there's so much i could say about RLM and won't, at least not today. you can't claim to have a serious conversation about video essays on youtube (or the tenor of nerd-related online media criticism generally) without talking about the Plinkett Star Wars reviews, and even still that convo would be incomplete without discussing their on-again-off-again relationship with abject somethingawful-style offensive edgelord shitposting. unlike an embarrassing quantity of their contemporary peers, however, the RLM guys grew and learned and changed, which is a big part of why i've stuck with them for so long. i was a teen in the 2000s, i also said slurs and thought being offensive was just good honest fun. i grew up as they matured, in contrast to a sea of other adult entertainers existentially committed to never doing so.
RLM is probably the closest thing i and a fair few millennials (from a very particular background) have to a Roger Ebert. i don't always agree with their takes, and there were a good couple years after The Last Jedi when i stopped watching them because it felt like they were playing too hard to reddit's tastes. i came back to them in 2020, when they (like me) finally just threw the entire mainstream blockbuster hollywood industry in the trash out of exhaustion and boredom, thus kickstarting what's honestly been the most consistently good run they've had in a long time. and i have to say, as someone who has been watching and reading online media crit for damn near two and a half decades now, i cannot overstate the immense psychic value i've come to place on the opinions of actual honest to god adults who like sci-fi and hate what's become of it. their spite for all things corporate schlock gives me infinite life. the fact is they've been producing entertaining, ambitious, and often shockingly insightful media analysis for more than ten years now. their Jack & Jill review remains an essential touchstone on the nepotistic business of modern ad-funded filmmaking! at least for me
but okay, i said i wasn't gonna talk at length about the legacy of RLM so i won't anymore. i'm here to talk about this relatively recent one-off documentary of theirs, which is nominally an extension of a years-old running gag but is in actuality a very matter-of-fact conversation between adults about the role of speculative collector's markets in nerd media. they begin by discussing the news story of a Back to the Future VHS tape selling for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, thus sparking much buzz about the potential unmined value of old tapes. this serves as a springboard for an honest to goodness investigation of the entire phenomenon: the grading process, the inferiority of VHS, what it means to collect things, and to what extant the whole damn thing is a scam. they approach this topic with all the unflinching cynicism you'd expect of the crew who melted 2,387 vintage Star Wars figures in a vat of acetone simply out of spite.
the real throughline of this video is the question "what creates value?" and their answer is what i came here to talk about. condition, scarcity, and providence are the words they come back to-- how well-preserved is the collectible, how rare is it, how much story does it have as an object? they cite Beanie Babies here, the perennial example of corporatized speculative bubbles. one thing i really appreciate is how they clearly differentiate casual collecting from the activity of speculators. there's a pernicious expectation culturally that anyone who keeps a functionally useless Old Thing (vhs tapes, action figures, trading cards) must be doing so at least in part in hopes that its value will increase over time. as someone who does collect a few Old Things i've always hated this expectation. there's a lot of stuff i used to have and sold because i didn't really have a choice economically, and honestly in most cases it left me feeling kind of dirty. i don't like the idea of a toy that never gets played with, a movie that never gets watched, a card game that never gets played. i don't want to own a thing because it might get me money later. the things i collect are collected because they represent something personal to me, much in the way the RLM guys keep and display their own collectibles.
nothing can be called valuable if you can put a dollar sign on it, in my opinion. can there be a worse fate for matter than to be transmogrified into a metaphorical lottery ticket?
