The other day my friend Randy and I made a 1-minute video for the awesome people who are publishing Looking for Alaska in Mexico. I was going to post this video to Youtube, but then Sarah said--and I'm quoting her directly here--"Sweetheart, I love you, but this is terrible." (Its terribleness is not Randy's fault; he just held the camera.)

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that it's hard to make a funny, charming first-person video, which is why I became so quickly and thoroughly fascinated by lonelygirl15 and danielbeast. Here's an overview, which you can skip if you're among the 1,000,000 people who've already seen the videos:

Lonelygirl15 is a 16-year-old girl named Bree. She has very strict, religious parents. She's homeschooled. She spends all her time inside her room. She's smart. Her best and only friend is Daniel, a technology whiz who enjoyes editing digital video. Together, they make a bunch of funny, nerdy videos about, say, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (the significance of which they sort of misunderstand, but whatever), or, say, the phenomenon of dental grills. Then one day, Bree posts an unedited video of herself in which she reveals that Daniel admitted having a crush on her.

Incidentally, if you love freedom and justice and truth and all that is good and noble in the world, you want Bree and Daniel to fall in love and live happily ever after and have beautiful brilliant babies. Sure, they'd have to hide their relationship from Bree's parents, but that's easy! Even I've done that.

So, okay. Daniel likes Bree. And Bree, if she loved freedom and justice and etc., would like Daniel back. Except "she's never thought of him that way." Daniel proceeds to post a video saying that he wishes Bree would keep their private life private. They reconcile (as friends only), make a movie about the Tolstoy principle, and then start fighting again.

It's a pretty interesting love story, and the videos are so well-made that they'd be fun to watch even without the love story.

Oh, and there's one other thing: I mentioned before that Bree's parents are very strict and very religious and that she is homeschooled, so you might conclude that her parents are fundamentalist Protestant Christians. But then Bree and Daniel made a video that was ostensibly about a discussion Daniel had with Bree's father. In fact, the whole video seems to build toward one moment, when Daniel attempts to light a candle beneath a framed photograph:
That, for those of you who didn't spend the early 1990s embroiled in an embarrassing phase of mystical searching, is a portrait of none other than Aleister Crowley, the occultist/mason/mystic/chess expert/cocaine addict* who was once known as "the wickedest man in the world." So, why does a very religious girl have a viscerally violent reaction to her male friend's attempts to light a candle beneath Aleister Crowley's portrait? Presumably, she and her parents are followers of the Crowley-centered religion Thelema, which is odd, because A. I didn't previously know that there were still any Thelemites anywhere, and B. because Crowley wasn't the sort of guy who wanted girls locked in their rooms (he wanted girls locked in his room).

After the Crowley video, almost everyone decided that lonelygirl15 and danielbeast were fakes, created either 1. by a production company to sell as an eventual TV Show (the trials and tribulations of an occultist family, perhaps), or 2. by Thelemites for the purpose of gaining converts, or 3. by some extremely smart high-school kids with a boring summer stretching out before them. The supposedly airtight evidence that lonelygirl is a fraud is that the domain of her fan site was registered about a month before she posted her first video. (The webmaster has a justification for this, but it is flimsy.)

As a friend recently told me, "Lonely girl is like LOST. Only real. Ish." Incidentally, I still believe that lonelygirl and danielbeast might be real (so do the new york times and the Times of London), although I think it is probably just two very smart kids who are fudging with their real lives to give us something realish.

And it is this realishness that has me worried. What lonelygirl accomplishes (and to a lesser extent what something like LOST does, as well) is she gives viewers a sense that the story might be really real, and that we can uncover its really realness by paying close attention. It gives us a compelling reason to focus intently on the work, which is why two of the best recent youtube videos (here and here) have been about Bree and Daniel.

Books, with very few exceptions, cannot mimic this kind of realishness. (The Gospel According to Larry, one of my favorite YA books, accomplishes realishness on some level, but Janet Tashjian's name is still on the cover and we still secretly know that it is not really real; same with Infinite Jest and the excellent As Simple as Snow. Go Ask Alice, like a reality TV show, makes us think it is real although it is not, but it never plays with the question of its own realness.) And I wonder if the abundance of realish works of art out there make it more difficult for people to find books compelling in that read-it-again-and-again-in-search-of-its-truest-secrets kind of way that great books demand to be read.

I also wonder whether the eventual response to the paucity of realishness in books will be to abandon them altogether, at least in their book form, and instead to create narratives that combine textual and non-textual elements, like Bree and Daniel, or all the LOST stuff. Forty years from now, will the magic of books seem like snake oil compared to the heady narcotic of the really-realish hypertextual novel?

I hope not, because as previously noted, I'm not good in front of the camera. Text is my only solid medium, and I need it to hang around, because otherwise how am I going to pay the dentist?