing five videos a week in 2017.
54:00 In order to facilitate this a new cast of hosts appear very suddenly,
54:05 Screenwave employees who are already on the clock and don’t have
54:09 scheduling conflicts or other jobs that they would need to work around,
54:13 to do a podcast and two panel shows a week.
54:17 People who are convenient.
54:19 Cinemassacre, through Screenwave,
54:20 became visibly extremely corporate extremely quickly, and remember:
54:25 James doesn’t see the channel as “the Angry Video Game Nerd”,
54:29 he sees it as Cinemasscare the production house.
54:33 So while this transition made sense to him, it made less sense to his fans,
54:37 since all of these secondary videos would show up in their subscriptions,
54:42 not just AVGN videos.
54:43 When you see the channel has a panel
54:46 show where James is only an occasional guest,
54:48 the narrative of a corporate takeover, of James “selling out”, writes itself.
54:55 But, like, none of this would matter if it were good.
54:58 If the podcast is entertaining no one’s going to care that Justin and Kieran
55:02 and Ryan suddenly show up out of nowhere or that James isn’t the main focus.
55:07 But it’s not good, because these dudes they bring
55:10 in are a void of charisma with basically no on-screen chemistry.
55:15 Because the reason they’re there is convenience.
55:20 recently I took the old website and I
55:23 made a big document of every single article
55:26 that was on the old website and what YouTube video or it goes to or whether
55:33 that video is like lost and we would have to get it from the sources so
55:37 I have this like huge map and I gave it to Justin and Kieran and all
55:41 of them and they're going to start
55:43 digging through that or having someone dig through
55:46 that and start uploading some of the old
55:48 stuff like the uh like all the turtle Tuesdays
55:51 and all of all of that stuff the goal forgot about those cuz all the WordPress
55:56 stuff and stuff the goal is to get
55:58 monster man that's on there fully and finalized Also,
56:01 like, James just isn’t very good at spontaneous conversation,
56:04 he’s not a strong podcast host, but he’s the star of this show,
56:09 he’s the person people are tuning in for, which
56:12 makes a chatty podcast format a really bad choice.
56:16 It’s a product showing the star of the show in the worst light possible.
56:22 Then there’s James’ dad rock band, Rex Viper.
56:24 Named after a joke character from the Big Rigs:
56:27 Over The Road Racing episode of AVGN,
56:30 Rex Viper is so insubstantial a project that it
56:34 would barely merit mentioning if it weren’t for the fact
56:36 that James and James alone seems to take it
56:40 really seriously and talks about it like it’s important.
56:44 The sum total of Rex Viper is two live performances
56:47 and four music videos for parody songs that are just songs
56:51 from 80s movies with the lyrics sometimes retooled to throw in video
56:55 game references or the instrumentation altered to mix in game themes.
57:00 Eye of the Tiger Electronics.
57:02 Mighty Wings and Hadoukens.
57:04 Nintendo Power of Love.
57:06 I’m gonna be honest, I hate this entire genre,
57:09 I am the last person to give it a fair shake, so I’m just going to move on.
57:14 All of this is easy pickings for truthers:
57:17 whether it be the cringe or the cynicism there’s a lot here to make fun of.
57:22 Truthers even have a name for all it!
57:25 The Slobwave era!
57:26 Get it?!
57:27 Because Justin Silverman is fat and Keiran
57:29 Fallon has that heavy metal look going on.
57:32 Ultimately, though, no matter what
57:34 the Cinemassacre Truth might be accurate about,
57:36 it’s all just a vehicle for ableism,
57:40 fatphobia, sexism, transphobia, and, like, they’re chan trolls,
57:44 it’s not that deep, they are in fact just haters.
57:48 They have a particular hate boner for James’ wife,
57:50 April, for reasons that are complicated, but not complex.
57:53 They’ll frame it that James was dragged kicking
57:56 and screaming from his basement because she wanted kids.
57:59 They cast James as a henpecked husband whose career was derailed by a woman.
58:05 This flies in the face of both everything James has ever said,
58:09 and also just observable reality.
58:11 James and April were together before the first AVGN episode hit
58:14 YouTube- there is no Garden of Eden for Eve to tarnish.
