Alex Casey talks to Henessey Griffiths, a 22 year-old Dunedin student who just finished her dissertation about one of Youtube’s most controversial stars. 

Content warning: this article contains mention of suicide, please take care

Yesterday afternoon in Dunedin, honours student Henessey Griffiths sent a tweet that was a year (or rather, five days) in the making: 

The 22 year-old had just handed in her dissertation entitled “What, You’ve Never Stood Next to a Dead Guy? YouTube, The Attention Economy, and the Facilitation of Outrage” to the University of Otago, one step closer to completing her Bachelor of Arts with honours, majoring in communication studies. She had spent most of 2019 analysing Logan Paul, an American YouTuber with nearly 20 million followers, who is probably most famous for vlogging next to a dead body and then getting cancelled for it. 

She never thought he would actually see her tweet. 

After the dust had settled and the likes had slowed to just a couple hundred an hour, we talked. 

Henessey, why did you do this? 

Okay so within the broad field of communications, my specific focus has been memetic studies, which is the study of memes. I’ve always loved internet and meme culture so I thought ‘hey, why not study it?’ I didn’t know what I was going to write my dissertation about for ages, but when I started researching I realised that there had been no scholarly work about YouTube since 2016. 

I thought it was interesting that there’s this huge gap in research and there’s so much that has happened online since then. So I started joking around like ‘wouldn’t it be fucking funny to write a dissertation about Logan Paul’ and then that really good joke then turned into a cripplingly depressing reality. The meme went too far, and now I’ve actually done it. 

So what is the dissertation about? 

The dissertation is about the attention economy of YouTube and uses Logan Paul as a case study. Broadly, everything on the internet works within the attention economy now, because there is a surplus of information and a scarcity of attention. Because there is so much different cultural knowledge being shared around, I was interested in people’s decisions about who or what is going to get their attention. 

I was also looking into YouTube as this massive conglomerate with all this corporate secrecy within the platform and nobody actually nobody knows what is going on. So on the one hand someone can make a career on YouTube, but what we are now seeing is content creators having to rely more and more on clickbait to attract an audience to gain attention and ad revenue. That promotes increasingly controversial content, which leads us to Logan Paul. 

Okay. So can you please explain who Logan Paul is. 

Logan Paul is a 24 year old YouTuber who first found fame on Vine, the six second video-sharing platform, and then started making daily vlogs on YouTube in 2017 about his life. He started to build a lot of popularity through these vlogs and reached the point where he had around 15 million subscribers in 2017. The thing that is really important to note here is that the majority of his subscribers are aged 8-14, so a very young fanbase. He definitely pandered towards that, he’d do very clickbait titles like ‘You’ll Never Guess Which Girl I kissed’ or ‘I Just Bought a $15 Million Lamborghini’ – shit like that. 

Why do YouTubers like Logan Paul matter? 

YouTubers matter because they represent the convergence of so many things in our mediascape right now. There’s this concept of the microcelebrity, which is a new breed beyond the old idea of a celebrity who was this ubiquitous star that was completely unattainable. These days, the rise of influencers means that everyone has the potential to pick up their phone and change the course of history with a single video. That is now an acceptable idea. 

The other reason why they matter is that they earn so much money. Logan Paul is estimated to earn about $11,000 for every minute of video he uploads. He made about $16 million last year. It’s so crazy to think about how much money people make off this stuff, but nobody seems to be really thinking about it critically because it still seems like a leisure activity. It’s so much more than that. And that’s why we need to talk about it. 

Can you describe what happened with Logan Paul’s infamous cancellation?  

During 2017 he went on a vlogging vacation to Japan with a couple of friends and uploaded the travel vlogs in about four parts. The video that I analysed was the last installation. He posted a video on the 31 December titled ‘We Found a Dead Body in the Japanese Suicide Forest’. It starts off with this monologue, which is actually one of the most interesting parts of the video. He tells us “this is not clickbait, this is the realest thing I’ve ever posted”, which is really weird. 

The video then shows him and mates travelling into the Aokigahara Forest, more commonly known as the Japanese suicide forest. It is this big sea of trees where quite a few people have taken their lives. Him and his friends decide to camp there and they treat it all as a big joke, wondering if there will be ghosts and stuff. Then they actually stumble across a real dead body hanging from a tree. 

