You love video essays, we love video essays, everyone loves video essays. And why not? There’s lot of video essayists out there doing great, illuminating work: Tony Zhou, the folks at IndieWire blog Press Play and Nerdwriter1 (who’s recent Wong Kar-Wai video essay is amazing and helps you view the work in a new light or at least maybe one you haven’t considered). Using video context for a visual medium is a no-brainer, but it’s time consuming, so generally those who are good at it, like some of the aforementioned folks, put a lot of time, effort and detail into their essays.
But without question, some video essays can be a little heavy-handed and the worst ones border on pretentiousness and preciousness; the over-enunciated voice-over, making leaps for correlations that aren’t really there or suffering from apophenia—debilitating pattern-itis that sees random and meaningless information in things that just aren’t there.
If a video essay has ever turned you off, and lets be fair, the good ones far outweigh any of the mediocre ones, Clickhole has got your back. The Onion’s more-absurd sister site has done a video essay examining Christopher Nolan’s "The Dark Knight," arguably one of the more poured-over and hyper-examined films in the history of video essays. And it works on myriad level, sending up behind-the-scenes tidbits often offered in this clips, mocking ludicrous Internet theories and generally satirizing both the movie, Nolan, video essays and more in their patently absurdist manner. This made us laugh out loud, so consider it an amusing daily diversion. Watch below and let us know your favorite part.
"hilarious" is a bit much, don\’t you think..?