dhar mann

Like everyone else, I experience social media in something of a dream state, and I am taken places at certain times without even being fully aware of what's happening. Sometimes facebook offers to show me a video and sometimes I say, 'sure'. There are a lot of videos which appear to be excerpts from films or tv shows but which (after a minute or so's viewing you realise) clearly aren't, and which are instead I suppose purpose-made cheap scenarios to get fb clicks/likes/shares? Sorry to be so dim but I can't imagine how anyone makes money out of these things (even as 'content', even if they are watched a lot - maybe fb rewards content providers who keep people glued to fb for certain amounts of time etc?). 

I can't even really describe what these videos are, though here are a couple of screenshots. I have to admit they're always too long for me (10-15 minutes generally) so I tend to check out once my famously short attention span tires but I have to say, they have a lot of common features. I'll try to list a few, but I won't be very scientific, sorry, because as I say - social media dream state (also lingering covid aftereffects making me a little woozy). 

Dhar Mann actually has a wikipedia page which goes through a few interesting aspects of an interesting career and correctly identifies the Dhar Mann videos as morality plays. I have only watched a couple of these, but they seem to typify the majority of the kind of videos I'm talking about. Off the top of my head, a few tropes, which may not be typical of Dhar Mann videos (a lot of the videos I've seen have no credits at all, and certainly no titles etc except for a title which seems supplied by some third party eg 'Racist bank executive experiences kharma' and so on). However, generally speaking:

• The set up starts almost immediately with two characters, one being inexplicably hostile to another in a socially inequitable situation
• The character being treated cruelly behaves with almost christ-like civility in the face of hurtful disdain
• The viewer is quickly swept up in a scenario whereby we are clued into the way that the downtrodden character is (a) morally victorious and will soon be (b) revealed to all to be victorious - it's just a matter of time
• The character who has been badly treated, often if not always for racist reasons, proves to be actually socially and financially powerful.
• In some instances, continuing the christ theme, once justice is restored/realised the 'victim' now revealed to be powerful is also munificent in triumph and forgives her/his abuser, encouraging them to regard the situation as a learning experience (usually, 'don't judge a book by its cover' because people you assume at first glance are your inferiors might be your superiors - rather than, 'all people are worthy of respect'). 
• I don't think this is core but it does seem to speak to the conditions in which many of these videos are made - they are English language videos but often the main characters clearly don't have English as their first language. It is not commented on that their English is accented (there's no particular reason why it should be commented on) but their odd emphasis on particular words sometimes gives the impression that they are not entirely sure how to deliver their lines or perhaps even what they are saying, though I suppose that might be a reach on my part. It's just the vibe. 

I laugh at these stupid setups and essentially I will say they are way, way too long so I tend not to watch them all the way through so I'm not fully on top of them. But still the scenarios stay with me. I could tell you quite a bit more of the detail of the story of the woman in a wheelchair who tries to go to a restaurant and is treated with extremely bad grace by not only the restaurant owner but also the other staff, who initially refuse to serve her and then insist on putting her in an inconvenient place in the restaurant away from the other customers (the restaurant, by the way, has every appearance of being an office corridor with some temp tables in it). This story's resolution is that the woman in the wheelchair ends up being a restaurant critic on whose good favour the restaurant's future stands or falls, and it will fall. Another one which I didn't watch all the way through is where a racist white low-level executive berates an Indian at an ATM machine and then arrives at work to discover the Indian man is now his boss, at which point he decides to poison the food at an investor's lunch laid on by the new boss (and then hides under the table!) but this somehow backfires on him because the investors had already signed agreements with the company (!?) etc etc and all the way through (to when I stopped watching) the Indian boss is serene and philosophical.

Anyway. It's a new phenomenon (to me) and it's really interesting to see this smug, crappy genre emerge. What I actually wonder is whether I am being fed the SJW videos but there are also videos exploring how good it is to judge a book by its cover and how one really should poison the investors' lunch or throw the paraplegic out of the restaurant, but the algorithm unfortunately doesn't think I'm ready for that kind of thing yet.