Logan doesn’t put down the camera at all, he never stops vlogging, he just keeps filming between his friends reaction, his reaction, and the dead body. You can hear his friends telling him to stop filming, but he just doesn’t. They leave the forest, the call the police, and at the end of the video he tries to frame it like it was a suicide PSA, telling people to reach out for help if they need it. But, realistically, he was clearly using a dead body as clickbait.

And what was the backlash to that video like? 

He posted a follow-up video saying he had made a terrible lapse in judgement, but the whole time you can actually see his eyes wander off-camera like he’s reading from a manuscript. He posted that apology video, which was framed around the idea of ‘be here tomorrow’ and saying he was donating $1m to a suicide awareness trust. He posted that, and then took a three week hiatus – another common YouTuber move. 

His first video back after that hiatus is him framing it like everything has moved on. What’s even more interesting is that at the very start of it, he plugs his merch hard and says that YouTube and Google have cut his Ad Sense so everyone needs to buy his shit or he can’t keep his house. He immediately puts all this guilt on the user. The craziest thing is that he gained about a million subscribers in the weeks after the controversy. 

That’s extremely fucked up. 

It’s so fucked up. It blows my mind. There was a lot of backlash and people calling for him to be cancelled and everything, but the way that the attention economy works is that there is an inevitable shift in attention towards whatever new controversy that pops up. We no longer care about Logan Paul, which was another big motivator for me because every time I told people I was writing about Logan Paul, people would say “oh yeah, I forgot about that.” 

That’s the key thing for me – how quickly people forget about these really awful, controversial things that we really shouldn’t be forgetting so easily. But because we are constantly in this influx of information, we can’t stay focussed on one thing. And YouTube has a hand in redirecting the shift, because they want people to start watching kids eating Tide pods instead and stop asking questions about how they enable such egregious behaviour in their big content creators. 

There’s a funny circular nature to this, like you have tweeted it out now and Logan Paul has tweeted it and DM’ed you and now you have all this attention. 

I know. I didn’t expect for this to happen. It crossed my mind that he might find out about it, but I did the tweet to celebrate handing it in. And then he retweeted it, and now the tweet has like 10,000 likes and I’m getting hit up by you and all these other media outlets. I have now been directly interpolated into the very thing that I am studying. I am the living embodiment of what the attention economy is. In a week’s time, nobody is going to be talking about this. It’s so in and of itself, it’s so meta, I can’t even explain how much it is fucking me up. 

Someone needs to do a dissertation about you doing this dissertation.

I hope so. The thing about going viral is that you know it’s not going to last forever, but at the same time, it’s all you can think about. You get addicted to seeing how popular you are, because our whole sense of validation now is around like, follows and retweets. So I am watching this all from a critical angle but I’m also aware of the part of me that can’t stop refreshing my Twitter and seeing what everyone is saying about me. 

What do you think is going to happen next? When do you get your marks back? 

I don’t even know. All I want is to do is sit with a gin and tonic and a Port Royal and just question why. That’s all I want to do. Studying the internet makes it really hard to enjoy it, because I’m constantly thinking about the ideological implications of why I’m looking at it. So I feel like I need to distance myself from this but also make the most of my 15 minutes of fame. Put it this way: if Logan Paul makes a bloody video about me, I better get a payout. He better pay off my bloody student loan.

Alex Casey yarns to Karen O’Leary, early childhood teacher by day and star of Wellington Paranormal and What We Do in The Shadows by night. 

Two of the funniest moments in New Zealand television last year were entirely fence-based. First up there was Agni on The Block NZ, who packed a massive sad during an interview and decided to sprint away from his problems, elegantly jumping the property fence as the camera wobbled to keep up with him. His blurry, tiny frame disappeared into the distant forest. Nobody has seen him since.

I thought it couldn’t be topped, until Officer O’Leary encountered a fence in Wellington Paranormal. 

