Hi, my name’s Iris. I’m a giant dork with an english degree and way too many opinions on writing for someone who basically hasn’t written a story in two years. Also I’m trans, and basically the same age as Contrapoints.
… With that in mind, I want to talk about some specific things that Contrapoints does in her videos. And since I don’t really want to immerse myself in all the direct criticism, we’re going to talk about something that you can just make shit up about: literary criticism!
(Yes, I know it’s about videos really, but … it’s close enough. Art! Art is art.)
I didn’t even know that Contrapoints existed until late 2018 — a friend of mine was watching The Apocalypse on the TV in my house. … And it just took seeing some of a video of hers in the background for a little bit for me to be ushered into this strange new world of Lefttube.
What initially grabbed my attention in that video was hard for me to describe at first, but the more I’ve seen of Contrapoints’s work, the more I realize that it was the blatant intentionality of the visuals. And while I’ve seen a lot of people talk about her artistic vision in general … I haven’t really seen people talk about how it colors the arguments that the videos make themselves. (It’s possible they have — I just haven’t seen it.)
So the word I think of when I watch Contrapoints’s videos is, again, intentionality. Everything seems very assured and pointing to a concrete end. An easy way to see what I mean is to compare and contrast this with someone like hbomberguy’s videos, or even Contrapoints’s earlier videos. There’s a humanizing effect in a video when you plainly state sources, and talk as though you aren’t God. But Contrapoints’s videos in the last two years almost seem like they’re … solid white pieces of marble, that fell from the sky whole. So while any individual viewer may have issues with the purity of Contrapoints’s arguments, it’s very hard to have issues with the purity of her aesthetic. And that’s part of the problem.
Part 1: Some commentary on videos
Since we’re talking about videos, we should probably have some images. Here’s the first one I want to talk about:
This image is from the beginning of Cancelled. It’s a picture of Contra herself, surrounded by garbage. And it’s perhaps the least apologetic self-garbage shot I’ve ever seen. She’s /artfully/ in the garbage. You can tell she’s put herself there, she’s done her makeup, she’s got some good bathtub posture … she’s constantly taking sips of alcohol to the point where you slightly worry for her liver …
The aesthetic of this video is pretty much the same throughout. She explains basically what happened to cause her being cancelled and explains the out-of-context quotes/etc. — and then she goes directly to hate she’s received. Other than the general vibe of regal class, there are two other aesthetic choices she makes in this video.
1: Contrapoints‘s tweets look like this in the pictures she gives:
Flowery background that fits with the previous background she had. What does she use for her detractors?
… It took me a few watches to even really see this background, which she uses for all of the criticism against her. (There’s also very trivializing music in the background.) And I have to say … you can tell someone’s truly lost touch with other trans people on the internet when they’re trying to belittle people with this. From the words she says during this part, this is obviously meant to be using a purposeful aesthetic as criticism. Oh god, the trans memes! We should all … distrust … trans people who … use memes!
Wait, that sounds /really bad/ doesn’t it? Well … yeah, it does. I mean, that’s just because … it is really bad though. She also seems to be taking the shitposts, overly harsh criticism, and criticism as all the same thing.
Anyways, I think the scolding tone that she takes to the criticism of her is most obvious in the credits at the end.
Natalie Wynn. AND NO ONE ELSE.
It’s like she’s wagging her finger at everyone who’s criticized her, saying: “You have taken my ability to acknowledge my friends from me! You evil people! I’m all alone! … Well, at least I’m going to be pretty!”
While that’s what some of the people cancelling her have tried to do, that’s a response that’s extremely … extra.
In this scene she actually says “The point isn’t that I’m a persuasive genius. If I was, then I could talk myself out of being cancelled.” But … I mean, isn’t that kind of what’s happened with this video? The majority of people have uncancelled her. She’s pretty much back in the good graces of twitter, though there are people who still don’t like her. But the cancelling itself has died down.
Given that reality … it’s baffling, given the content of the video, how inauthentic it feels. I can hear it in her voice: “I don’t like painting myself as a victim, gorg, but I’m making myself sit in the trash and this ain’t it, chief.”