58:19 April has been here the whole time.
58:21 During the filming of AVGN: The Movie she moved with James to LA for six
58:26 months and took on the role of production manager.
58:29 If the movie had one champion it was James, if it had a second it was April.
58:36 But because he describes her as giving him an “ultimatum”
58:38 about having kids they are able to depict it as browbeating,
58:42 vilifying April as a nagging shrew who uses their children
58:45 as a chain to keep James from realizing his ambitions,
58:49 as though it is preposterous on its face that James
58:53 might honestly prefer fatherhood to making videos for the internet.
58:57 One time James and Mike sat down to record a let’s play,
59:00 and James had somewhere he needed to be,
59:03 to pick up his kids from swim lessons or something,
59:06 which gave him a hard out of 5:40 if he was going to get there on time.
59:11 5:40 came and went, James started to visibly panic when he noticed the time,
59:16 and wound up leaving rather ungracefully before
59:19 finishing the LP later in the evening, alone.
59:22 let's break it all right well anyway it we just ran out
59:26 of time because I have to be done at 5:40 right now
59:29 and so what's going to happen is exactly 540 next time you
59:33 see this James is going to beat this on his own uh
59:36 without me cuz the way we record so yeah okay just
59:40 to make it clear again what happened was that we ran out
59:46 of time truthers have clung to 5:40 as a meme ever since
59:51 these are what James describes as comments of an assholish variety And really,
59:57 the thing with the 2021 behind the scenes video,
59:59 the odd texture of the whole thing,
1:00:02 isn’t that it’s partially a response to these comments, but that all of it is.
1:00:07 That’s the animating force behind it, that’s the reason why it exists.
1:00:11 It’s not a behind the scenes room tour for the sake of easy content,
1:00:16 it’s an explanation, a defence.
1:00:18 As a room tour it’s bad, James bounces from odd detail to odd detail,
1:00:24 spends tremendous amounts of time outlining problems,
1:00:27 and the whole of it is a weird
1:00:30 and nearly incomprehensible level of honesty about his bespoke inefficiencies,
1:00:34 but all because it’s a defence of Screenwave, a defence of his wife,
1:00:40 a defence of his children, and a defence of his priorities in life.
1:00:59 So why doesn’t James have enough time anymore?
1:01:03 What’s he spending his time doing if not making AVGN?
1:01:07 I don’t know and I honestly don’t particularly care.
1:01:11 If AVGN has declined in some spiritual way it’s not
1:01:16 because James isn’t grinding away with burnout-inducing 16 hour days.
1:01:20 In watching through all 52 hours of Nerd videos in reverse
1:01:24 chronological order I’m not even convinced
1:01:26 that there is some calculable decline.
1:01:28 Maybe this is to its detriment,
1:01:30 but the show has always been spotty and kinda ragged
1:01:34 at the edges and it has remained incredibly consistent in that zone.
1:01:40 Maybe the format is just dated, YouTube has left AVGN behind,
1:01:45 maybe the audience is just aging out,
1:01:48 maybe James lacks ambition or he’s just out of ideas.
1:01:52 Hell, maybe it is his wife and kids “getting in the way” of the show.
1:01:57 But here’s my hot take on that: that’s fine.
1:02:00 The Angry Video Game Nerd is not a load bearing pillar of reality,
1:02:05 it’s a YouTube sketch comedy, it doesn’t need to exist.
1:02:11 I do not know James Rolfe, but in this I feel confident:
1:02:14 James Rolfe loves his wife and kids and they are his top priority.
1:02:19 The best written parts of his autobiography, by a substantial margin,
1:02:23 are the stories about the challenging births of his two daughters,
1:02:27 and how he discovered that he really, really enjoys being a father.
1:02:32 His mistake was to share that fact
1:02:35 with an audience too immature to comprehend it.
1:02:37 No, not just too immature.
1:02:40 An audience patently unwilling to comprehend it.
1:02:44 Probably the most baffling mistake James has made is
1:02:47 assume that his haters are here to be persuaded.
1:02:51 “Do you want me to suffer?” Yeah, James, they kinda do.
