Mortars and memes: Participating in pop culture from a war zone

Theoretical framework

Participation in meme culture is not as simple as deciding you want to engage and then doing so. It requires a sophisticated level of literacy – knowing how to read the texts and how to create your own. As Burgess and Green (2009: 81) argue:

YouTube is a potential site of cosmopolitan cultural citizenship – a space in which individuals can represent their identities and perspectives, engage with self-representations of others, and encounter cultural difference. But access to all the layers of possible participation is limited to a particular segment of the population – those with the motivations, technological competencies, and site-specific cultural capital sufficient to participate at all levels of engagement the network affords.

Agency and literacy go hand-in-hand. To participate as a global citizen, you must not only have technological and cultural access to the digital sphere, but you must also be able to meaningfully participate in its discourses. To do that, you need to be social media literate; and you must be able to keep up.

To be social media literate, a person must be technologically proficient, well versed in pop culture discourses, and demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of audience. In other words, social media literacy requires familiarity with sub-cultural standards – a recognition that the right way and the wrong way to use inter-textual digital discourses are never definitive and are subject to constant negotiation. Papacharissi (2014) describes social media aptitude in terms of ‘fluency’, arguing that ‘the ability of the individual to manipulate not just the affordances of technologies, but the greater socio-cultural context within which those are utilized’ is critical to harnessing storytelling power and carving space for alternative voices and viewpoints (p. 2). Yet fluency suggests a natural, unthinking, or impulsive response. For this reason, I favor the term literacy rather than fluency because social media literacy implies competency and understanding. There is something ‘unnatural’ about service members shimmying and shaking to a stateside pop culture phenomenon from their forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, when troops participate in meme culture, it is out of competence or literacy rather than fluency.

Social media literacy hinges on two ‘sub’ literacies – ideological literacy and technological literacy. The difference between the two is roughly a distinction between content and medium. Simply put, ideology is the body of ideas that reflects the attitudes, values, and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. To be ideologically literate, one has to be reflexive about ‘what’ is being communicated in terms of norms, attitudes, and values. Ideology circulates via media. Technological literacy, then, refers to the means of communication – the technological aspects, the repertoire of competences that enable people to analyze, evaluate and create messages in a wide variety of media. Technological literacy involves more than knowing how to use a particular medium. The process of selecting a channel among polymediated platforms is accompanied by a host of complicated and oftentimes ethical decisions (Madianou and Miller, 2013). Communicators need to consider which media are most appropriate for communicating a specific message to a particular audience.

Social media literacy enables online social presence. ² By learning how to proficiently create, circulate, and transform multimodal texts, military personnel – as cultural participants – can have more stake and say in the broader discursive community. Put another way, although social media offer opportunities for service members to stay current and connected, in order to meaningfully participate in the broader discursive community, they must render their discourses intelligible to a wider audience. According to YouTube’s Global Head of Content, Robert Kyncl, to make the most of social media, ‘It’s about leaning in …You have to participate in cultural moments’ (Robertson, 2013: np). And as Lange and Ito (2010) found in their research, youth are particularly adept at using social media to exercise their voices. Young adults are the most voracious consumers of online video. Three quarters of the 18–29 age demographic report they regularly download or stream video (Lenhart and Madden, 2007). Two-thirds of active-duty military personnel fall within this age bracket (Military–Civilian Group, 2011). It is less of a surprise, then, that they would use meme videos as a way to interact with civilian culture.

Existing literature

Both popular and academic sources have treated the phenomenon of warrior-produced videos since their emergence in 2005. Sax (2006), a journalist for Rolling Stone, offered in-depth coverage of the technological abilities of contemporary soldiers and their application in combat videos. Wright (2004), author of Generation Kill, notes the degree to which soldiers live and breathe mediated popular culture and how it influences the type of content they produce. In a similar vein, academic research such as Anden-Papadopoulos (2009: 20) argues that the warriors producing YouTube clips ‘fall back on contemporary popular culture and its broad repertoire of war as entertainment’. A majority of the analyses consider the reach and prominence of what has been called the ‘YouTube War’ within broader discourses of popular culture, arguing that there is a growing conflation between war and entertainment (Stahl, 2010; Terry, 2012). This article contributes to those conversations by considering warrior-produced internet memes as cultural artifacts that further compound relationships between war and pop culture.