To be clear: I don’t want to castigate her specifically for ensuring that this video looks ‘right’ to her. There’s obviously been a giant amount of talk around Opulence, and it makes sense that she’d plan this out given that response — and it also makes sense that she’d want to ensure the content she puts out is good. But that maximalism, though less than a ‘normal’ video, is still there. And that planned artifice, that barrier of ‘I’m going to be beautiful’ that she puts up around herself, leads to a less direct discussion. It feels a lot like what she does in Opulence, honestly.
Maybe that’s because the opening of Cancelled is a /direct/ callback to Opulence. So let’s go over some parts of Opulence.
A short synopsis: the video’s seemingly set in as many fancy places as Contrapoints could think of, with as many trappings of power as she can muster. She talks about the appearance of power and how it’s utilized; how it’s important for people in America to feel like they have luxury. And then she talks about how for the wealthy and powerful, opulence is a flex; and for the impoverished, opulence is a simulacrum of the wealth and power they’ve been denied.
…
Do you get it yet? Do you get what happened in this video? Well, she sure didn’t, because she spent a fair amount of Cancelled complaining that people didn’t even watch Opulence because they were too busy cancelling her, not realizing that she kind of cancelled herself.
To be explicit … Contrapoints is currently powerful. Regardless of how she feels about it, or how she was before where she is now, that’s how it is. So while she might think that this is an appropriation of the simulacrum she’s describing, and that she’s not flexing … it really doesn’t come off that way.
And she can flex because she has this success from this intentionality and maximalism, right. My understanding is that she changed the way a lot of youtubers in her branch of youtube have produced their videos, because she put so much effort into hers. But it comes off incredibly callous within a video about Opulence. Contra as Marie Antoinette, saying that the commoners can eat cake if they want.
She does acknowledge that she has power in Cancelled and in Opulence a little bit, but these acknowledgements really just function as asides against the larger dialogue of the videos and their given aesthetics. And because of that, I don’t think they’re effective. When you have to drink your wine /just so/ in the shot, it doesn’t feel like your acknowledgement of your power lessens your power — if anything it heightens it.
She also has a video called ‘The Aesthetic’, which I have to cover because … looks at title of medium post
Tagline: ‘What matters more: the way things are, or the way things look?’
It’s presented as a video about Contrapoints’s internal thoughts on where she is — basically a Socratic dialogue, using two of her characters as archetypes.
- Contra as Tabby — radical left-wing uncompromising anarchist:
- Contra as Justine, centrist compromiser and social influencer:
There’s a hall runway in the video, which seems very … Pose-like to me, at least like what I’d assume Pose is like (… I haven’t seen it). Showing off aesthetic, talking about style. But the discussion isn’t really a dialogue, it’s more of an internal monologue consisting of:
- Tabby yelling inanely that she needs to break things
- Justine saying what needs to happen
Because of that, it feels less like a discussion between two characters, and more like a discussion between one character who is trying to figure out how to best use this other side of herself — if she wants to at all.
To refer to a bit of Cancelled, specifically her response to the tweet I linked, up near the beginning of this video: the general theory of the video is trying to figure out the answer to that question. How does one deal with the general impossibility of proving something that’s only really apparent in thoughts, to people who are predisposed to hate anything you do?
And the video says … well, maybe one way is aesthetics?
I think also that this video and the response to it makes clear one thing that Contrapoints does a lot: her videos frequently seem like they’re about a ‘general case’ but are actually about a ‘her case’. For instance, this video … it seems explicitly about her talking to herself. I don’t think it holds up at all for trans people in general, and it shouldn’t? Yet watching it, because it’s so authoritative-seeming … it’s easy to mistake it for that sort of sweeping generalization.
I was reminded of this because I was looking at stuff for this essay, and saw a tweet.
TLDR: I agree with this tweet.
UPDATE: The tweet has been removed, I guess? I actually don’t remember it. Don’t link and not type exactly what something says, kids. … From my memory, the point was that all the care put into a Contrapoints video, as well as the characters frequently seeming as though they’re in Socratic dialogue with each other, makes it seem like this is intended to be a parable about The Way Things Should Be(tm). But it isn’t a parable about The Way Things Should Be(tm). It’s a parable about The Way Things Are For Some People Sometimes(tm), which is very different.
