Friday, September 27, 2024

September 27, 2024: MrBeast and 21st Century Folk Heroes

[On September 26th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of folk figures, leading up to this post on the status of the concept in the 21st century!]

On a contemporary folk hero who reveals both the enduring power and the darker sides of the concept.

If you’re the age of my sons (18 and 17), you probably don’t need to read a brief biography of James “MrBeast” Donaldson (1998- ). But if you’re in your 40s like this AmericanStudier, you probably do need a few contexts for this young man who is already one of the most famous people in the world. Donaldson began his career on YouTube in the early 2010s doing things many other YouTubers do (live commentary while playing video games, conversations with other YouTubers, and the like), but gradually evolved into a creator of more unique, elaborate stunts and games that were generally designed to award large sums of money to lucky strangers. That has continued to exemplify the MrBeast brand ever since, with ever-more-elaborate (and frequently dangerous) stunts and games; although as he has developed a more significant infrastructure as well as considerable personal wealth he has likewise expanded to more systemic activist endeavors such as the Team Trees and Team Seas fundraisers and projects (both of which he co-founded).

Those latter two projects are both impressive and important, and of course the Team Trees one aligns MrBeast closely with the historical folk hero who was the reason for this week’s series. But I would argue that if we were to call MrBeast a 21st century folk hero, it would be due to the trend which more than anything else made him so famous in the first place: his ability and willingness to make random strangers suddenly and fabulously wealthy. One of the defining features of our era is the fact that wealth and fame can come in entirely sudden and random ways (I’m drafting this post in a moment featuring one of the most extreme cases in point yet, Hawk Tuah Girl), and both MrBeast’s own success and that which he promises others fully fit that category. Yet precisely because he does promise wealth to others, he has become more than just a representative of his era—he is, to my mind without question, a folk hero for this moment, one to whom audiences can look not only for inspiration but also for (ostensibly) a path toward their own success.

Hoping to make it rich through the largesse of a YouTuber is, of course, an even more extreme version of other unlikely “rags to riches” narratives before it like lottery winners (and perhaps even more unlikely, or at the very least even more random since lottery winners did take the proactive step of buying a ticket). But the fact that MrBeast’s folk heroics are unlikely to reach the vast majority of folks isn’t necessarily a striking thing, as of course the same can be said about any folk hero (even Appleseed planted trees on only a tiny fraction of the American landscape). What is striking, and I would argue destructive, is that he often asks his potential beneficiaries—and indeed, as I mentioned above, has done so more regularly as he's gotten bigger—to risk their health and safety, if not their very lives, in order to pursue these folk heroic goals. At a certain point those kind of risky realities would make MrBeast’s challenges the equivalent of The Hunger Games (or historical gladiatorial contests), and that’s a very different kind of story than that of a folk hero—and perhaps all too relevant of one to our dystopian current moment.  

September Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

No comments:

Post a Comment