[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?
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