Part 2: Let’s look at this illustrative example
We’ve gone very quickly over these three Contrapoints videos, but I just recently saw a small drama on Twitter that reminded me a little bit of the general vibe here. I don’t need to actually quote it for this example and my impression is that everyone involved wanted it to just go away, so I’m changing it a tiny bit. But to summarize, someone made a tweet that was equivalent to this:
“Person X has communist viewpoints according to tweets I’ve seen, and also a net worth of umpteen million dollars according to this random website with no references and multiple misspelled words. These are both, now, equally true facts. And these two things explain how much of a terrible person Person X ‘really is’.”
This tweet got a few hundred likes but in the big scheme of things it was not a big deal. I only heard about this because I follow Person X, and they tweeted ‘Someone subtweeted me and said I have umpteen million dollars, and I fucking wish I had umpteen million dollars’. Remind you of someone?
So the person who made the first tweet took a statement from an impossibly questionable site, divorced it from any context at all, and treated it as unequivocally true.
After calling this out, Person X went into a long twitter thread about how if they did nothing they wouldn’t get attacked. And sometimes it makes them want to do nothing and shut up, but they’d rather do something than nothing.
And … personally? I appreciate and identify with that sentiment. A lot. I’m not famous, but I worry about doing the right thing. I have some power, because I’m employed and have insurance — never a guarantee of those things in late-stage capitalism, as you likely know. And I feel like I won’t always do the right thing when I try to do good things. But I have to do something, and the only way to get to the right thing is to first do something that’s as right as I can make it and then make the things that I do … better over time. So inevitably you’re going to sometimes do bad things in the pursuit of doing good.
Someone replied to that thread with this sentiment: ‘I think people with that viewpoint would just rather have less representation, but have the representation be perfect.’ And this feels like a flawed opinion that leads to what I think is correct, which is encapsulated in two points:
- Perfection isn’t possible. No human beings are perfect — all representation is flawed in some way. So … if we throw out any flawed representation, we just won’t have representation.
- The disagreement people have is less over perfection, and more over where the line of acceptability is. And that line will necessarily be different for different people. And everyone, no matter how ideologically pure … has a line.
Part 3: Another illustrative example, in which I argue against cancelling people in general
This is kind of tangential to the rest of the essay, but it feels right to have it in. So, a personal anecdote:
A lot of my family is Jewish, and I grew up with both Jewish and Christian holidays.
I had a person who I was friends with talk to me about Israel during work. At the time Israel was a really questionable topic, there was this whole thing where people in Israel settlements were abusing Palestinian kids. (I think? This might still be happening?)
They really wanted to talk about this. And I just straight up can’t — I know bad things were and possibly are happening, but a lot of my family really supports Israel, and I went on Birthright. I have some opinions, but it is forever going to be completely impossible for me to talk about it with any sort of objectivity, and it just hurts.
So when I wouldn’t immediately condemn Israel entirely, they said that I was just as bad as whatever Israel was doing, and yelled at me for around thirty minutes saying I was killing defenseless children. I begged off the conversation and when that didn’t work, I started crying. Eventually, since we weren’t actually there to talk about Israel-Palestine, the conversation changed. (Thank god.)
The point of sharing this is that … it’s not a direct analogue. But when we cancel people around us for still being friends with their friends, directly after showing them something bad about the person … I don’t think that this is a fair thing to ask of other people, especially if you don’t know the person you’re talking to! This doesn’t directly correlate to the anecdote, but a person can logically realize that a person is bad in some ways, without being able to fully internalize and accept that they’re toxic. Actually accepting that can take years, and cutting the person off entirely may not even happen. So, TL:DR: jumping on people for not immediately cutting ties with people they know because of one or two dumb things they’ve said or done is incredibly stupid. It’s ignoring that people are human within a crusade for some misunderstood version of ‘justice’.
Cancelling in general also tends to also lose the nuance of what the person being cancelled is saying, most likely because of how the mob picks up and carries a story. I was linked this incident, which I think is somewhat illustrative: (I recommend reading it, this link is only two paragraphs)
This wasn’t a case of someone legitimately tweeting something hateful. It was someone making a joke and being dogpiled for others reading the joke as sincere. In the majority of cases this is basically what cancelling /is/, at this point. And it only has its intended effect on people who aren’t entrenched enough to be able to ignore it. Small examples: Louis CK is on tour. Ricky Gervais hosted an awards show. Both of these are people who were cancelled, didn’t really change, and yet they’re still here. If anything, ‘cancelling’ them with mob justice is encouraging them to do worse things, since obviously cancelling isn’t really doing anything.
