Why "Literally Me" Characters Are So Important

you like refin his early work was a little too european for my taste but in 2011 he really came into his own commercially and artistically with the release of his hit film drive what do you do i drive that's literally me literally me dude i like to dissect girls did you know i'm utterly insane oh literally me that's me that's so me master payne it is a great honor having you beating random people in our town that's literally me [Music] in recent years a new film genre has emerged out of the chaos of our culture and what's weird is that it's not made up of entirely new movies there are some new films in this genre of course but overall it's the classification that's new not the films this genre is literally me or maybe sigma cinema is a better label it's a loose collection of movies that typically star men on the fringes of society they're usually regular guys who just snap but sometimes there are complete psychopaths in a clockwork orange alex lives an extremely hedonistic lifestyle how is it then that it falls under the same umbrella as something like falling down as i thought more and more about this concept i realized the vast diversity that existed within this new genre these films present different male archetypes but how do they all relate to each other surely there's a through line do people connect with these characters ironically or are they just using a veil of irony to point to a deeper more sincere truth i know we all naturally lump all these films together but why let's take a look at some of the major literally me characters just to see if we can find the dots to connect i can only talk about a couple here or else the video would be entirely too long and boring if i don't mention your favorite literally me movie then i think you should honestly just uh cope nah don't worry this video is part of my series called literally me and i will be making a lot of these videos for this series in the near future so stay tuned and any femme cells out there i got you covered as well let's look at today's roster men who are quite literally just like me patrick bateman he's young jacked has an amazing skincare routine drinks like a fish and can get any lady he wants so long as he's got the money and he has the money bateman feels like a satire on the materially obsessed yuppies of the 80s and this lack of meaning that comes out of this lifestyle of obsessing over clothes and restaurants manifests itself as a desire to kill or is it all in his head does that even matter bateman wants to fit into a world that he despises he is a husk of a man albeit a hilarious one it's hard to know if he likes the music he listens to or the food he eats as he qualifies their value with reviews he read rather than what seems like his actual opinions bateman's life isn't just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends it's about how these things consume our lives our cultures and turn us into npcs who just want to destroy it all defense aka william foster what happens when the machine rejects one of its cogs michael douglas's character we know is defense because that's what his license plate says is a department of defense worker who has lost its job he helped build missiles that probably caused untold death and destruction in foreign countries on behalf of the usa he was well regarded in his field but when he was no longer useful when he was no longer economically viable he was spit out he lost everything his job his home his wife his daughter and arguably his sanity and on one hot la morning he finally cracks he abandons his car and sets out on a journey across los angeles to attend his daughter's birthday party leaving behind him a wake of destruction defense is the embodiment of the mid-20th century man it's not a coincidence that at the beginning he wants to turn back the crisis to 1965. he's a man out of time he embodies the 1950s american ideal but he's stuck in an empire in decline he fights against what his country has become increased prices fascists gang violence and elite class who hold disdain for ordinary citizens and america itself all the while he spouts ideas of what american society should be freedom of speech the customer is always right and so on just standing up for my rights as a consumer but confronted by the law and told that he's the bad guy foster asks i'm the bad guy yeah is he he obviously has personal responsibility for his actions but it's undeniable that he is the product of a sick society we cheer for him as we use him to vent our own frustrations on the world even if we wouldn't dare to repeat his actions it's his straddling of the line between good and evil that makes him so compelling billy brown this is a literally me deep cut but it shouldn't be vincent gallo excellently portrays billy brown the protagonist of this breakout film buffalo 66 the film opens with billy leaving prison racked by intrusive memories and an intense need to pee he searches for a place to relieve himself while building a web of lies to conceal from his family the fact that he spent the last few years in the can under the stress induced by the retention of his urine he calls his parents to let them know he's come to visit with his wife and shortly after he kidnaps a woman layla and forces her to pretend to be his wife so that he can keep up the illusion this is acting all right you're my wife so that means you adore me you love me you cherish me jesus christ you can't live without me brown is a troubled man his mom blames him for making her miss the buffalo bill's super bowl win because he was born on the same day his parents know nothing about him and don't seem to care about him one bit nothing he can do will make them proud of him they don't even know that he's a champion bowler he's also been in love with the same girl since he was a kid a girl who barely knows that he exists in short he doesn't know what it's like to be loved and he aims to avenge his loveless life by assassinating a former kicker for the buffalo bills but leyla does her best to soften his heart and stop him from further ruining his life he's a 30 year old virgin with propensity for having gamer moments and really and i mean really dislikes the touch of a woman how much more like me can he be you know i didn't have a girlfriend huh because there was nobody that i liked tyler durden the unnamed protagonist of fight club looked at tyler durden and said wow he is literally me tyler durden is the hidden rebel within all of us who exist in this corporate ikea furniture-filled rat race of a society we call the west durden isn't just an anarchist he's an agent of chaos he splices adult films into regular films he pees and drinks and he performs acts of violence through durden the protagonist moves out of the normie circle of life and into the fringes of society in order to embrace his masculinity fincher and palnook take all this to its logical extreme as the fight club morphs from a group of men fighting each other for fun to a group of men fighting all of society is durden real is he some schizophrenic hallucination of the protagonist or is he the real person within the protagonist maybe edward norton is the fake persona a mask made to fit into society and live by its rules while brad pitt is the real man under the mask we live in a world where testosterone levels are falling conformity is on an upswing and our lives have become more and more sedentary as the wage cage has moved from the cubicles of an office building into our homes think about how working from home has turned our sanctuary of our non-work life into a workspace we cannot escape the grips of whatever large corporation we work for trust me i cannot escape youtube but as our culture puts more and more pressure onto us to conform to whatever new ideals it purports or as