"Borderline Forever" - A Deep Memetic Frame Reading

July 7, 2024.

If you know me personally, you won’t be surprised that my first article is about Scott The Woz. If you don’t know me personally, let me explain. While I’ve been doing way-too-deep literary analysis of not-that-deep media for ages (perhaps one day I’ll revisit my “Bee Movie is a subversion of a Greek tragedy” argument from high school), Scott The Woz is what really solidified it as My Thing™. I wrote my actual autophilosophy class final about it. I filmed a video essay with my friends comparing it to gothic literature (it’s in my friend's portfolio now, give his work a watch!). Most importantly, I wrote a very long Google Doc breaking down this series, one which has given me a reputation as “the literary analysis guy” in some Scott The Woz fandom circles. In fact, I’m overhauling that document right now; this reading was supposed to go in there, but I couldn’t fit it in naturally. Scott The Woz fans, consider this a teaser for the new and improved doc; non-fans, don’t worry, I’ll be analyzing something very different next month.

About Scott The Woz and "Borderline Forever"

Scott The Woz is “a comedy video game centric variety show” (via its YouTube channel description) written by, directed by, and starring creator Scott Wozniak. Each episode contains a mix of Wozniak’s commentary on gaming topics and surrealist comedy sketches featuring him and his friends; the ratio of commentary to comedy in each episode varies. The series takes a Seinfeld-esque approach to its characters, i.e. the titular character (Scott) is based on the series creator while the other characters are fully fictional. While Scott The Woz does not have a single overarching “plot” per se, it has strong continuity between episodes, resulting in surprisingly coherent (if absurdist) world-building and character growth throughout the series. All episodes are surrounded by a blue border watermark, which is now a mainstay of the channel’s branding.

“Borderline Forever,” the 200th episode of Scott The Woz, is an hour-long special that comments on the series itself. After going on a long rant complaining about Nintendo, a brand he usually loves, Scott notices the blue border watermark around the video (or, in-universe, his vision). He tells his friends about the border and how it grows when he talks about video games; they don’t believe him at first, but once he brings to light how all their personalities are based on singular running gags (including his own, his obsession with video games), they all see the border. They try to repress their one-note personality traits to keep the border at bay, and also start warning people about its existence. It turns out, though, that the border spreads via people learning about it, so their attempts to warn people actually make the problem worse. They figure out that the border lives in space, and so they construct a rocket and try to hunt it down. Along the way, they are attacked by the Green Bay Packers (yes, the NFL team, don’t worry about it), and they realize that in order to defeat them, they have to accept their one-note personality traits, not repress them. Once they reach the blue border’s spaceship, Scott and his friends are captured, and the border reveals its plan to take over the world. Scott defeats it, but realizes that it needs a host or else it will take over the world again. He volunteers himself as the host, and the crew returns to Earth, setting things largely (but not entirely!) back to the status quo.

The Blue Border as the Deep Memetic Frame

First thing’s first; what’s a “deep memetic frame?” In her WIRED article “Please, Please, Please Don’t Mock Conspiracy Theories,” author Whitney Phillips defines it as follows:

Deep memetic frames are what we believe in our bones to be true about the world. They emerge from our education, our experiences, and how we’re culturally conditioned to interpret information… they shape how we see and what we know (or think we know) so completely that we probably don’t even notice them. (2020)