1:02:56 But, still, like, mistakes have been made.
1:03:01 Like, what’s the point of having a company to handle
1:03:04 all this stuff if James is going to make a video where he tries to do his own PR
1:03:10 response to his haters by showing off his janky DIY rigging?
1:03:15 Why employ editors if they’re going to leave
1:03:18 in the footage where he has a humiliating panic attack?
1:03:22 Part of what is so transfixing in all of this is this parade of contradictions,
1:03:28 that from the outside there are these very visible,
1:03:31 very public decisions being made,
1:03:33 but those decisions aren’t producing the intended results.
1:03:38 Even without access to their actual back end I can
1:03:41 say that massively increasing the channel output absolutely improved revenue:
1:03:45 even if the podcasts and whatnot under performed there’s just so many of them,
1:03:51 it is on net hundreds of millions of views,
1:03:55 but what good is that if it damages the brand?
1:03:59 What’s the point of doing damage control at all
1:04:07 if it just raises a million more questions?
1:04:14 In a spiritual sense James has trapped himself on the couch:
1:04:18 his access to the capital resources needed
1:04:21 for larger projects is dwindling and his sensibilities
1:04:24 as a filmmaker are too myopic to appeal to an audience that isn’t humouring him,
1:04:30 telling him that Rex Viper is cute and they’re just glad he’s having fun.
1:04:35 In a more literal sense James has trapped himself
1:04:38 on the couch because the room is just too small.
1:04:42 I had heard this before, but I find that just saying it or looking at frame
1:04:46 grabs doesn’t do justice to the realities of physical space,
1:04:50 so I did the thing any normal person would do
1:04:54 and built a 1:12 scale diorama of the nerd room.
1:04:57 He needs to haphazardly hang things from the ceiling
1:05:01 and build franken-low-hats because when he moved
1:05:04 house in 2016 he had Kyle build a replica
1:05:07 of the Nerd basement in the new garage,
1:05:10 so that the new basement could be dedicated to a fake video rental store,
1:05:15 but Kyle, whose day job is renovating houses, built the room as an actual room,
1:05:20 not as a set with accommodation for the needs of recording,
1:05:25 and for reasons I can only speculate on the set is only eight feet wide.
1:05:31 I dunno, maybe the rest of the garage is
1:05:34 a workshop or they needed it to still fit a car, I really truly don’t know.
1:05:40 It would feel cramped just as a rec room but as a film set it’s claustrophobic,
1:05:48 there’s nowhere for the stands to go.
1:05:52 And, okay, now, every film set is crowded with junk,
1:05:55 every film set is a jungle of stands and tripods
1:05:58 and apple boxes and lens boxes and lights on standby,
1:06:02 but this tightens things down to a point where you
1:06:06 just can’t get in and out without stepping over everything,
1:06:09 it becomes a game of parkour just to change a battery,
1:06:14 and when you’re working mostly alone that gets frustrating really fast,
1:06:18 and when you get frustrated you get impulsive,
1:06:21 and those impulses lead to half measure solutions,
1:06:24 and those half measure solutions accumulate
1:06:27 into a whole network of bespoke inefficiencies
1:06:31 that you just live with because the process
1:06:37 of unravelling them feels just so… big.
1:06:42 It was in the finishing touches of James’ low hat that it began to make sense.
1:06:48 Screwing on a bubble level did something to it, transformed it.
1:06:52 It was still janky, it was still inexplicable, but I suddenly cared for it,
1:06:57 no longer saw it as just a heap of scrap stapled together for a bit.
1:07:02 It’s still a bad solution, it still looks,
1:07:05 visibly, like a bad solution, but it felt personal.
1:07:09 I could imagine myself as James,
1:07:13 self-conceptualizing as not an indie filmmaker but a backyard filmmaker,
1:07:19 a kid with no resources but what he can scrounge out of the garage,
1:07:24 and this felt far more homogenous with that than
1:07:29 with any other James I had considered so far.
1:07:33 In 2010 James posted a autobiographical
1:07:35 documentary called The Dragon in My Dreams.