In the first episode of TVNZ’s What We Do In the Shadows spinoff, O’Leary’s steadfast commitment to catching spooks forces her to pursue a possessed woman on foot, who promptly escapes over a construction fence. O’Leary tries to follow her with a small run-up, but completely fails to clear the jump. “It’s not something that normally happens to me,” she tells the mockumentary camera, stuck in mid-air on the fence like a sad coat on a sad coat rack. “But I’ve just given it my best shot and it didn’t quite work out on the day.”

It’s the perfect moment of New Zealand deadpan – as stoic as an All Black who has just lost a game and as surreal as Police 10-7‘s always blow on the pie. But, just like her character of the same name, O’Leary has proved to be so much more than a person, hanging off a fence, refusing to ask someone for help. She’s an actor, she’s an early childhood teacher, she’s a recording artist and she enjoys long walks on the beach with her dog. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what she was doing before I gave her a call to have a yarn. 

So I thought you were some genius stalwart who had been acting for years, but you’re just a regular person with a regular job? Where did you come from? 

Well, I came out of my mother’s uterus, but in an acting sense, I have definitely stumbled into all of this and I’m very grateful for it. I think that praise there is probably testament to the fact that the character Officer O’Leary very closely resembles myself, someone I’ve been playing for many years. I have tried to stop calling myself a fraud recently and stop being so self-deprecating and realise that I do have a certain amount of skill. 

I do think I have some skill. Maybe. There’s that self-deprecation again. Who do I think I am, Hannah Gadsby? I did actually get mistaken for her the other day here in Wellington. This lovely woman came up to me and was like “you’re so funny” and her friend was like “oh yes, you’re that Hannah Gadsby”. It’s that classic thing of all lesbians look like each other, but I’m still prepared to take the compliment. 

I see that you grew up in Miramar, that must be a pretty interesting place to return to now that you are working in the fancy film and TV industry.

I actually grew up about 12 minutes away from where I live now. It’s funny now that I go back to Miramar to Park Road Post and there’s this real sense of swankiness. I remember when it was just funny old Miramar with the Supreme Bakery and the Penny Bun Café which did the most amazing cheese toasties for about $1.20. It’s very different now. 

I remember interviewing the head of Park Road once in their super flash building, but then right across the road there’s this huge amazing opshop in an old shed. 

Oh yeah that’s the hospice one! That used to be cheap as chips, but now they’ve realised their clientele has got a bit of coin so they’ve up their prices big time. What you want to do is go to the one in St Aidan’s Church. It smells a little bit like Meals on Wheels food – which isn’t bad if you like the smell of cabbage – but it’s got proper opshop prices, like $2 for a pair of pants. Damn, that’s probably Miramar’s best kept secret and I’ve just let it out of the bag. All those flash Weta people are going to be in there now. Orlando Bloom. Viggo. 

Before you got into acting, how did you choose early childhood education as a career? 

I actually studied politics initially, but I think still living in Wellington meant that I didn’t really meet a lot of new people. I got a bit disillusioned that I hadn’t met all these amazing people, so I dropped out and had a year of watching quite a lot of sport on the telly. When I went back, I picked up early childhood. I did get into a little trouble at teachers’ college because I’ve always had a bit of trouble with authority. It’s ironic that I now play a police officer. 

The more time I spend in early childhood, the more I realise that it is the most crucial part of our education journey. If you look at the complexity of what is happening for a child between the ages of zero and five – you’re working out how to interact with a diverse range of people, you’re working out how to have a positive sense of self, you’re working out how to understand who you are. Research suggests that if you have a really stink home life and you’ve never been told anything positive in your life, a positive ECE experience can turn it around before you are five. 

People think of it as glorified babysitting, but it is so much more than that if you are a good teacher.  

You work with a lot of kids and occasionally some very funny adults, but who do you think is definitively funnier? 

Hands down kids are funnier than adults. Absolutely. I do know some very hilarious adults, but children are naturally funnier because they have less inhibition. It’s like how drunk people are funny because they don’t care about what they are doing. Children are a bit the same – they are honest and fresh and they trust their intuition without being guarded like so many adults are. I feel very lucky to say that I could not have a single day at work where I don’t crack up laughing. 

There was one child who had a movement in the sandpit and rolled it nicely in some sand and said “Karen I’ve made you a muffin” and gave me this muffin. Of course it wasn’t a muffin, it was a poo rolled in sand. You just can’t write that shit, you know? 