These wars have been mediated more than any other conflict in history (Berenger, 2004). Just as television defined Vietnam and the first Gulf war, the internet is defining what we know, see, and remember about Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally speaking, much of the existing literature on war’s representation evaluates professionally produced texts for their persuasive force or epistemological contribution to civilian, public audiences. For example, Alper’s (2013) article on the way embedded photojournalists use Instagram filters to create imaginary auto-ethnographies of how soldiers might document their deployments largely concerns itself with matters of authenticity. By contrast, my work focuses on texts produced and disseminated by military personnel themselves. I am less interested in studying meme videos as products, and more so in understanding them as distinct cultural practices – how they might function as vital opportunities for deployed personnel to command a social presence among civilian social networks.

Method

This article undertakes a critical reading of two Carly Rae Jespen lip-dub videos performed by US Marines on deployment in Afghanistan to highlight two key aspects of social media literacy – technological literacy and ideological literacy. The reason for selecting a meme produced by US Marines is because, of all the military branches, they are the unit most frequently deployed to combat environments. On top of that, the American imaginary holds Marines to be the most rigorous and strict of all the branches. Thus, studying meme videos produced by Marines in a theater of war offers a compelling (if paradoxical) opportunity to parse the demands of creating a social presence online. The personnel featured in these videos are neither ignorant nor immune to our collective attention economy. With frequent and recurring deployment cycles, they are constantly moving between worlds home and away. And with constant connection and immediate access, they are as much a part of the public audience as they are members of a distinct war fighter community. As a result, they know what garners public attention and they have learned how to play the game.

The reason to focus on the ‘Call Me Maybe’ meme, in particular, is because it received remarkably wide public attention at a time when the US death toll in Afghanistan was on a steady rise (Quinn, 2012). Canadian singer–songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen’s summer 2012 hit, ‘Call Me Maybe’, inspired home-made lip dubs from fans the world over, including the USA Olympic Swim Team, pop singer Justin Bieber, the University of Florida baseball team, a group of Canadian Air Flight attendants, the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, and, of course, the US Military (Hill, 2012). Shifman (2013) traces the origins of the lip dub, a performative genre where voice and body are split, to Dennis Potter’s 1978 TV series Pennies from Heaven, which featured a 1930s salesman who avoided the agonies of his life by escaping through lip synch to the magical world of music. In this way, it is rather fitting for service members on a combat deployment to choose to replicate a lip-synching meme. Moreover, as the critical reading demonstrates, the ‘Call Me Maybe’ meme is especially conducive to invoking other popular culture tropes, such as the gender flip trope, as a way for troops to establish common ground with civilian audiences.

The critical reading compares two ‘Call Me Maybe’ lip dubs performed by personnel stationed in Afghanistan. The analysis takes special interest in questions of audience by paying close attention to form and content, and other textual indicators for clues about potential audiences. The comparison allows for a deeper appreciation of warrior-produced memes as multivalent texts, arguing that military personnel use internet memes to attract a broad base, while also promoting in-group cohesion as they dog-whistle to one another through culturally specific visual cues or inter-textual references. In this way, video memes serve two primary functions for deployed personnel. They allow service members to define themselves as a social collective against outsider groups (usually civilians but sometimes other service branches) and they also act as a method of social presencing. Before I move to the close reading, however, it is important to understand how meme videos became a form of cultural participation in the first place.

The cultural practice of video-sharing

Just two decades ago, video production, distribution, and playback required expensive, bulky, and fragile physical media. But advances in digital imaging technology have made recorded video ubiquitous today. Moreover, the expansion of high-speed data networks and internet-enabled smartphones has helped connect billions of people to the internet, fueling growth in social media and video-sharing websites around the globe. As a case in point, YouTube recently reported one billion unique visitors to the site each month (Blagdon, 2013).

