Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. And in this archive poll episode, we revisit episode
seven of Never Post from April 2024 in my segment, the American
car, about how the automobile became one of the default
filming locations for short form vertical video. Question I pose
at the end of the segment, I think, remains mostly open. What
development is in store for the car as a filming location?
Will more people engage in more extreme personalization, or will
we move on from the car as we did, at least in some senses,
from the bedroom? And if we do move on, what location is next?
One half answer that I have, at least, is that we have, I think,
moved on slightly from the car, and the new filming location
that has replaced it or augmented it is everywhere. I
think below the technical conveniences of the car's
privacy as a filming location, it also generally protects
against something not really discussed in the segment,
embarrassment. There is or maybe was at this point, a kind of low
level mortification inherent to filming in public, to being seen
in your desire to be seen on the sidewalk, in the restaurant, at
the grocery store, in the gym, and so on.
As the practice of creating short form vertical video has
normalized for all sorts of reasons, it has maybe ironically
become less cringe to film yourself wherever you happen to
be with technology racing to meet this willingness in things
like wireless battery powered Bluetooth microphones and camera
glasses. All this is to say nothing of the age at which one
desires to make short form video, the age where one can get
or reasonably needs a car, and the, I think, probably
increasing gap between those two numbers. So does the moving
outside of short form video spell the death of the car as a
filming location? I don't think so. Just this week, I saw a
newscaster reporting on the cyclosporiasis parasite outbreak
in The US with a lot full of freshly purchased veggies in the
passenger seat of her car.
A few days ago, I'm sitting in my car like I am now. It's 04:30
in the afternoon. I've arrived early to our daughter's daycare
for pickup. I have fifteen minutes to kill, the most
unshapely amount of time. Neither a fleeting ten nor a
productive twenty.
Fifteen is the perfect interval to simply lose. So I open
TikTok. Fried Indian Before long, I'm watching a man in a
slightly too large lilac dress shirt and matching striped
necktie. He's in his mid twenties, I'd wager with brown
hair and a thin beard. It's a food review with all the gusto
and overstatement one expects from short form social video
about eating.
This
Speaker 2: is the peak of my life right here.
Mike Rugnetta: He says, of the butter chicken coated naan that
he's folding into his mouth. He moves on to spoonfuls of rice
slathered with the same. The curry oozing out of Take our
whole bean a fountain
Speaker 2: come to my
Mike Rugnetta: like you might see on the dessert table of an
office function, burbling chocolate to be drizzled on
strawberries pre poked with toothpicks. The appliance is two
feet tall ish, a gurgling spout on top and two plastic domes
with a recirculating reservoir below.
Speaker 2: But you know what? It adds flavor. Maybe next time
I'll dip
Mike Rugnetta: He tilts an aluminum container of rice,
squeezing it under the lowest dome. And I notice he's managed
to avoid getting any of this on his shirt and tie. Miraculous
given that this whole scene has played out in the driver's seat
of his car. I think that cars today are almost the exact
equivalent of the great gothic cathedrals, Roland Barthes
writes in the opening line of his 1957 essay, The New Citroen.
I mean, the supreme creation of an era, he continues.
Conceived with passion by unknown artists and consumed in
image, if not in usage, by a whole population which
appropriates them as a purely magical object. Barth was
writing about the Citroen DS 19, designed by a sculptor and an
aeronautical engineer, considered one of the more
beautiful vehicles ever manufactured and a significant
milestone in the mechanical development of the automobile in
the twentieth century. But Barth may as well have been writing
about Luke Food's car, the one with the butter chicken fountain
in it, which appears to be an undercover green Kia Soul. The
car is a magical object in that it is unbelievable even when
directly beheld. Like a magic trick, endless effort is
expended in some out of sight place to make the work done in
public seem as impossible as it is also inevitable.
A lady cannot be sewn in half and that the image is so well
known, it practically defines the performance of magic. We
assent to its contradiction. A pickup truck cannot be angry,
but yet we've all been in suburban grocery store parking
lots on a Saturday afternoon staring down these embarrassing
behemoths. This is what Bart means when he says cars are
consumed in image and usage. They're machines which serve a
purpose, but they're also maybe more so symbols which signify
things about themselves and so then more significantly, about
the people who drive them.
The first time I noticed the car was David After Dentist in 2009,
in which David DeVore junior, having had anesthesia to remove
an extra tooth, asks his father filming on a flip cam. Is this
real life?
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is real life.
Mike Rugnetta: He's seven years old in the video and buckled
into the back seat of some stationary vehicle. The large
rear window frames blown out trees in the afternoon light.
The black leather of the car looks new. When David screams
Speaker 2: Stay in your seat.
Mike Rugnetta: And slumps explaining that he doesn't feel
tired. I don't feel tired.
Speaker 2: You don't?
Mike Rugnetta: No? The deadened sound of the car interior is
unmistakable and evocative. This video needs the car. David is
enclosed, protected, in transit, between states. The car is in
public yet its own kind of private space where his father
films this first surgery for the benefit of his mother before he
uploads the video to YouTube for the rest of the family, not
realizing there's an option to make the video, like the car
itself, private.