You can disagree with what people say, and even work to deplatform people, if you believe in it. But please, please don’t just cancel people without reading into what’s happening and forming your own opinions. Otherwise, the whole process becomes a current-day witch hunt. Society outlawed witch hunts, and then the internet came into being and there’s nothing outlawing them on Twitter now, so there you go, they’re back!
Don’t participate in witch hunts.
Thanks.
Part 4: In which we talk about some sort of conclusion
I don’t know if Contra knows how calculated she comes off when she makes these videos, but her entire video aesthetic for over the last year is this maximalist intentionality. So when something in a video isn’t fully calculated, it seems calculated anyways because of the aesthetic. And it stands to reason, then, that when everything /seems/ calculated, it all must /be/ calculated, right? And the bad apple spoils the bunch. And, since it works for everyone else, it must be their fault that her videos isn’t being perceived as she expects, right?
It follows that she complains in Cancelled that when she’s replying to people as Contrapoints people don’t see her as human. Because of course they don’t! They see her as the avatar of her channel. Her extremely intentionally-presented channel. And if they do that, and she’s really unintentional and sarcastic about things … some people are going to misunderstand, and there’s going to be a big brouhaha about everything.
And I guess what Contra isn’t getting is that the aesthetics she uses to feel like she’s reaching out properly to people — as she says in The Aesthetic — are actually isolating her from some of her audience. You can’t portray opulence without setting yourself apart. And if the topic’s more personal, perhaps it calls for a little less intentionality.
Communication is inherently imperfect, as is the language we all use for that communication, and it’s good to be mindful — both as an artist and as a consumer — that any artistic statement that anyone makes will always mean different things to different people.
No matter how impeccable your aesthetic.
Part 5: A hastily-written update, in which we look at the year since this essay was initially published
Since I posted this, Contrapoints has published … more videos. (Wow! Amazing!) I’ve been watching (… and patreon-ing) her throughout the year, so I thought it’d be worth looking back at the year in a very quick way.
For reference, I /think/ that this was the first one after I wrote this essay:
Shame | ContraPoints — YouTube
And she’s posted four others throughout last year.
I want to just quickly talk about this. You may be wondering why … and it’s because the aesthetics of the show have visibly changed. I don’t want to speculate about why, but the effect of it, at least to me, is that the content of the videos seems much more personal than it did previously: they’ve lost their authoritativeness.
It’s interesting — I think that for what she’s actually making, it’s much more apropos. And watching the videos I think that it makes the arguments stronger, and the videos cohere together much stronger. The latest one, on JK Rowling, was very ‘confessional!’-y, and I think the overall treatment of the subject was much improved for it. (TLDR: I think I was right … but she actually did the thing that was basically the subject of the essay here, which is /wild/. So we get to actually see the output of it.)
But … at the same time, I kind of miss the old content for what it was. Basically, I miss the production, even just for its own sake. I wonder if both could coexist somehow — the old content felt almost like watching a cartoon character. Now that cartoon character has become a more person-like cartoon character, one still made for an audience but made inherently with flaws. It makes the content more approachable. It makes it … human. But that inherent remove that the content(tm) used to have is nice, sometimes. In an artistic sense there are things you can convey with mere aesthetic that this new Contrapoints sort of can’t.
Perhaps alternating videos, some soundless and some not? … I think what I liked about the old Contra was how it expressed things via art that felt like truisms, and what I didn’t like about it was how the other things that were expressed — though they were personal thoughts that weren’t truisms — also felt like truisms.
Similarly, what I like about the new one is how it expresses ideas /in the format of an idea/, so the audience feels more able to engage. But that means that the ‘new Contra’ can’t express something that feels definably like perfect truth.
And perhaps the type of the video that the old Contra is always has to be at a remove from reality, somehow. And it can’t ever … be … clear. Because that clarity makes it inherently flawed, almost — it’s like scratching the lens on a camera, and taking a picture of a perfect moon. You have that lens scratch, but the moon itself is perfect.
Currently we have a picture — it’s not of a moon, though. It’s of a human. And the human is not the austerity of the moon. But it’s in focus. And it expresses, and grows. And it’s a good picture, even in the hellscape of the pandemic. I’m excited to see what comes next.
:)