How the supercut made everyone a cultural commentator

DURING THE week I found myself, not for the first time, watching a long stream of related clips otherwise known as a supercut. In this case it was 15 minutes of Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generationbeing rejected. A full quarter-hour of the lumpy-headed character suggesting that the ship go to red alert, that it launch torpedoes or, in one case, that his son go to school. Each time someone utters some variation of "no", followed by Worf gritting his teeth and biting down his violent surliness.

There were seven series of that, identified by a fan, edited, put into a montage and uploaded to YouTube. So far 330,000 people have watched the thing.

Anyway, welcome to chapter 4,993 of What Did We Do Before the Internet Came Along?The supercut has become one of those unforeseen offshoots of visual culture and criticism, found where YouTube, fandom and free editing software come together. They represent not just wonderful time-wasters in themselves but also the ease with which this type of visual culture is understood, dissected and repackaged. It's not just the old line that "everyone's a critic". Everyone's a cultural commentator.

This is far more fun than that suggests, and offers a more colourful alternative to the books, popular in the late 1990s, that examined popular TV shows – The X Files, The Sopranos– with academic vigour while sucking the joy out of them.

Plus, supercuts have developed a satirical edge that is crying out to be wielded in an Irish context.

The term was coined by Andy Baio, a blogger, who has since created supercut.org, an entertaining archive. Supercuts come in various guises. They might edit together particular words – every f*** in The Sopranos, every "What?" in Lost– or run together cliches across different movies ("She's going to blow", "Pause the image and enhance").

They identify film-makers' favourite shots, such as "Tarantino from Below" or "Wes Anderson from Below". There are revelatory split-screen comparisons of, say, Star Warsshots with the movies they were copied from or the entire opening act of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arkalongside half-forgotten adventure movies from which it borrowed shot for shot.

And where they have particularly evolved is where they take that visual evidence and articulate it. There is a fascinating look at “the Spielberg face”, which tracks the director’s use of characters’ reactions as a mirror of the audience’s. To get this kind of thing used to mean sitting in the lecture hall for a course that would not end in gainful employment or being cornered by a Tarantino-wannabe in the kitchen at a bad party.

Last year, Tom McCormack posted the most definitive history of the supercut yet on the website of the Museum of the Moving Image, tracing it to the found footage of A Movie by Bruce Connerin 1958. And it's true that the supercut is not born of the internet. You might now be able to watch a supercut of every blackboard joke from The Simpsons, but in its early years the show itself was compiling Homer saying Mmmm and Moe repeatedly falling for prank calls.

But it has flourished since the advent of YouTube, allowing surprising angles on even the most familiar films. Here's McCormack on a supercut of every Chewbacca scene in Star Wars. "The stoic animal usually lingers near the edge of the frame or in the background, an onlooker, or sometimes performs a menial task under orders from Han. The rebels battle the Empire; Han and Leia fight; Luke comes of age; decisions are made; but Chewbacca merely observes and does what he's told."

He compares this to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. "Both focus our attention on minor characters from major cultural touchstones in order to explore the postmodern feeling of narrative powerlessness. Chewbacca, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is not history's actor." (That kind of thing gives a particular type of fan/geek a head rush. I'm giddy just cutting and pasting the paragraph.) And yet the supercut is now evolving as satire. There is a 600-clip supercut of Obama saying "spending" repeatedly, although it takes on the trappings of a talking "word cloud", in which a passage of text is rendered graphically, with the largest words being those most regularly uttered.

This is why, perhaps, the most effective, satirical and oddly disturbing yet is Palin’s Breath, which took Sarah Palin’s address after the shooting of the Arizona senator Gabrielle Giffords but stripped it of words. What remains are intakes of breath and practised displays of compassion. It is only 40 seconds long. It is devastating.

And in Ireland, where the sharpest satire is now increasingly being delivered online, the supercut is a novel opportunity to dissect political discourse and Irish media. We’re about to engage in the drama of a referendum. Someone somewhere will make their own director’s cut.

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