The intertwining of social media and the automobile makes some
sense. The web remade a world only recently remade by cars.
Both are used to navigate infrastructure which is now
integral to mandatory for in many ways, contemporary life.
The car was the engine of early travel vlogs. It was the safe
space of cap wearing, sunglass clad, tough guy conspiracy
theorists.
It remains the thrumming heart of van life and alongside the
bathroom, it's become a default setting for short form vertical
video.
Speaker 2: Just you know mean? Because here's the deal. Right?
Come here. In the great words of little John, what?
Mike Rugnetta: It's four thirty eight in the afternoon. I
continue to scroll. And not long after Luke Foods, I arrive at
Taco Reacts, known mostly for reaction videos. He shows a clip
of someone else's content before inserting his own commentary.
Speaker 3: The last time you saw someone with an Audi?
Speaker 4: Early two thousands, It's been a while.
Speaker 2: It it it it depends because the neighbors got one
that he drives every day unless you're talking about the other
one and then in that case, you're damn right.
Mike Rugnetta: He's a bearded white guy seated almost always
in a four door Ford f one fifty pickup. Out of the rear windows
of his truck, you may see a house across a suburban street,
a parking lot, a tree line. We often join him for lunch as he
unwraps fast food packages. The interior roof of the truck
features a growing number of morale patches. The easiest of
which to make out is for Montana Knife Co.
There's also a polar bear and what looks like a fighter jet.
Taco, known elsewhere as Paul b, for whom Taco is a kind of
character. Taco looks like a Ford f one fifty owner insofar
as such a thing has a look. His beard is long, dark, and
manicured. He wears a structured baseball cap with an elk on it
and an arrowhead necklace and sometimes reflective sunglasses.
In the back seat of his truck, you can occasionally see arrows
with their bright fletching. Scrolling through Taco's videos,
reacting to a woman holding a snake, reacting to someone
smashing a camera lens, a man saying he wouldn't allow his
wife to go to the club, a cat eating a french fry, I find
myself surprised. Taco seems non confrontationally accepting is
maybe one way to put it. He looks confused and dismayed at
the guy saying he won't let his wife go to the club, but he
remains silent, like he doesn't wanna cause trouble. Elsewhere,
he quips with classic millennial affliction about D and D and
Harry Potter.
Are these the reactions of a Ford f one fifty owner? One with
a baseball cap and reflective sunglasses? What do I think the
reactions of a Ford f one fifty owner should be?
Speaker 2: As a representative of to boop or not to boop, boop
the fuck out of that thing. Give it all the love in the world.
Make sure nothing can ever harm it. Ever. Ever.
Mike Rugnetta: In 2014, writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote
The American Room, an essay chronicling the background
environments of YouTube videos. The first time I noticed the
room, he writes in the opening line of his essay, was in the
Pneuma Pneuma video of 2004, circulated pre YouTube in which
a New Jersey man named Gary Brolzma danced in his chair to a
Moldovan pop song called Dragosta Dinte. Ford notes the
sameness of the rooms depicted in many YouTube videos. Their
emptiness, their off white color, their size, large. The
rooms look the way they do for a few reasons.
First, he explains, because of standards. Sheet rock is cut in
certain sizes. Certain house plans are easier to come by,
which are themselves easier to come by than skilled labor to
build them. The rooms are empty, he suggests, simply because such
large rooms are difficult, meaning expensive, to fill with
art, knickknacks, furniture. Quote, you could judge those
rooms and say that America has a paucity of visual imagination,
that we live in a kind of wasteland.
Or you could draw another conclusion and note that America
might be a little more broke than it wants to show, end
quote. And so the empty American room emerges and inside it, the
viral YouTube star. The American room has lost its primacy in the
last decade. First, because the frequency of sudden and
unexpected viral mega hits.
Speaker 2: The
Mike Rugnetta: one off video produced ad hoc like Pneumonuma
and without a manicured background.
Speaker 4: Hi, guys. So this is my first video blog.
Mike Rugnetta: Has waned. YouTube is now known for its
creators.
Speaker 2: Once again, behind me are a 100 people.
Mike Rugnetta: Professionals who seek notoriety and influence
repeatedly on purpose. YouTube videos are no longer posts.
They're weightier than that and with that weight, they exhibit
increasingly TV like production, makeup, lighting, sets. On
television shows, the characters rooms are filled with art,
knickknacks, ephemera and signifiers, Ford writes.
Continuing, think of the rooms in the Big Bang Theory, constant
visual stimulus.
Always something for the eye to do. YouTube audiences too need
something for their eyes to do now. If not a full set, at the
very least, a shelf with some stuff on it. The beige wall just
doesn't cut it anymore. The American room has fallen from
favor, thanks also to the ascendancy of the mobile phone
and a locale even more suited for casual video production.
The car is a natural setting for social video, less so for
podcasts. Not only do its qualities obviate the need for
additional production equipment, you couldn't fit most of it in a
car anyway. Neither could you fit a bookshelf of Funko Pops,
your sword collection, or a grid of old LP sleeves. It's a
filming locale that excuses and addresses the stress of bare
beige walls of producing constant visual stimulus. The
American room is stationary, but the American car is action,
movement, motion.
