Sports And The Vine With All The Groaning Plastic Ducks In It

The answer seems pretty decisively no, but it is a reasonable question and one that should be asked: the Vine in which several dozen plastic mallards groan in horrible, keening unison—is it sports? It is not, although that does not mean that it is not extremely great, and probably the best six seconds of filmmaking that anyone has put together this year. (Although, to be fair, I have not yet seen HBO's "Show Me A Hero," and I've heard good things.)

The Vine is indeed extremely, hauntingly, dream-vexingly great, though. Neither is this to say that ducks cannot be sports; they absolutely can be, just as any animal in the fullest and most transcendent pursuit of passionate goofiness becomes sports in that pursuing. But these are not real ducks, and the expression and evocation here is more abstracted—a glimpse, brief and bottomless and looping endlessly, of what it would sound like if the bulk bins at a Bass Pro Shop could vocalize the torment of their creation, transport, and their inert purgatorial non-existence amid the fluorescent lights and Kenny Chesney songs—and darker. It's art, but it's not sports. It is, however, sports media.

It is, I submit, the most vicious and crystalline distillation of how sports media works that I have ever seen, give or take @PFTCommenter. First there is an incident—bleating, fartish, small, insignificant unto meaninglessness by almost any measure. But this incident, once legible and audible, exerts a disproportionate and unfortunate downward pressure: it must be answered, even if and maybe especially because it is so meaningless. And so the answer—which is really, strictly speaking, more of an amplifying echo with a little bit of fry around the edges—comes in so much louder than the thing to which it is responding.

And in that amplification, the initial bleat somehow changes shape. The goofy little fart noise, in the roar of all that compulsory repetition, becomes a shriek, a wash of noise that disconcertingly resembles the sound of people crying out in agony. It sounds, impossibly, like the echo is now echoing only itself. It does not sound good.

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— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) August 31, 2015

Anyway, that is how the best Vine of 2015 is like the Internet Of #Content. In related news, today is the final day of August.