Ah, MrBeast and the way he might look at you, the big Easter Island head on him looming out at us from a social-media landing page. See him there, emoting like a fleshy emoji, his voice rising and falling as if in Auto-Tune, in a plastic mimicry of man. MrBeast basically answers the question: what if the YouTube algorithm had a head?
Regard that head. Regard his huge, slightly embarrassed rictus grin below a set of apple cheeks and a pair of glassy, expressionless eyes, all framed by the vague beige blur of his large, generic face. Your children know that face better than your own. He is their parasocial digital daddy, and they watch with nihilistic glee while, like a modern-day Sun King, he randomly launches money at the desperate victims of US economic policy.
That’s his shtick – leaky wealth, dripping challenges and prizes upon the masses. He dresses like a tech billionaire in a black hoodie. He is surrounded by chortling boys. Essentially, his first name is Mr and his second name is Beast. What of it? My nephews have weirder names. (I’m looking at you, “Arlo”.)
You may have never heard of MrBeast, but he is BIG. It’s just the screens he’s usually on are small. And now the Amazon corporation has paid him to take his racket from the very small screen to the slightly bigger screen of Prime Video. There he has launched the most expensive gameshow ever – Beast Games – in which 1,000 people compete to win $5 million in cash. Literal cash. MrBeast stands on a pile of it, shouting through a microphone at the hungry hopefuls below. “They look like ants,” one of his servant boys says later in the episode.
On Beast Games, MrBeast gives away islands. This will be familiar to the Irish as ‘colonialism’
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Yes, there’s a slight problem with the scale of it all. MrBeast’s normal dynamic is BIG STUFF in small packages. He does huge stunts but on a teensy screen where people more commonly just talk to the camera. When you move it all to a bigger screen where Star Wars and Marvels are also happening, small moments are also important. But I don’t think MrBeast cares about small moments.
To paraphrase Stalin, the elimination of one person from a gameshow is a tragedy, but the elimination of 1,000 is a statistic. MrBeast probably heard this quote and thought it was the coolest thing he ever heard – and probably tried to get Stalin on his show. Because statistics are COOL. He is constantly telling us statistics – usually about how big the prizes are.
Meanwhile, the humans who make up the statistics say things like:
“I grew up homeless, and now I want to help other homeless kids.”
“This is about getting my whole family out of the poverty pipeline.”
“If I win $5 million, I can use that to make passive income for the rest of my life.”
“I will die for $5 million.” (Probably not in the first series. But in a second series? Under a Trump administration? I can imagine this.)
MrBeast does not realise that this is deeply depressing. He responds to everything with the same immobile grin, as though he’s trying to process and understand human emotions before he feeds on them. “What is love?” his dead eyes seem to be saying as he gnaws at somebody’s hard-earned pathos.
This is why he calls the prize “generational wealth”. Implicit in this coinage is the understanding that the American people are destitute and that what they have instead of a safety net is MrBeast. I’d predict that Beastism will eventually be studied in universities if I felt confident that there would be any universities under Beastism. For this show MrBeast built “a city”, and as he seems to be the only person in the world actually building homes right now, it’s noteworthy that there is no educational institution to be seen in the city, nor any industries of note (bar perhaps the production of “lulz”). The city, incidentally, cost MrBeast $15 million. (He knows the price of everything.)
Over the course of six episodes (so far) MrBeast bribes and cajoles and encourages betrayal. He invites celebrities such as the diminutive, seaworthy rapper Lil Yachty to stand next to him looking confused. Because of the sheer scale we learn little about most contestants beyond their job titles: “content producer”, “content creator”, “former division-one athlete” and, in one case, “gamer dad” (which sounds more like a diagnosis than a job to me).
These poor wretches fall through trapdoors and are hunted by navy Seals and engage in surprisingly boring sports-day-type activities and get gifted islands. (This will be familiar to the Irish as “colonialism”.) There is no rhyme or reason to success or failure on Beast Games. Life is arbitrary chaos. This seems to be MrBeast’s message for our children.
He also seems to manipulate human emotions constantly without ever once showing any particular interest in human emotion or exhibiting a convincing human emotion himself. In a later episode a woman talks about buying back the house she lost “so I have somewhere to live”. “I love it,” MrBeast says from his big papier-mache head before his humanity consultant apparently whispers something in his earpiece and he adds: “That was very touching.”
MrBeast’s dystopian vision of the world makes me feel even more fondly towards Bradley Walsh and his alliterative television heir, Barney Walsh, as they oversee the Day-Glo warmth of Gladiators, on BBC One. This is a show in which hunks in Spandex (England’s national costume) knock members of the public from scaffolding into nets or hit them over the head with large cotton buds while baying children shriek with joy (England’s national sport).
The Gladiators’ names are called out at the outset of each episode: Giant, Electro, Nitro, Comet, Steel, Fury, Legend, Dynamite, Viper and so on. Most teachers will recognise this as the typical roll-call from an average suburban Educate Together. Legend, Dynamite and Viper are, in fact, the names of my other nephews. And then we meet the contestants, fit and healthy Everyfolk who must meet these flexing, glowering beefcakes atop podiums while engaging in bewildering feats of strength and speed.
I didn’t know until now that Beast Games or Gladiators was the choice before us as a species, but it makes sense when I consider the trajectory we’ve been on for the past decade. I’m pretty sure the old political verities don’t hold any more and the future will definitely be in some way feudal and gladiatorial. Well, it’s Gladiators every time for me. This is possibly because nobody on Gladiators is competing so that they can afford medicine, or to stave off homelessness, and possibly because it’s about actual skill, even though the real-life application of that skill is a little dubious. (I’ll take this back if Viper ever chases me down from within a large metal ball.)