Even while parked, it's always in media race going, arriving,
like David after Dentist between states, and so always already a
place of excitement and progress before the action even begins.
It's also no less a personal space. Jean Baudrillard in the
system of objects called the car an eccentric relative to the
household. In the new Citroen, Bart notes that car interiors
were becoming increasingly homely, abandoning the
mechanoscientific design language suggesting a quote, the
alchemy of speed for a more domestic feel. Quote, more like
the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control room of
a factory.
The car, Baudrillard writes, makes it possible to be
simultaneously at home and further away from home. A lot of
people make videos in their car, but I think principally of the
videos I see of mostly women screaming.
Speaker 5: Do you ever just
Mike Rugnetta: And crying inside of them. Sometimes ironically.
Sometimes it's hard to tell. Often, hold a large beverage.
Speaker 5: This is my Starbucks drink today. I don't know if you
guys have tried this.
Mike Rugnetta: This is a media type of such specificity. You
might bulk at the idea that it comprises a genre until you hear
Evelyn from the Internets ask
Speaker 5: If you don't have an automobile, where do you scream?
Like, where do you just let the proverbial chopper sing?
Because, baby, within these walls, in this Toyota, in my
Corolla, oh, I don't play. I gets down.
Mike Rugnetta: A projectile and a domicile is how Baudrillard
describes the automobile. The car too is an abode, he writes,
but an exceptional one. A closed realm of intimacy, but one
released from the constraints that usually apply to the
intimacy of the home. In some ways, for some people, the car
is more home than home. My fifteen minutes are nearly up.
I land on Shannon Blake. One of Blake's videos has been going
around lately. She's seated in a car with a white cowboy hat on.
There are fake leaves and moss pinned to the roof of her car. A
dream catcher hangs over one shoulder and a Nazar over the
other.
She wears at least five necklaces of beads, shells,
feathers. Her hands are covered in rings with rocks and
crystals. Her wavy platinum hair fans out from under the hat. She
wears three nose rings, one lip ring, and at least six earrings.
She raps about taking Ayahuasca and about how the pyramids were
built for time travel.
Someone interrupts Rick, ah, this is a stitch. An
archaeologist enters the frame, noting that since this video has
become so popular, he sees fit to set a couple things straight.
The pyramids, for one, were not built by aliens. They are not
time travel devices. This is one of the reasons Shannon's video
has been so ubiquitous.
Endless people lining up to pick apart her new age clap trap. Why
I wonder have I not seen anyone pick apart her car? Shannon at
one point lived in her car. She posted pictures of her car, her
home, which she named Nancy in 2016, a few years after her
daughter was born. I put links in the show notes if you wanna
go look.
People joke that Shannon is the final boss of Burning Man, but
she may very well be the final boss of short form vertical
videos shot in a car. Say what you must about her bedazzled co
opted shamanism obscured by weed smoke. Her frames are amazing.
Having taken the American car, in this case, a late model white
Ford Bronco as a filming location to its logical
endpoint, customizing, communicating with the interior
of her vehicle as much and possibly more than its exterior.
The Ford Bronco is gone, transformed by whatever aura
Shannon is at the center of.
Her frame feels very purposeful. Not at all like an automobile,
but like a home. Personal. Lived in. Full.
I think of Paul Ford. I think of the emptiness of the American
home. The rooms in the Big Bang theory, constant visual
stimulus, always something for the eye to do. For Ford and
Barth, home is marked by less visual complexity, not more.
Blake no longer lives in her car.
I've seen videos of her house. It's huge. But her car
nonetheless feels lived in. Another vehicular visual magic
trick. Another contradiction to which I ascent.
I wonder what Shannon presages. The professionalization of
YouTube spelled the demise of the American room popularly.
What does the professionalization of TikTok
spell for the American car? Will we look back on the empty
automobiles of TikTok? No morale patches.
No dream catchers. Just screaming women in their cups.
As quaint artifacts of a simpler time before we realized what
those spaces could accommodate and what space will arrive to
address the stressors of not wanting to deck out ones?
Corolla, or Kia Soul, or Ford Bronco, or Ford f one fifty. I
look back into my own car.
I see dog blankets, a child's car seat, an empty cooler that I
should clean. My timer goes off. My fifteen minutes are up. Lost
thoroughly. Do you make videos in your car?
Do any of your favorite creators make videos primarily in their
cars? Why do you think it makes for such an effective filming
location and what does it signify? Also, outside the scope
of this segment, but something I mentioned briefly and I'm still
curious about, how did the bathroom become another default
video setting for vertical videos in the last few years?
Surely, there's something more to it than the presence of a
mirror and good lighting. Call us at (651) 615-5007.
Email us at theneverpost@Gmail.com. Drop a
voice memo in our air table or leave a comment on the website.
There are links in the show notes, and let us know what you
think. We may respond to your comment in a future mailbag
episode. That is the archival episode we have for you today.
If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and
interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never
Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this
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You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping
us keep the show going. Never Post's producers are Audrey
Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name
last name.
Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike
Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure
and is distributed by Radiotopia.