YouTube’s slogan, ‘Broadcast Yourself’, encouraged users to think big about audiences. Taking cues from mass media, individuals could now produce their own content. The key to YouTube success is to make the video entertaining. According to Hess (2009, 2010), YouTube videos appear to rely on ‘infotainment’ production logic, accomplished primarily through techniques such as parody, spoof, and irony. However, Guo and Lee (2013) are less optimistic about users’ interest in information. They describe YouTube’s principal operating logic as more exclusively entertainment, labeling it ‘LOL or Leave’ and arguing that on YouTube, uploaders strive for view counts, and viewers come for entertaining rather than educational experiences.

Occasionally a successful YouTube video will become a ‘hit’ and go ‘viral’ or even inspire an internet meme. The difference between a viral video and a meme video is that a viral video does not necessarily inspire derivations or alternative versions. In a viral video, the original content stays intact as it circulates through social networks whereas a meme spreads through artistic imitation and mutation. As Shifman (2012: 188) describes, ‘mimetic videos’ are popular clips that generate extensive user engagement through creative repetition. An illustrative comparison would be ‘The Evolution of Dance’ video and ‘The Star Wars Kid’. ‘The Evolution of Dance’ features a dancer performing a live rendition of several popular dances to their accompanying songs (Judsonlaipply, 2006). Although this video was wildly popular accumulating millions of hits within months, it did not spawn any creative imitations. It is therefore considered a viral video. By contrast, ‘The Star Wars Kid’, which featured a high-school student awkwardly wielding a golf ball retriever as an imaginary light sabre, first spread virally then later evolved into a meme when several people created their own renditions of the original (Loves, 2006). Users far and wide uploaded their own versions of ‘The Star Wars Kid’ to YouTube. Even television programs like Arrested Development and Family Guy demonstrated their ‘coolness’ by making references to the meme on their shows. Shifman (2012) argues that the inherently flawed or incomplete attributes of a viral video are what make it so ripe for reproduction and further creative engagement.

In this way, the internet meme is a genre of participatory culture. Yet the idea that video memes qualify as cultural participation makes some scholars uncomfortable. The concern is that this mode cheapens public discourse (Babcock and Whitehouse, 2005; Corner and Pels, 2003; Weiskel, 2005). For example, Johnson’s (2012) ‘Information Diet’ argues that we are consuming too much unhealthy ‘comfort food’ in the form of pop culture. Likewise, Goriunova (2013: 223) describes ‘the mumbling, instant, repetitive, easy, playful, junk, worthless creativity’, as a form of ‘new media idiocy’. Goriunova uses Deleuze’s (2008) definition of ‘the idiot’ as a private thinker preoccupied with personal thoughts and ideas. However, I contend that whenever a member of a social collective engages with others, negotiates representations, or makes use of artifacts, he or she is participating in culture. Thus, whether or not we perceive internet memes as pop culture junk food, they are worth examining as instances of cultural performance.

Although this article explores how US troops use internet memes to participate in home front culture from a warzone, it is important to note that this is not the first time in history that memes have appeared on the battlefield. A well-known meme among World War II veterans, ‘Kilroy Was Here’, featured a simple drawing of a bald man with a long nose peering over a wall. Kilroy, as he was called, was often drawn with his fingers curled over a horizontal wall, with one or two squiggles of hair sprouting from his head. Kilroy appeared everywhere – on the sides of tanks, planes, ships, scrawled on halls, walls, and even toilet seats. Kilroy created an invisible bond among service personnel, offering membership in a privileged and mysterious brotherhood. An important difference between Kilroy’s analog existence, and the digital memes of today is that Kilroy primarily stayed within military culture. By contrast, the digital memes of today are much more widely circulated. Not only that, but they are far more visual, creating the potential for multiple meanings through inter-textuality (Shifman, 2013). Another key difference is that Kiloy’s presence in a warzone inserted bizarre and unexpected humor into a bleak environment. Conversely, the warrior-produced video memes of today introduce the context of war into a digital space already teeming with humorous and nonsensical whimsy. Therefore, a central point of interest in this article is the way troops capitalize on the digital meme format to highlight the context of war.