She and her co-author Ryan M. Milner break it down word-by-word in their book You Are Here. It is a “frame” because it influences what we “see,” or, outside that metaphor, what we understand about the world and how we make sense of that information (2021, pp. 19-20). Much like the “framing” of a painting or photograph, our deep memetic frames put some information front and center, relegate more to the edges of our perception, and cut plenty out entirely. In fact, what the frame cuts out may be most important of all; as sociologist Gaye Tuchman notes in her book Making News, that which we do not notice or choose to talk about are often the things we consider normal (1978, pp. 6-8), and what we consider “normal” is more subjective than one may assume. That’s where the “deep” in “deep memetic frame” comes in— they are informed by our own life experiences, including what we consider mundane, to the point that they are foundational to our sense of self (Phillips & Milner, 2021, p. 20). This is why it can be so difficult to bring anyone, including yourself, to question them (Phillips, 2020). Lastly, “memetic” means that they are formed by sharing (and not sharing!) information with our peers— while our deep memetic frames are rooted in our individual experiences, and while they are certainly shaped by large institutions and mass media (Tuchman, 1978, pp. 2-4), they are created and developed by mutual social participation, i.e. talking to each other (Phillips & Milner, 2021, p. 20).

The blue border is, of course, a frame. Quite literally, it is a frame around characters’ vision, obstructing their sight at the edges. Note that this obstruction is the object of their fear— in Jeb’s panicked words, “centimeters are being obstructed” (Wozniak, 2021, 36:50)— which fits Tuchman’s argument above. The blue border is also explicitly memetic, spreading by people telling each other about it (ibid., 41:34). Scott spreads it to his friends by telling them about it (ibid., 34:44-36:58), like how our deep memetic frames come from peer-to-peer social interaction; it also spreads via Scott and Rex’s appearance on network television (ibid., 40:40), like how our deep memetic frames are also influenced by mainstream, top-down communication. And while its reliance on characters’ adherence to “crippling restrictive tropes” (or “silly running gags,” as Rex prefers; ibid., 36:16) may not seem “deep,” remember that “Borderline Forever” is about how these characters are wholly defined by these tropes. While it isn’t deep by our real-world-person standards, it is deep within the world of Scott the Woz, in that it is tied to who these characters are at their core. All things considered, we can easily read the blue border as a representation of the deep memetic frame.

Scott, a brown-haired white guy with glasses, sits in a hospital bed. His therapist Jerry, a white guy with a big mustache wearing a maroon sweater, holds up a copy of Tetris on the NES. Scott screams. There is a thick blue border around the whole image. A TV screen showing a news broadcast; there is a graphic of the United States, with Ohio highlighted in red. Its caption reads 'Ohio Exists?'. There is a thin blue border around the whole image.

Left: The border grows when Scott indulges in his video game obsession (Wozniak, 2021, 35:00). Right: A news report shows that the blue border is spreading across Ohio (Wozniak, 2021, 41:40).

Plot Implications

The concept of the deep memetic frame produces some anxiety. To be told that your view of the world is false-by-omission (or even just straight-up false) is destabilizing— one’s first impulse, if it isn’t to deny the existence of the frame outright, is to try to get rid of it. Think of Rene Descartes in his (in)famous Meditations on First Philosophy; in his desire to seek incontestable truth, he tries to throw out not just what others tell him (the “memetic”) but also his own long-held beliefs and even his senses (the “deep”) (1641/2017, pp. 11-15). Scott, when he becomes aware of the blue border, tries to repress his one-note trope to keep it at bay, and encourages his friends to do the same (Wozniak, 2021, 37:03-38:21). Remember what we said earlier about these tropes deeply defining the characters; to repress these tropes therefore parallels Descartes’ attempt to ignore his own core beliefs. Hell, Scott literally refers to it as “dismantling your personalities” (ibid.). When faced with the possibility that something about themselves prevents them from seeing the truth, they reject themselves to seek it.