it takes away the very essence of ourselves and being it lights a fire within us to resist when we see tyler durden and fight club we see on screen our same desire and motivation to stand up for ourselves against a crushing society travis bickle talking to me [Music] well who the hell else are you talking talking to me travis bickle might be my favorite character of this bunch and i'll be going more in depth on him in my next video he's arguably the granddaddy of the literally me characters as taxi driver released all the way back in 1976. bickle's a complex man he's a vietnam war vet living a modest life in new york city he has trouble sleeping maybe due to ptsd so he works long hours as a taxi driver unlike the other drivers he doesn't discriminate he drives anyone anywhere and because of this he witnesses the underbelly of american society each and every night bickle is perceptive and at times spiritual he sees the chaos around him and knows that something must be done turning first to assisting and then attempting to assassinate a politician before he sets his sights on freeing an underage prostitute on the flip side he's intensely socially awkward he attends the adult film theater and sees couples there so he takes betsy on a date there when she protests and leaves he doesn't understand heck he awkwardly messes up his narration to us the audience and has to restart his frustrations and anger towards the state of new york and to his own life transform into a need for cathartic violence i really i really wanna i got some bad ideas in my head i just the us government trained him to kill in a foreign country but now he's going to use that training on domestic soil by purifying his body and styling his hair in a mohawk he evokes the image of a warlike native american thus bickle declares war on the scum of the streets he becomes a western hero in a modern world he is the man who stood up you might be wondering where's the driver from drive 2011 and arthur fleck from joker 2019 well a couple years ago i made entire videos about drive and joker where i touched on their sigma appeal so if you want to hear me talk about them i'll leave links to them in the description below so what brings all these characters together and what brings them together with characters i didn't talk about like k joker driver battenson riddler alex louis bloom donnie darko or what have you at their core they're all troubled men dealing with some sort of trauma mental illness or a mix of both they live in a detached society that increasingly resents them in which they increasingly despise and turn they have different ways of dealing with this reality sure lewis bloom from nightcrawler cynically moves up the corporate ladder to find success while riddler just sows chaos and kills corrupt officials no matter their paths methods or goals most if not all of them are motivated by some sense of alienation so why shouldn't we connect with these characters on a deep level we live in an increasingly alienating world as our social interactions move from real life to the internet our encounters with friends families and strangers become more and more soulless we might be able to befriend and hold conversations with people on the other side of the planet but we're talking to a screen these people might be interested in the same niche subjects as we are and so subcultures form on the internet but as more subcultures form our own culture becomes more splintered it's great in some ways but bad in others but think we can get all the social interaction we need from the comfort of our bedrooms but is it really socialization or is it just a simulation of such when we talk with people online the normal constraints and additions of real-life interactions just don't exist people are more vicious because they're not looking at a real person but just an avatar misunderstandings also arise because we can only see what others say through text or voice there isn't that much context or body language to clue us into the real meanings of the words on top of all of that news is fed to us online like an iv we're inundated with news real and fake that's designed to elicit an emotional reaction from us if we're online it's hard to escape it and if we're not careful it can easily lead us to political extremes i can't discuss sigma mails and films without talking about dating i get it we all want our state mandated girlfriends just as we can hang out with friends from our cheetos stained bed we can ask girls out in the same way dating apps like tinder and bumble reduce romance to a mobile game we make commodities out of our bodies and a caricature of our personalities for others to consume while treating everyone else on the app like a product rather than like a person and if tinder doesn't work out for us then there's the adult industry that we can turn to to get our temporary shots of pleasure we can eat drink work have a social life and have a sex life without leaving our homes yet it doesn't fulfill us it all feels hollow we no longer feel like people but like rats in cages loneliness is rising and it's a problem that we all need to address head-on lonely characters in films those that exist on the fringes of society those that feel a sense of alienation they resonate with us because we're struggling with those same problems now more than ever we're probably not struggling to the same extent as the fictional characters but these characters provide us a sense of catharsis or potentially they help us lonely guys figure out how to better our lives this is totally non-scientific but it does seem like there aren't that many kinds of movies made nowadays people especially young men are starving for these kinds of stories we saw the reception to joker good time the lighthouse and the batman if hollywood wants to tap into the market make a lot of money and capture this part of the zeitgeist then they should make more of these movies but that would mean funding movies that explore more uncomfortable truths they'd rather make crap that spouts whatever the latest corporate talking point is and only worsen the problem of social alienation and loneliness but i was thinking these kinds of movies were the norm back in the 70s just look at five easy pieces the last detail the king of marvin gardens the last picture show or practically any of the scorsese movies from this time these movies impacted the culture tremendously and still stand as classics because they had their fingers on the pulse of culture sadly with the disney vacation of movies right now i don't have much faith in mainstream films filling that niche the batman and joker came close but at the end of the day they didn't hit nearly as hard as taxi driver and i'm afraid that the studios will learn the wrong lesson with the batman and joker the cynical side of me thinks that maybe they think that just making the movies brooding and dark will get them the desired result all while failing to connect on any deep level with the audience i just hope that sometime soon a new wave of filmmakers can make movies for the people that they'll make films that cause us to laugh and to cry and to point at the screen and say that's literally me [Music] you

Channel: The Kino Corner

Views: 1,644,711

Keywords: the kino corner, sigma, male, literally me, american psycho, taxi driver, falling down, travis bickle, vincent gallo, billy brown, dfens, nightcrawler, ryan, gosling, drive, fight club, tyler, durden, brad pitt, kino, art, cinema, theater, movies, filmmaking, mads mikkelsen, another round, blade runner, 2049, gf, christian bale, robert, pattinson, good time, safdies, funny, satire, joker, arthur fleck, joaquin, phoenix, fincher, scorsese, lonely, social media, dating, modern, life, society, comedy

Id: VcuPcySRSpE

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022