1:07:37 James tells a story of a recurring nightmare he had as a child,
1:07:41 being born down on by this massive dragon,
1:07:44 an image that he connects to a dragon-shaped water feature
1:07:47 in a neighbourhood park his parents took him to as a toddler.
1:07:51 For the video James, with friend Matt behind the camera,
1:07:53 visits the park on the day it just so happens that workers are
1:07:57 removing the dragon from the spot where it’s sat for thirty some odd years.
1:08:02 In voice over he reflects on his childhood,
1:08:04 on the imagery of the dragon, on the then-upcoming milestone of turning thirty,
1:08:08 and holding back tears he takes a knee beneath the dragon
1:08:12 and avows himself to the path of the filmmaker while
1:08:15 the dude who was working the jackhammer stands just off screen
1:08:19 having a quick smoke as these two guys do their thing.
1:08:23 It’s all kinda cringe,
1:08:24 a truly elemental example of pretentious, self-important film-school pap,
1:08:28 but whatever, let he who is without cringe throw the first stone.
1:08:33 The conclusion of the video is muddled,
1:08:35 just kinda wanders between a few different ideas,
1:08:38 but the intent is clear: it’s a reflection on just how far James has come,
1:08:43 and an aspiration of just how far he has to go,
1:08:46 a phase of his life coming to an end just
1:08:49 as conclusively as this dragon being torn out and replaced.
1:08:53 That metaphor crumbles to bitter ash when you
1:08:55 realize that the dragon didn’t really go anywhere,
1:08:58 it was displaced all of thirty feet,
1:09:00 from sitting inside the water fountain to standing
1:09:03 beside the gate of Fox Chase playground.
1:09:05 In a way The Dragon in My Dreams is itself a brutal metaphor for Jame’s career:
1:09:10 James is a calcified dragon whose films have
1:09:14 barely changed between high school and middle age,
1:09:17 uprooted from VHS and transplanted thirty feet away in HD.
1:09:22 I think about James every day now,
1:09:24 every time I have to step over something that’s in a bad position,
1:09:28 every time I need to get something off a shelf
1:09:31 but there’s stands or tripods or boxes in the way.
1:09:34 Every stack of books, every lens without a home,
1:09:36 every camera bag left on the couch for weeks on end, every clamp, every cable,
1:09:41 every stray roll of tape has become an accusing presence in my life,
1:09:45 a bespoke inefficiency that I can stare directly at and yet never fully escape.
1:09:51 What if the problem is me?
1:09:54 James hasn’t moved, I’ve moved.
1:09:57 AVGN is what it’s always been.
1:09:59 The truthers claiming that the show is bad
1:10:02 now are getting spooked by their own shadows: the show is what it’s always been.
1:10:07 It isn’t bad now but good in the past, you’re just older.
1:10:11 You’re not seeing a titan of YouTube fallen from grace,
1:10:15 you’re seeing a man as immovable in his interests and habits as Atlas.
1:10:21 But, like, so what?
1:10:22 Would it even matter either way?
1:10:25 We don’t have the James Rolfe,
1:10:27 we have a crass homunculus of James constructed out of photons and wavelengths,
1:10:33 delivered to us through our screens,
1:10:35 a codex of symbols we can interpret but never fully know,
1:10:39 and in that void between the real and the perceived,
1:10:45 impose meaning, compelled by what we’ll never know.
1:10:53 Today we’re going back, we’re going Flashback.
1:10:56 Released in 1991, this game was available
1:10:59 for most consoles available at the time,
1:11:02 plus PC, but all I’ve got is the Super Nintendo version,
1:11:05 so that’s what we’re playing.
1:11:06 This was part of a trend of so-called “cinematic platformers”.
1:11:09 Many of these games are considered classics because
1:11:12 of the way they elevated games as an art form,
1:11:14 took it seriously, and confronted audiences with complex, sober stories.
1:11:18 They weren’t just reflex-based arcade games where
1:11:21 you hop on Goombas to rescue a princess, they told complex stories, like films.
1:11:27 So, will Flashback delight and astound, or will it put the ass back in classic?
1:11:33 Let’s find out.
1:11:34 It opens with a pretty impressive 3D cutscene that was
1:11:37 clearly intended for PC because the Super Nintendo is really struggling.
