Internet Memes
Sixteen years old, with wide brown eyes--and those crazy eyebrows!--Bree’s first video as Lonelygirl15, in June 2006, on her eponymous YouTube channel, had all the sophistication of a pink fuzzy diary, open for 100 million people to leaf through the pages. Ostensibly the clear-skinned home-schooled daughter of super religious parents, somewhere in a generic IKEA-outfitted room in the heartland," it was strange, but strangely compelling: Bree would pull her legs in close to her chest, had difficulty maintaining eye contact and would glance around nervously. She was, as The New York Times lamented, an “unbeatable fantasy”: a pretty girl that geeky guys could relate to. Which is what made it all the more shocking for her millions of fans when it was revealed that “Bree” wasn’t really Bree, but an unknown actress named Jessica Rose, backed by a screenwriter, a surgical residency dropout, a former attorney, and the LA-based Creative Artists Agency. For months, media outlets obsessed over the hoax. As New York magazine concluded, Lonelygirl15 was “the birth of a new art form.” In the end, though, Lonelygirl’s rank in the annals of pop culture won’t be for masterful story-telling, but for the Blair Witch-esque blurring of the lines between the real and imagined; the hallmark of the muddled “reality-based” entertainment of the past decade. As the first episodic Internet series to go mainstream, Lonelygirl showcased the Web’s ability to create and sustain a viewership beyond cat videos and Andy Samberg. For that alone, Lonelygirl deserves a prize.
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