The American Meme

The American Meme works best when it reveals the subtle pain behind much of the manufactured fantasy.

What is fascinating, and valuable, about The American Meme is its ability to reveal the desperation, loneliness, and sheer Sisyphean tedium of ceaselessly chasing what will most likely end up being an ever-diminishing share of the online-attention economy.

The American Meme is a film I very much recommend, since it’s both highly entertaining and an essential snapshot of the voyeuristic parasitic American fishbowl.

The American Meme traces this democratized/Americanized form of “celebrity” back to its origins and profiles some of the web’s more notorious creations in a generally entertaining and somewhat illuminating account of recent history.

The American Meme can be fun, even informative, but there’s a bigger story here, and Marcus mostly fails to tell it.

It’s vital in the sense that there aren’t enough third-party chronicles of this undeniably potent force in the online world, but it’s sloppy in how safe it feels — it’s easy to imagine the stars agreeing to speak so long as certain topics were either breezed over or avoided entirely.

The American Meme is a polemic as shallow and artificial as it thinks its subjects are.