oh i hate this shit. i hate how our entire goddamn economy is just a series of gambling addictions stacked up in a trench coat called "banking." let's set aside cost of living, rent, education, healthcare, etc. i resent how expensive used clothes are now, how expensive vinyl is, old lenses for outdated mounting systems, weird analog a/v equipment, and honestly just like... everything? we're living in an era of such inescapable productive stagnation and engineered obsolescence, the only place left to turn to find something built to endure is the past. the demand for that stuff (and a lack of regulatory pressure to limit resale value) means sellers raise prices exponentially, which ultimately just ends up crowding out all the poors like me who just wanted some stupid little object to put in a corner where we can look at it and feel a fleeting moment of joy between shifts at the Food Pyramid. like i know this isn't A Big Problem but it fucking gets to me. everything old is expensive, everything new is expensive (ESPECIALLY if it's worth the money), and all the while we're just drowning in subscription services that treat every individual bank account like an oil field they've got mineral rights to. voting with your wallet doesn't make a lick of fucking difference when drainage enters the equation. god damned capitalists see a nickel changing hands and want a dime for each finger it touched. i made a video some years ago about all the Halo collectibles i had at the time and how conflicted they left me as i got older. i've all but removed the bookshelf from my recent essays because it just feels weird to me. the collection lingering softly behind you in a youtube video serves the same base function as a framed diploma at a doctor's office, which is... a little bit disquieting? i don't like that the only qualification that seems to matter in the world of media analysis is, functionally, how much money you have. but then that's true for becoming a doctor as well, isn't it. i guess it is kind of true of everything now. so yeah, the fact that RLM share both my enjoyment of collecting and my resentment towards most collectors means a lot to me. makes me feel slightly less psychotic
the big gimmick here is that they get a handful of tapes professionally graded (including a fake one just to see what happens), one of which is a copy of the wretched 80s b-movie Nukie. this is the aforementioned years-long running gag, a film that's been sent to them hundreds of times that they hadn't bothered to watch until producing this video. contending that this makes them owners of the largest private Nukie collection on earth, they proceed to put every single copy they own into a wood chipper to inflate the tape's perceived value ahead of listing their final, graded tape on eBay. i love this. i love this so much. generally i love how often the RLM guys destroy shit. in a world where everything is wrapped in plastic and rated for inevitable resale, there's immense catharsis in simply smashing something into worthlessness. we could use a lot more of that in some slightly more consequential arenas of human existence, imo
the tape sold for $80,600 and the proceeds were all donated to charity. that's awesome. but i wonder to what extent this whole episode works as an experiment. it certainly proves that you can create value where none ought to exist, though i think they should have listed a second Nukie tape without publicizing it like a week before releasing this vid just to have a control sample to compare from. but what i keep asking myself is, did destroying all those tapes ACTUALLY increase the speculative value of Nukie? it's not like they were in circulation before, and certainly the RLM guys had no intention of selling them down the line. the purpose of the wood chipper stunt is to create scarcity, but that scarcity only really exists in the narrative of Nukie as a running joke in RLM's videography. you're not bidding on the tape because it's the last, you're bidding on it because it's a funny joke from a youtube video. and that's providence, right? of course all that context imbues this worthless object with a parasocial value, it's the same thing as bidding on a prop from a movie you like.
but what kind of kills it for me as a proper experiment is that they explicitly say "we're donating the proceeds to charity." of course people are going crawl over each other to bid higher on this thing now, the internet LOVES seeing big numbers go to good causes. on the one hand, that's more providence. all of this is part of the mythos. whoever won the bid got plastic trash in exchange for giving RLM an $80k tax writeoff, which i think is hilarious. but that's precisely what pushes it into the realm of a stunt for me, rather than the proper experiment the rest of the vid puts a lot of effort into setting up, because our guys are very much pressing their thumbs on the scale. which, you know, i'm not REALLY complaining about this. anything they listed would sell for a lot, and i think we all know the aspiring VHS speculative bubble is a pile of shit. it doesn't need to be proven even faux-scientifically. but if we just seclude ourselves in the self-contained universe of this one video on its own, i feel like the stunt of the tape auction eclipses and maybe even undermines a lot of what came before. would it have been better if they'd held onto that now more-scarce graded tape with the intention of auctioning it off for charity someday at an unspecified date? for me, maybe yes. but of course everything you'd do to avoid unduly influencing the results of the auction ultimately results in giving less money to charity. i dunno. i don't even know if i'm complaining about anything at this point. i just know i've watched this video twice (once when it released, once last night because i was bored) and both times i found myself feeling somehow vaguely uneasy by the end. what does that mean? does it mean anything? supposedly it's my job to figure that out, but here i am at the end of this review and i've come no closer to really resolving it. maybe i am just unfairly cynical about youtubers doing charity.
in any event, i think this Nukie vid is an excellent example of what makes RLM special at their best. if you want a much more pure, personal, and distilled exploration of this emotion but filtered through the realm of memes stolen by corporations, definitely check out RLM's Dick the Birthday Boy: The Legacy Continues. anyway it's a good video so go watch it