‘Call Me Maybe’, the Marine meme

In July 2012, US troops stationed in Kandahar International Airport, Afghanistan performed a ‘Call Me Maybe’ lip dub video that showed them happily singing and dancing to Jepsen’s hit single. An article for ABC News said the goal was to ‘show troops in a more positive, light-hearted way’, and to create distance ‘from the controversies that have dogged the US mission for the past several months’ (Lila and Clarke, 2012: np) The article went on to cite the Quran burnings on a base near Kabul and the leaked video of Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. The lip dub project was a USO undertaking by USO employees Eric Raum and his friend Randy Moresi. In an interview, Raum described the project as offering a ‘human side’ to the military: ‘It’s a side of the military that you don’t get to see.’ The video depicts fun-loving Marines signing on a shooting range, an airman doing the robot (see Figure 1), and other cheerful dance scenes. One YouTube commenter writes, ‘This should be a recruitment video.’ And I would argue that it most certainly is. It is an institutionally sanctioned meme.

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Figure 1.

An airman doing the robot.

Raum and Moresi produced the video with permission and support from the military. The commanding officer gave explicit orders that everyone on the airbase was to follow Raum and Moresi’s instructions. The result is a professional grade 3-minute video complete with lighting kits, expensive dollied camera moves, and polished choreography. The military, formerly sold as a career, is now sold as an experience. This video marks an evolution in the type of experience being sold. It is not the brave paratrooper or the adrenaline pumped Marine diving into a fighting hole. Instead, it is a domesticated social experience, emphasizing casual friendship sociality as US troops dance and lip sync to a pop song. Currently the rights to the video are owned by the US Military. At the time of writing, the video has received over 2.5 million views (ABC News, 2012).

In September, a few months following the Kandahar lip dub, Marines on an undisclosed forward operating base (FOB) in Afghanistan posted another version of the ‘Call Me Maybe’ video. This time it featured a group of dirty sweaty, shirtless Marines performing a near-perfect shot-by-shot remake of the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders’ lip dub video (see Figure 2). By contrast with the USO production, this FOB Marines video reflected vernacular rather than institutional discourses.

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Figure 2.

Miami Dolphins cheerleaders parody.

The Miami Dolphins’ cheerleaders produced their ‘Call Me Maybe’ video while on a calendar photo shoot in the Dominican Republic. Abiding by the principle that imitation is the best form of flattery, the Marines dedicated their rendition to the cheerleaders with a final screen that read: ‘To the Dolphin Cheerleaders, thank you for the inspiration. – Your fans in Afghanistan’ (Fark, 2012, see Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Split screen of cheerleaders and Marines.

What is significant about the FOB version is that it defies expectations for a meme video. Most memes propagate an idea. For the ‘Call Me Maybe’ strain, the focus is on the close lip-synching with Jespen’s hit single. By contrast, this video is a meta-meme. The Marines mimic the cheerleaders’ mimetic performance of Jespen’s song. In other words, they lip-synch Jespen while they video-dub the cheerleaders. This second layer of parody allows them to carry out more cultural work through the video. For example, the close replication to the cheerleaders’ video serves to highlight the warzone context. When looking at duplicates, the impulse is to point out differences. What becomes blatantly obvious in this case, then, is the backdrop of war.

In order to foreground their unique context, the Marines must match everything else as closely as they can. They achieve this through skillful social media literacy, revealed in the end product, and made even more impressive by their lack of resources. They use mop heads as pompoms, fold their shorts back to look like bikini bottoms, and use makeshift field showers, to imitate sexy water scenes. Their choreography and editing are spot-on, in perfect synchronization with the music and the cheerleaders.

Every detail is accounted for. Even the Marine participants reflect careful casting. Their age, race, hair color, and relative body type reveal an attempt to match their cheerleader counterparts. The technical precision is what makes this video so compelling. Therefore, when they present viewers with incongruences like a pistol sliding up the hairy leg of a Marine rather than a pompom sliding up the smooth, tanned leg of a cheerleader, it serves to highlight their presence in a warzone. An attention to detail extends, perhaps unsurprisingly, to operational security (OPSEC) concerns. Eleven seconds into the video, a blurred box appears over the right shoulder of one of the Marines. The box was likely placed there to obscure the name of the base or some part of the base that could identify where they are located.

