An Introduction to Memetics
Culture > Memetics
An Introduction to Memetics
The start of a new column about our favorite memes, and why they matter
by Dominique Lear ・May 8, 2020・10 minutes
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a talk (online) where the panelists, who were meant to be discussing the role of the novel during the COVID-19 crisis, entered a long digression about the particularities of the meme and its flourishing during moments of crisis. I was drawn to their description of the meme as a new form of literature, a style of language belonging to a baroque form of expression in our digital era.
In Mexico, the meme has quickly become a national industry. While I recognize we Mexicans have a particular tendency to aggrandize our talents, we do create memes with such speed and precision and of such surprising breadth and depth that if it were a monetizable endeavor, our GDP and economic growth would be much healthier than they currently are. It’s come to a point where I learn about current events more reliably through memes than through the news, or any other social network feed. I’m sure that many other countries have a similar relationship to memes, though my national pride prevents me from considering that anyone does a better job than Mexico.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to find a way to represent the ubiquity and prominence of the meme in our world on Xeno. One of the key attributes of a good meme is that while many are universal, the best are often so culturally specific that they’re illegible to out-groups. The meme, like the biological phenomena it’s named after, needs to have variation, replication, and “fitness,” meaning it needs to belong to a single environment more than any other. The meme trades in a precise balance between specificity and generality that makes the reader, viewer, poster, sharer relate to it, identify with it. But the digital meme also just is, and to write about it is to try to attribute science or rationality to a pastime. My brother, for example, does not approve of this endeavor.
I decided that to best respect the sheer variance of meme-lore, any writing about the meme on Xeno needed to go beyond the scope of a single essay. So I’m honored to be kicking off a column in which the writer will pick a single meme that was prominent or significant in the week leading up to their writing, and place it into context. To explain a meme is a little like explaining a joke, so please forgive us if this sounds a little clunky. What we aim to achieve is a window into a different culture through their memes. It’s an experiment.
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My favorite meme this week comes in the shape of a forty-three second-long clip, which was actually an original meme created for a dear friend and meme-queen, @memerylstrip. The video shows two pre-pubescent boys. One successfully walks across a makeshift bridge over a stream, and the other begins to trundle his way across. For the Mexicans among my readers, this video should be immediately recognizable. The image is one of the original tokens of the early viral age: “La Caída de Edgar” (Edgar’s Fall).
“La Caída de Edgar” became internet famous in 2006 in Mexico (and perhaps Latin America?), a time when everyone’s cellphones were not all rectangular touch screens, when we were all giggling over Charlie’s finger biting, and I had just entered the “wearing braces” stage of adolescence. The original video was exactly what you’re seeing in our meme: two boys, a stream, a tree-bridge. But what made the original so famous was the dialogue. As our red-shirted friend, Edgar, tries to cross the bridge, the yellow-shirted friend starts jostling the tree-bridge in an attempt to thwart Edgar’s crossing. Edgar gets annoyed and starts yelling at his friend. His tone of voice, his slang, his accent, his sheer desperation build up as his body begins to come down, reaching to the branches for stability against his bullying friend’s antics. The video ends with, well, Edgar’s Fall, narrated by the cameraman’s “Ohhh, te bañastes.” (“Oh, you showersed.”) “La Caída de Edgar” is a classic narrative structure in which we’re not interested in what happens—the video’s title tells us Edgar is going to fall—but rather how it happens.
The meme in question has adapted not the video content of the original, but rather the accompanying voices. In this meme, “Edgar’s Fall” was dubbed. However, the meme translates “La Caída de Edgar” not from Spanish to English or any other language, but from its original slang-laden Mexican garb to the ubiquitous “Dubbed Spanish” that any Hispanophone knows well. The cursing and slang are replaced by the family-friendly language of dubbing distinguished by its incomprehensibly hazy register and its fanciful substitutions for slang. For example, the “no, wey, no” (no, dude/bro, no) and “pinche pendejo, wey” (f**cking idiot, dude) become “no, amigo, no” (no, buddy, no) and “maldito insolente” (darned insolent), both phrases that could only conceivably come out of the mouths of priests with receding hairlines or sixth-grade geography teachers whose use of light-blue eyeshadow covering the entire lid has remained unchanged since their college days in the eighties. There has been an ongoing trend of “dubbing” famous videos, but this is perhaps the apex of said trend.
The “Caída de Edgar” meme trades on nostalgia: nostalgia for a digital culture of the early 2000s, when what was viral remained so for more than a day, and for the bygone days of the television era; for sitting around in your grandmother’s kitchen watching U.S. American TV shows sloppily dubbed into Spanish, where every character sounded like every other. As those of us fortunate enough to find social distancing equal to having too much time on our hands are lured into reflecting on our pasts and childhoods, our routines and rituals, our roots and families, this meme pokes fun at the cultural staples of two important moments of our lives: the simultaneously intensely communal and acutely individual experiences of watching television and venturing into the depths of the internet. With this meme, we’re allowed to briefly inhabit a familiar world before the pandemic, before our current political situation, before Britney shaved her head, and, for some of us, before taxes and rent and health insurance and 9-to-5 jobs.
To refresh “La Caída de Edgar” is to look back on ourselves. Giggling at the dubbing of the meme, I couldn’t help but think of myself, at 11, struggling to fit in to a new school, a new home, and, slowly, a new body, giggling at the original video all those years ago. The meme allows you to point back and recognize that yes, you were very silly when you were 11. And that’s ok. But while the past may seem easier, rosier even, than today, it wasn’t necessarily less hard; we just had different battles. We’ll be able to laugh about all this too, dub it, even. But hopefully, we’ll be somewhere better then. ❖
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