I have stumbled over a portion of the internet of which I had previously not known. It’s possible I might have been happier that way, but you can’t unring that bell.
There appears to be a small industry producing short videos or playlets in which one person is truly awful, and gets their comeuppance. Like a scripted version of an encounter filmed on someone’s phone, where (for example) a nasty person calls the cops to shut down a kids’ lemonade stand because it’s a “health code violation”. Of course the nasty person is a well-to-do white woman and the “violation” appears to be nothing more than that the kids are black and selling lemonade in her neighborhood. The nasty person is eventually scolded or arrested or otherwise trounced, and goodness and virtue triumph.
One “brand,” if you can call it that, focuses on the adventures of the Mango Park Police Department; they have their own YouTube channel, and many many videos. The hero, police captain James Porter (and occasionally, confusingly, a Mango Park judge as well) is played by a black man (actor Verne Alexander) who exudes decency. The Captain’s frequent foil are women cursed by their features to play the “mean and self-righteous” role. There are other repertory players who appear in these things–sometimes as good guys, other times as villains. The playlets all have titles like “Boss Forced to Resign After Mistreating Black Employee,” or “Wealthy Entitled Karen Sues Cops, Does Not End Well.” The sins of the villains are overblown–this is not a subtle art form. The production values are somewhat below those of a 1970s Afterschool Special, with writing to match.
What fascinates me is that these playlets get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and many comments, most of which are of the “You rock, Captain Porter!” variety. Some of the audience seems to confuse Captain/Judge Porter with real world sometime-jurists like Judge Judy Sheindlin. As I say, there are a lot of these: someone is making enough money doing this to finance these videos and to make more. But who is the audience?
I was talking to my daughter about this phenomenon. She calls it “rage-bait,” but I’ve been thinking of it as “Karenporn,”* entertainment that sets up an easy target: an entitled, well-t0-do (usually female) white person who thinks that anything that crosses their personal squick line must be illegal; who expects the authorities and the world around her to laud her for taking a stand. And the satisfaction of these stories is that the Karen (or Chad, as I believe her male counterpart is called) gets smacked down hard.
If you are a conservative of the MAGA stripe, maybe you think this is entertainment for liberals? I find it hard to believe that most of the liberals I know would watch more than one of these films without wincing. Because I wanted to write about them, I watched several, and felt oddly queasy–certainly not triumphant or entertained.
Maybe there’s just a portion of the electorate that hungers to see cartoon villainy get its comeuppance? If so, I recommend almost any of the the Marvel films–both the villainy and production values are more convincing.
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*with apologies to my several friends named Karen who do not deserve to have coals of fire heaped on them for the bad behavior of others.