But we have deep memetic frames for a reason; as Phillips & Milner stress, they are how we make sense of the world (2021, pp. 19-20). While it is important to be aware of the limits of one’s perspective— and, of course, address biases that are bigoted and cause harm— it is impossible for a single human brain to process every single detail of everything they experience in every possible way. Interdisciplinary professor Megan Halpern, in her article “Feminist standpoint theory and science communication,” writes:

The conventional view of scientific knowledge presumes that we can arrive at objective knowledge; a view from nowhere… But some feminist scholars advocate embracing the multitude of perspectives as part of what makes science so powerful. (2019, p. 2)

In other words, instead of trying to individualistically arrive at perspective-less knowledge (if it exists), we should embrace our own perspectives as a valuable resource for both ourselves and those around us. We can glean what happens outside our deep memetic frames by understanding those of others, which inevitably center on a different part of the picture, and in turn we teach them in the same way. That is why in “Borderline Forever,” when Scott and his friends fight the Green Bay Packers, they must lean into their character tropes to win (Wozniak, 2021, 49:39). One’s deep memetic frame is not inherently a weakness, but one must accept its existence to use it as a strength, and it is only a strength when the whole team fights together; “the only way we can win is by being the best us we can be” (ibid.).

This brings us to the ending of “Borderline Forever”. To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of this ending; while I understand why Wozniak (as a creator IRL) needs to keep the border around, the whole thing about it needing a host (ibid., 2021, 55:10) always felt like it came out of nowhere. But in the deep memetic frame reading, it makes a little more sense. When you believe that you have no deep memetic frame— mistakenly, of course, because we all have one— you believe that what’s within your frame is all that exists. You have the full picture, and so everyone else in the world logically must see things the way you do, or at least a limited, mistaken subset of such. In short, rejecting your deep memetic frame just universalizes it; to “defeat” the border, to remove it from oneself, risks it taking over one’s world. No, you can’t “eradicate” it (ibid., 54:59). All you can do is accept it as part of oneself, i.e. to host it. Such a message aligns with other Scott the Woz specials; “It’s Awesome Baby!”, “You’re Not an RPG Guy,” and “A Very Madden 08 Christmas” all have messages about importance of embracing different opinions and perspectives. Hell, Scott himself has said that the latter is an allegory for religious tolerance! (Wozniak, 2022, 23:00). Though I doubt Scott has read these particular works about the deep memetic frame, I wouldn’t be surprised if this general theme was tugging at the back of his mind.

Six white guys gear up to fight in room made out of Wii games. From left to right: Rex, in a gray hoodie and black arm band, is just out of frame. Jerry, the therapist, with a mustache and a maroon sweater, holds up his clipboard with his patients' notes. Target Employee, in his uniform, puts on a Wendy's employee uniform visor and holds up a spatula. Scott, with glasses and a black jacket, stands in the foreground with a sword made out of solidified Pepto Bismol. Jeb, in the background in a purple-gray hoodie, holds a gun, which he calls Gex. Terry, with curly brown hair and a white baseball cap, wields a carrot like a dagger, symbolizing his veganism. There is a thin blue border around the whole image. A blue rectangle lies in a blue, iridescent, plastic-wrap-like room. There is no border around this image.

Left: The characters embrace their gimmicks to defeat the Green Bay Packers (Wozniak, 2021, 50:03). Right: The blue border is defeated, leaving Scott's world frameless (Wozniak, 2021, 54:56).

Conclusion

Before I end this article, I’d like to shout out my old professor Ioana Jucan. All of the sources used in this article are from the class I took with her, so this reading literally would not have happened without her. If you find this article interesting, check out her book Malicious Deceivers. It’s all about how Descartes’ “trust nothing and nobody, not even your own senses” methodology reinforces rather than eliminates his deep memetic frame, even as he proclaims to have done the latter. (Or, in “Borderline Forever” terminology, he doesn’t host his blue border, and so it takes over his world.) Not sponsored, not PR, she doesn’t even know I’m writing this.

That’s it for my first blog post! I’m hoping to post on the first Sunday of each month, but we’ll see how well I can stick to that. I‘ve already planned what I’ll be writing for the next few months, and I can’t wait to get started on them. In the meantime, thank you for reading, and have a great July!

References

Cite This Article (APA)

Miller, A. (2024, July 7). “Borderline Forever” - A Deep Memetic Frame Reading. Grab a Shovel. https://primmsfairytale.neocities.org/posts/2024-07-07-Borderline-Forever