So how did you get from crap muffins to What We Do in the Shadows? 

The casting director for the film had kids at my school and she asked me to audition. I said no, but then she asked me really nicely again, so I felt obligated. Next minute I am on the set in Miramar and Jemaine [Clement] is asking me what my name is going to be in the movie. At first I was first like “shit” but then I was like “wait, shouldn’t you know what my name is? Because it’s your bloody movie?” But he didn’t. That’s why it’s my real name – it’s all I could come up with. 

That’s extremely Kiwi, just like how you were allegedly deeply hungover in your audition. 

Yeah that’s a common story, because it’s true. I was. I was crook. I don’t advocate for heavy drinking, I advocate for responsible drinking both as a human and a police officer, but I was really, really quite ill. You know sometimes you feel like you are going to vomit everywhere? I was that rough. It gave me less of a chance to be nervous, so maybe it’s lucky I drank all those beers that Friday night. 

I auditioned with Cohen Holloway, who was like a proper actor famous person, so I was already starstruck. Then they told me I had the role and I had to show up to set at Miramar quite late at night. There wasn’t a lot of information given to me, there was no script, I only knew the place and the time. I took some Lion Browns in my bag, just in case I needed them. 

Did you need them? 

I actually didn’t. I turned up and got my police uniform on and was expecting that they would do my hair and makeup, but they were just like ‘you’re good’ so I didn’t get any of that. Then I met Mike, who told me that he was an accidental actor as well. and I really liked him straight away. And I think the feeling was mutual. It was a bit of a shambles, and I think most of them would agree on that. A hilarious, positive, shambles that I think leant it to its success. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82hJOaY9Cwg

We were called to set and I met Jemaine briefly, which is where he gave me this quite vague direction, like “just um, you might have heard some shrieking or smelt a weird smell or something, so you are investigating the house like you are cop.” That was basically all the direction that we got, and then the first time I met Taika [Waititi] was the first time I knocked on the door onscreen and said, “hello, I’m officer O’Leary.” 

Has that level improvisation carried over onto the TV show? Is there a script? 

For the film there was a script but only Taika and Jemaine had it, so it was their job to keep us on track because we didn’t really know what was coming. With Wellington Paranormal there is a bit more structure. We do have a script for every episode, but we always deviate. They always let us do a take that’s just me and Mike talking rubbish for as long as we can, so what you see on screen is a blend of all of that. 

We’re both really good at talking shit on the spot. This is where I feel like working with small children for a long time has been very advantageous to my acting career. Because every day they need you constantly be improvising and making up stuff, and the kids aren’t interested in hearing the facts. They want a story, they want to hear something completely untrue, they want something entertaining and engaging. 

Who were your television heroes when you were growing up? 

I really wanted to be MacGyver, but he wasn’t a woman and he wasn’t gay. Actually, he might have been gay. I loved MASH. I remember the first time I watched the Topp Twins on TV and going over to see my neighbours who were very staunch Christians. I remember asking them if they had ever seen it, and them telling me ‘we don’t watch that – they’re lesbians.” 

I had never even heard that word before, but after that conversation I kind of figured out what it meant. And it was all down to the Topp Twins so full credit to them. I think it’s kind of interesting that they have become New Zealand icons and there’s been a real sense of love and acceptance there. It really rejects that narrow view that I think a lot of conservative New Zealand has about gay people and any kind of diversity. 

How do you feel about being a part of that representation in the roles that you take on? 

I definitely see how movies like The Breaker Upperers are so important, because they provide that visibility and put people like me onscreen in a positive way that’s not just the token gay character. Because sometimes I wonder if that is actually helping us in any way, or if it just creating more challenges. It was also entirely women-led offscreen, which provided a really different environment again and felt really comfortable. 

It’s interesting to me because diversity and difference in my early childhood centre is something that is always valued and appreciated, rather than being seen as a challenge or as even something that is notable. In Paranormal its pretty obvious that I’m a lesbian, but its not the one thing that I am defined by or the only thing that makes me interesting. It just is, it just exists, and that’s where I think we all want to move to. 

The second series of Wellington Paranormal begins tonight at 8.30pm on TVNZ2