my youtube chennel

To understand how J. Matthew Turner ended up creating a viral YouTube essay arguing that Daniel LaRusso, the young hero of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, was actually the villain of the movie, you first need to know the story behind the video he posted to YouTube a month before that one. For years, Turner, a video editor from New York, harbored a conviction that the movie Mortal Kombat was so similar in plot and themes to the Bruce Lee cult classic Enter the Dragon that they were virtually the same movie. “It was in the background of my head for a long, long time,” he told me recently. “And for whatever reason, I happened to think of it again last year and I suddenly saw how it should be done.” He had always envisioned a 15-minute video in which he would methodically build a case for his thesis, but he knew it would be difficult to keep viewers entertained for that long. “But now I realized that I should just show all the shots side by side and then try to explain the plot of both movies as one movie at the same time.”

The end result, a video that’s barely over a minute long, took Turner only a day to edit together. In it, he uses a split screen that simultaneously displays scenes from both movies while the narrator, Turner himself, briskly walks the viewer through the plot. The similarities, piled up in such rapid succession, are almost overwhelming, and it quickly dawns on you that, no matter how improbable, these movies, shot two decades apart, are exactly the same. He submitted the video to Reddit where it quickly amassed 3,000 upvotes. Within a week, the video had attracted over 100,000 views. “That blew my mind,” he recalled. “My immediate reaction was that I wanted to follow it up with something else. I was trying to think what else I should do, and that’s when I thought, ‘Hmm, I always thought Daniel was kind of asking for it, so maybe I should do something about that.’”

Daniel, of course, is the pugnacious teenager from The Karate Kid who forms a rivalry with a local bully named Johnny and, under the tutelage of his mentor Mr. Miyagi, eventually defeats that bully at a martial arts competition. But in Turner’s video, which he released a few weeks after his first video took off, Daniel is the bully and Johnny is the flawed hero. The argument is, of course, absurd, but Turner does such an adept job at piecing together his thesis that you finish the video doubting every assumption you’d previously made about a movie that had been a staple of your childhood.

Though the Mortal Kombat/Enter the Dragon essay was a veritable success, this new video was a viral blockbuster. Within hours it was posted across hundreds of news sites and it collected over 5 million views. Irate viewers, unaware that the video was tongue in cheek, flocked to the comment section to argue with its conclusions. “I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a joke,” Turner said. “Apparently it wasn’t.”

Turner didn’t fully realize it at the time, but by creating these videos he was contributing to an expanding genre that has become especially popular during the YouTube era: the video essay. Though the approach varies, video essays almost always feature a narrator who presents a thesis via a series of still images, animations, and video clips. Nearly all of them involve some sort of cultural criticism, and many of the most popular within the genre focus on film. Sometimes, as is the case with the “Honest Trailers” produced by a YouTube channel called Screen Junkies, this involves criticizing a single movie with the same approach that you might see in a text review in a newspaper or magazine.

But many of the best video essays go beyond mere reviews and take a much more academic approach to cinematic criticism. For example, consider a recent video published to the YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, which is helmed by a former MSNBC producer named Evan Puschak. Titled “The Evolution of Batman’s Gotham City,” it walks us through the various incarnations of Bruce Wayne’s metropolis, first introduced in Detective Comics and then later expanded upon in television series, cartoons, video games, and, of course, films. “When the Adam West show failed,” argues Puschak, “Batman writers brought a darker tone to the stories. They brought an extended continuity, and continuity meant that individual locations in Gotham gained importance and the city itself began to breathe as a character.” He then guides us through the gothic luridness of Tim Burton’s Gotham, the garish portrayal of the city in the horrible Batman and Robin, and then finally the hyperrealistic New York City depicted by Christopher Nolan. “A Gotham that resembles our own world,” says Puschak, “can be even more terrifying when it’s shown to be fragile in the face of a violent disregard for the established order.”

While this essay certainly would have worked in written form, Puschak’s use of still images and video adds an entirely new dimension to his argument that makes it much more arresting. It’s because of this more engaging format that video essays are much more popular than their textual counterparts. Of the dozens of videos produced by Puschak, on topics ranging from the emotional theory in Inside Out to what it means when people say Seinfeld is a show about “nothing,” three have amassed more than a million views and many others have at least a few hundred thousand. Though it’s impossible to know how well he’s monetizing the YouTube channel, he’s raised over $2,400 per video on Patreon, which, given that he produces about one video per week, means he’s pulling in north of $120,000 per year. Most newspaper film critics don’t make half that.

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The Nerdwriter isn’t the only YouTube channel focused on video essays to have achieved this level of popularity. Every Frame a Painting. Wisecrack. Screen Junkies. Red Letter Media. The School of Life. Each has amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers and many millions of views.

Though the video essay’s popularity is a recent phenomenon made possible through the advent of YouTube, one can argue that the medium predates the internet. In a paper titled “Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay,” Dr Andrew McWhirter, a lecturer of media and communications at the Glasgow School for Business and Society, says that the form fits within the larger genre of remix culture and harkens back to what the filmmaker Hans Richter coined as the “essay film” in 1940. “Remixed footage has been part of experimental cinema and contemporary art for a number of decades,” wrote McWhirter, pointing to several decades-old political mashup videos posted to a YouTube channel called politicalremix. A 1984 video titled “Death Valley Days: Secret Love,” for instance, uses a mixture of news footage and the Shangri-Las song “Leader Of The Pack” to reframe Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s relationship as a romantic one.