Since being laid off in November, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of unemployment: riding the bus, ambling around Chinatown at 2:00 in the afternoon, and relying on the kindness of economically stable friends for nights out. But since I don’t have TV reception, I can’t really bask in television’s warming glow like a real bum. Instead, I turn to the internet, but more specifically, the magic of the animated gif.
This is in part nostalgia. The internet/digital culture I grew up with as a teenager was a garden of gifs; video was limited to (mostly educational) CD Roms. Usually they were horribly pixelated apologies, a variant on “this page under construction”. Even though it was terrible netiquette back then (yes, that’s right, not “best practices”), personal homepages could seem very static or just took a long-ass time for a layperson to code, and gifs underscored that fact.
Where would Geocities have been without that shit? They were like Christmas decorations: sort of serious, but also tacky and easily overdone; generic and repetitive yet a mode of self-expression. However, as the internet became more about preformatted, minimal design instead of decorative DIY (which could be summed up as the switch from Myspace to Facebook), the glitzier variety of gif went away or at least outside the mainstream of internet creators/manufacturers. This also coincided with the rise of high-speed internet. Larger-sized media were now accessible without massive/indefinite wait-times, effectively killing the CD Rom and bringing high-resolution photograph, music, video and flash to the forefront of what made a page/filesharing site worth visiting. Porn gifs (which I would argue were equally ubiquitous/shared as those “under construction” ones) were no longer necessary; you could just download the porn itself.
But, as the internet has repeatedly shown, just because something “isn’t necessary” doesn’t mean it won’t continue existing. This latter genre which preserved a cinematic moment – be it silly, sexy, or strange – are undoubtedly the most popular now. High speed allowed them to become “legible” (porn gifs were very, very tiny in order to preserve looping gyrations; otherwise they were incredibly pixelated). Gif Party, three frames, Aloha Friday, and Graphics Interchange Format (to name a few) are incredibly popular tumblrs that deal almost exclusively in movie/TV gifs. Since the age and background of most Tumblr users is pretty homogeneous (people in their teens/twenties who grew up with the same nerdy shit I did), there’s this strangely uniform sensibility about what is/is not worthy of being looped. The live stream of gifs posted to De.li.cious are a little bit more scattershot for that reason, but their popularity (and what they’re about) speaks to a “collective memory” at the very least. The tumblr gif gang, if I may annoyingly label it that, caters to an audience that is knowledgeable about a variety of types of media, familiar with Monsieur Hulot, Star Trek, Classical Hollywood, Bollywood, and crappy direct-to-video releases. In short, they reflect a wider range of media literacy.
So, with the announcement of Showgirls 2 – whose prequel was probably the first really, really dirty movie a lot of people of my generation accidentally/purposely saw – it should come as no surprise that a series of animated gifs of the original were released to celebrate it. Though the first Showgirls has been re-appropriated either as unabashed, laughable crap or a new type of eroticism(!?), the sequel looks true to the original in that most people will consider it utterly unwatchable.
I still haven’t watched the first one. Maybe I never will. (I love Kyle McLaughlin too much to watch him outside of a Lynch movie.) And since I’ve seen the best part of the movie distilled into gif-form, I’m not sure how anything 2 hours long could measure up:
