Oh no you can't: amateur propagandists in the YouTube age.(2008 II)

IT'S difficult to remember, I know, but not too long ago, before computers and word-processing software, hopeful screenwriters had to type their scripts on a typewriter. It was a frustrating pain in the neck, frankly, because the professional format of a screenplay is a complicated mess involving lots of tabs and dialogue margins, eccentric capitalization rules, right-side justification for scene transitions, that sort of thing.

On the other hand, it kept the riff-raff out. The physical tortures of typing the script format were a formidable barrier to entry. You had to really love your script idea to put up with it.

Today, anyone with a script idea and a few dollars can buy a copy of Final Draft and type merrily away, confident that margins, character names, scene transitions, all of it will be instantly--effortlessly--put into place. Anyone with a few dollars more, for that matter, can buy a digital movie camera and elementary editing software like iMovie or Final Cut, and make his own finished movie. If it's short enough, and stupid enough, and on YouTube, it will find an audience. YouTube videos are the sub-prime mortgages of the entertainment business--made possible only because of rapid advances in technology and communication, they're everywhere, and cheap, and they seem harmless. Everybody's doing it.

Just ask Barack Obama. For the past few months, he's been the toast of web video. Talented amateurs--the "Obama Girl," for instance--have been putting up fun, goofy mash notes on YouTube and other places, reinforcing the image of Barack Obama as the cool, progressive grassroots choice. Most of these are sloppy but effective--highly personal declarations of devotion to a presidential candidate--but what's most arresting about these amateur offerings is how emotional and needy the filmmakers seem. The Barack Experience is a little like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan: What you remember aren't the songs, but the tears and the screaming.

It's usually the other way around. It's usually the candidate with the greasy, hysterical smile; it's usually the candidate who seems grasping and desperate and hungry. When Hillary Clinton works the rope line--but let's not single her out; the same could be said of pretty much any recent presidential hopeful--she's got that pleading, maniacal, vote-begging look in her eye that we instantly recognize as the sign of someone who really, really, really needs to win this one.

And yet Barack Obama glides through these videos--and the campaign in general--in composed, unruffled sleekness. He's what pop psychologists call "emotionally unavailable." He's too cool for school, which is why he inspires such nutty, over-the-top fanaticism. The YouTube amateurs, and the voters who stream them, react to this the way twelve-year-old girls react to the remote boy who ignores them: They go nuts; they spin fantasies; they doodle hearts on their binders; they make home movies.

Homemade web videos are the fan clubs of the digital generation, and it's amazing to reflect on just how simple it is these days--a few clicks of the mouse, a broadband connection--to make and broadcast a fairly polished video product. Not too long ago, being a charter member of the Senator John F. Kennedy for ...