This video is a testament to the Marines’ multivalent literacy. It appeals to a broad audience (evidenced by the high view count) by invoking dominant ideology. The cheerleaders represent the ultimate objectified femininity. They shimmy and shake on the beach in bikinis. They playfully toss their hair and wink at the camera. And as is the case with all lip dubs, they literally have no voice. Although Americans are familiar with this commercialized image of womanhood, when US Marines, commonly imagined as the mythos of masculinity, invoke these qualities, it is an unexpected and highly entertaining twist. Employing the gender flip trope, which has been a staple in American popular culture for decades, shows that the Marines are ideologically literate. They recognize how the public imagines them and they play upon it using a timeless pop culture trope. They demonstrate that they understand what the public finds entertaining. Thus, this video participates in public culture’s comedic repertoire, while at the same time resisting it and poking fun at it. In this way, the Marines in this video position themselves against civilian popular culture, even while participating in it.

More than that, they position themselves against other branches in the military as well. Inter-service rivalry is part and parcel of military culture. Although this rivalry may seem counterintuitive (and perhaps counterproductive) during wartime, these rivalries intensify and even multiply to include inter-branch resentments as well. For example, the slang term ‘POG’, which stands for ‘person other than grunt’, is a derogatory moniker infantry Marines give to fellow Marines who are not stationed at FOBs or combat outposts (COPs). The discrepancy is a deep-seated, culturally inflected battle over legitimacy; who qualifies as a ‘real’ warfighter. As I mentioned, one of the earliest and most widely disseminated military versions of the ‘Call Me Maybe’ lip dub was the product of a USO effort on a large airbase in Kandahar. To the forward operating Marines like the ones featured in the cheerleader-inspired version of the ‘Call Me Maybe’ lip dub, the service members stationed at Kandahar are POGs who have it ‘pretty cushy’, as one infantry Marine described. In this way, the Marines in the second ‘Call Me Maybe’ video interpellate an audience beyond the sea of generalized others making up the domestic, pop culture-scape. They also speak to each other.

When the second ‘Call Me Maybe’ video is read as a response to the USO’s project, it offers an opportunity to consider the tiered aspect to Marine meme audiences. First, the video appeals to a broad collective. Presented in the format of a meme, its overall style and content are ideologically salient with contemporary American popular culture. By adopting dominant discourses and creatively reminding the American public that there is a war in Afghanistan, the video makes an argument for social presence. Second, the video speaks to those affiliated with the armed forces. Memes allow social collectives to come together and define themselves as a group, and set themselves against other outsider groups. Participants in the other ‘Call Me Maybe’ memes, for example, share affiliation through their profession, sports teams, or even celebrity status. In memes produced by US troops, they largely define themselves against civilian others but there are further sub-groups within the military community to which the video memes speak.

The insider–outsider dynamic animating the second ‘Call Me Maybe’ video is what makes it such a rich text worthy of study. For viewers ‘in the know’, the text reflects a gesture toward solidarity with other warfighters. Read as a response to the USO’s project, the second ‘Call Me Maybe’ video pits Marines in COPs and FOBs against service members in more supportive roles in the rear echelon, or on airbases in Kandahar, for instance. While they parody the cheerleaders’ video on the one hand, they also parody the idea of making such videos on the other.

It takes a great deal of time and effort to produce these videos. In comparison with the expensive USO production, the gritty, handheld version produced by the forward operating Marines comments upon the relative luxury and resources enjoyed by personnel at Kandahar. Read this way, the meta-meme takes on more significance too. Imitating the cheerleaders’ lip dub suggests that the forward operating Marines are calling personnel in the rear echelon ‘cheerleaders’ for the war effort. By contrast they are the key players. The video’s final scene is highly significant in this regard. The final shot parallels the cheerleaders’ version, but instead of a Miami Dolphins logo, the Marines place an American flag suggesting that the nation, rather than a football team, is the object of their cheers (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Miami Dolphins logo and American flag.

