When you enter old age – a word that I have always feared, but which I now have to face – you have to be very careful not to isolate yourself from the world that continues to go around with its usual vertigo. Knowing how to capture the present and not become the past; and, first of all, try to understand what seems strange to us. “Be not a grumpy old man, nor a miser, nor completely old,” the Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva reminds us. The discordant pounding of reggaeton and its monotonous litanies, the influencers that they feed pleases or they die, or the storytellers of TikTok, a universe where everything happens on the surface and is instantaneous.
It seems unintellectual to talk about TikTok, but that’s precisely where the trap that the immobility of isolation sets for you falls, which leads you to ignore or disdain what from afar seems banal to you. But what is rejected as vain and superfluous is nothing more than a repetition of the past in different forms, because time always closes in on itself, if we believe Borges, who in turn believed in Pythagoras.
Between the tiktoker There are the “content creators”, narrators through videos in series of several short chapters. Storytelling is as old as the world. We create stories and are attracted to listening to them, we are made for that; we cannot live without inventions. Every time we are told something fictitious, or something that really happened, different areas of the brain are put on alert and, thanks to a swarm of neural connections, the circuits that awaken the memory and the state of attention are activated, and others that, listening to what we hear, stimulate our emotions: hate and love, rejection and empathy, revenge and forgiveness.
Every time we sit in the cinema, while the film shows us the good guys in conflict with the bad guys, we identify with the good guys and desire the punishment of the bad guys. If the bad guys aren’t punished when the lights come on, we still feel a feeling of frustration. The stories told on TikTok are all based on that primary and elemental conflict between good and evil. The reward for the good and the punishment for the bad.
This conflict is one of the central axes of every narrative, together with the obstacles that repeatedly stand in the way of the protagonists, who on their life’s journey wish to reach the destination, where calm and happiness await them. From the Odyssey to infinitely long serials, which ended up in Cordel literature, and then in radio soap operas, in soap operas and finally in television series. streaming. Its synthetic, or encapsulated, version is that of Tik Tok.
There are content creators with large audiences, who have their own production teams, and manage to “monetise” millions, to the extent that their audience grows and becomes profitable, just like influencers successful. But the ones I’m interested in are the homemade creators, who are at the same time screenwriters, cameramen, directors, producers and are part of the cast of actors; some act with their spouses in real life, thus becoming imaginary couples. The settings are the kitchens and living rooms of their homes, or the streets of the neighborhood, their work environments, the places they frequent and everyday life is interspersed in the episodes. It is a domestic art that seeks an audience and does not survive if it does not have one.
The topics are far from complex. Very typical is that of the selfish daughter-in-law who has as a temporary guest her father-in-law, who has fallen into financial disgrace, who she treats very badly to the point of denying him food, and puts her husband in the dilemma of choosing between her and her father. The spectator also has to choose.
Another is that of the old man who is denied access to a luxury restaurant because he seems poor, until his son, owner of the place and an entire chain of restaurants, appears. deus ex machina who ends up firing the person who humiliated his father, and appointing the humble waitress, the only one who defended him, as director. Justice is served.
The golden rule of the content creator is to appeal to emotions, just as the golden rule of far-right populism today is to appeal to emotions, not ideas. Awakening the fear of the stranger is one of those much-used primary emotions.
At the very least, TikTok’s instant series seeks to make the viewer identify with those who are humiliated by their condition or appearance of being poor. And while the plots are simple, it’s still a worthy art to be able to tell a chapter of a story in a minute, or even thirty seconds.