1:11:41 Still, many Super ports at the time would
1:11:43 have replaced these with a static slide show,
1:11:46 so the fact that they even tried to keep it is impressive.
1:11:49 Okay, so your character crash lands in the jungle with no
1:11:52 guidance on who you are or what you’re doing here.
1:11:54 Well, turns out that’s intended, your character has amnesia and needs to figure
1:11:58 out why he crash landed in the jungle.
1:12:00 The only thing you know is your name is Conrad.
1:12:03 The first thing you notice is that the animations are very smooth and lifelike,
1:12:07 because like Prince of Persia the developers
1:12:10 rotoscoped actual footage of actors walking and jumping.
1:12:12 This does lend the game a certain weight.
1:12:14 When you drop down off a ledge with your pistol
1:12:18 drawn and ice two mutants it feels super badass.
1:12:21 Yeah, take that you mutant [___]!
1:12:23 The second thing you notice is that the controls are ass!
1:12:26 Every time you push a button on the controller
1:12:29 Conrad takes one giant step forward, or jumps, or rolls,
1:12:33 or draws his gun, and you need to wait
1:12:35 for the whole animation to finish before you can do anything else.
1:12:39 And that’d be fine, but the game still has
1:12:42 tons of reflex-based obstacles that require very precise timing.
1:12:46 One of the very first challenges you’re given is jumping over this pit,
1:12:49 but to do it you need to start running on the previous screen,
1:12:52 and then enter the command to jump
1:12:53 before the new screen has even finished loading,
1:12:55 or you just run off the ledge into the pit below,
1:12:58 and then need to climb back out,
1:13:00 waiting a short eternity for Conrad to go through his lifelike,
1:13:04 cinematic animation every time.
1:13:06 Just like in cinema Conrad doesn’t have a life meter on screen.
1:13:09 Instead he has a personal shield that can absorb a certain number of shots.
1:13:13 Okay, so that’s health by a different name.
1:13:15 So to check your health you need to open your inventory
1:13:18 and cycle through everything you’re carrying
1:13:20 until you get to your shield module,
1:13:22 where it’ll tell you how many charges you have left.
1:13:24 Oh yeah, that’s cinematic.
1:13:26 Cinematic as dog farts!
1:13:28 Yeah, it turns out that in video games
1:13:30 “cinematic” is a code word for “[___].” Oh, the controls suck ass?
1:13:34 Just tell players it’s cinematic!
1:13:35 The story gives you no clues about where to go or what to do?
1:13:38 It’s cinema!
1:13:39 You eventually get to a giant pit that this shady [___]
1:13:41 tells you to jump into in order to get to New Washington.
1:13:44 At least he warns you that you’ll die if you jump without an anti-gravity belt,
1:13:48 which he offers to sell you for 600 credits.
1:13:51 Okay, so you need to go find some credits.
1:13:54 Fortunately there’s lots of them hidden around different areas of the jungle.
1:13:57 But here’s the thing, if you go out of your way to get all of them,
1:14:00 thinking they’ll be useful later, you’re wrong.
1:14:01 He doesn’t just take 600 credits, he takes all your credits!
1:14:05 He robs you!
1:14:06 Cinematic!
1:14:07 Anyway after you pay this lying [___] everything you
1:14:11 have Conrad jumps into the pit and enters level 2.
1:14:39 There’s nowhere to go!
1:14:41 There’s just three screens!
1:14:42 There’s nothing but an elevator down into a hole!
1:14:45 Sure, you can recharge your shields down there in the hole,
1:14:47 but it’s not going to get you anywhere!
1:14:49 It’s cinema!
1:14:50 You can jump up to this ledge, but it doesn’t go anywhere, either!
1:14:52 There’s this ledge that you can see, but it’s out of reach!
1:14:55 You just can’t jump high enough to reach it and pull yourself out!
1:14:58 This is your life now!
1:15:00 You’re trapped here on these three screens until you quit!
1:15:03 Anyway, what you need to do to progress is confront
1:15:05 your insecurities and accept that you’re not a filmmaker, either.
1:15:11 What did you say?
1:15:25 He's the angriest Gamer you've ever heard Assssss