Furthermore replacing the Miami Dolphins’ NFL logo with the American flag serves to critique the civilian public’s preoccupations with trivial pop culture (like sports) during a time of global conflict. This perception, expressed by many service members during interviews and on Facebook pages, derives from their lived realities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Marines’ Miami Cheerleader video can be read as a multi-leveled critique. They poke fun at what they perceive as trivial American pop culture fascinations, while asserting their legitimacy as ‘real’ warfighters relative to their ‘rear deployed’ comrades on the airbase in Kandahar. Understood within this second frame, it is easier to identify some of the details that communicate the fact that these men are ‘on the field’ rather than ‘on the sidelines’. One significant moment, in particular, is the release of a 120 mm shell from a mortar. The participants in this particular scene are different from the other ‘main characters’. For one thing, they are not Marines; they are soldiers, distinguishable by the type of camouflage they wear. Yet they are an infantry unit, so their forward position in theater grants them a wartime prestige that supersedes their branch affiliation. Simply put, in wartime, grunts identify with grunts ahead of the rear echelon regardless of service branch loyalties.

In the mortar scene, two soldiers in full gear load and eject a 120 mm mortar: a system used by mechanized infantry, armor and cavalry units. Audiences can hear the deep ‘thumph’ sound of the powerful mortar leaving the M298 mortar tube above Jespen’s audio track. This is the only snippet of external audio included in the video. Service members flag this moment as their ‘favorite’ when they post or share the video on their Facebook pages.

The Facebook post in Figure 5 extracts the 2-second mortar scene so that it can be watched in exclusivity. ‘My Favorite piece, the Mortar guys are dancing before and after firing! LOL’: the bottom right of the screen capture indicates that 243 people ‘liked’ this clip and it was shared, or re-posted by another 93. The mortar scene as well as a few others such as the pistol instead of the pompom, the ammo belt instead of a cheerleading skirt (Figure 6), and a final group shot showing a Marine holding an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (a really big gun) serve as motivational or what Marines refer to as ‘moto’ imagery. Generally speaking, images of weaponry function as sources of empowerment and insider knowledge within military culture (Silvestri, 2014). Thus, references to artillery in the cheerleading video serve similar functions. They are a way for military personnel to bond with one another as well as a way for them to boast about the authenticity of their war experience to ‘the guys in the rear’.

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Figure 5.

Army soldiers loading a mortar.

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Figure 6.

Cheerleading skirt and ammo belt.

Marine memes are multifaceted texts with multidimensional audiences. They are a way for troops to demonstrate social presence and argue for cultural relevancy to an American public who has lost interest in the war. For fellow Marines, the meme videos serve to parody and critique what they perceive to be America’s trivial fetish-du-jour. Yet even in their frustration, the troops continue to absorb the pop culture lexicon in order to establish common ground with social network members at home.

Concluding remarks

Meme videos are not merely about connecting with, but are about participating in popular culture back home. Compared to previous generations, going ‘away’ to war is only a matter of geography. In fact, social media participation might be amplified the further service members feel from home. The more distant they feel, the more they seek to close the ideological gap by keeping up with the latest stateside cultural musings. In other words, US troops in a war zone do not exist outside of social media’s attention economy. They participate in it. It follows, then, that they perform home front popular culture discourses to receive public support and attention, even if only in the form of view counts.

The thing about memes is that anyone can do it. If you can do the Harlem Shake at a dentist’s surgery, then you can do it on an aircraft carrier. That is why memes work so well as a mode of public participation. For troops in Afghanistan, memes offer the opportunity to speak to civilians on a shared plane. Participation hinges on a rich repertoire of both technological and ideological literacy in order to adopt the familiar discourses that allow them to be heard. Although meme videos can connect warfighters to civilian culture, they can also serve as stark reminders that warfighters are not on the same plane as their civilian counterparts – geographically, institutionally, and ideologically. As texts, ‘Marine memes’ participate in both discourse communities – the dominant public discourse of popular culture as well as the localized discourse(s) of the warfighter community.