Yale Video
I must admit I’m kind of totally obsessed with this Yale Video:
(If you’re going to watch it hang in for at least 2:00 and you’ll see why. I recommend watching the whole thing).
So here’s my thing about this video. The idea is fun and kind of cool; the execution is really awful (aside from the nice camerawork, and fairly high production values). Bad rhymes, lame jokes etc. Obviously this is a result of “Glee” and “High School Musical.” What is shares with “Glee” in particular is its constant shift from winking meta irony, to super-sincere sentimentality — in this case, the aspirations of young college undergraduates, and their wish to change the world.
Now I’m not a hard-hearted person, but I just can’t deal with the sentimental side of this stuff. It’s so bad! Here’s an example from “Glee”:
It’s not set up well in the show, you never really get to know the deaf folks, so they don’t seem included at the end of it all anyway. They’re only their for our emotional catharsis. It’s lazy. It’s gross.
The Yale Video is more of the same. But, unlike glee, the Yale Video features no people in wheelchairs, gays (well, there are millions in the video, but are not identified as such), or overweight people (it does include Brian Williams, who hasn’t yet lent his ironic gravitas to “Glee”). Maybe this is because the agenda of the Yale Video is not only to entertain but to recruit students. Though it definitely winks at the audience, it’s cheesy propaganda. It’s a new thing, I think, self-aware audience manipulation. Madame Mao would have loved it. But couldn’t the witty Yalies have come up with something better, after all of this work?
But maybe the point of the video isn’t to be good or bad. In a recent string of emails I read, I came across some really insightful comments like:
“This is pretty much utterly ridiculous. It’s so utterly ridiculous that to parody it would be redundant. In a way, it’s so brilliantly inane (or inanely brilliant?) that it’s virtually parody-proof. Which is not to say there can’t and won’t be knock-offs in abundance. But those will likely only strengthen its appeal and effectiveness by drawing more attention to the original. IMHO this is a masterful example of a traditional institution stepping boldly into the 21st century by adapting not only new forms of distribution/media, but effectively resourcing the CULTURE of those new media. Yale Admissions goes viral, and I’d say they’ve done a pretty damn good job of it. This is precisely the kind of thing people LOVE to waste time on Youtube watching - it doesn’t ultimately matter if they’re laughing “with” or “at”, so long as they’re watching it and telling their friends to do the same.”
And:
“Does it matter any more if something’s “good” or “bad” if it gets people to notice it? Are we at a place in our culture where epic fail = epic success?”
As a classical musician, this hits home to me. In our efforts to be “unstuffy” and “connect” how far are we willing to go? How far are we willing to separate ourselves from our core message to get people to notice us? The Yale Video has a good feel for the current irony/semtimentality thing happening on TV right now, but what does it ultimately have to do with Yale?
I will say this: the video does reflect the real Ivy League in the sense that it features an unusually large amount of juggling.