Video Descriptions #7: Googling Things in Hell #1 (Daniel)

Read the introduction to this set of texts and video description #1 here.

Googling Things in Hell #1 (Daniel), 7 minutes 37 seconds.

Over psychedelic animated visuals, titles spin into the centre of the screen reading, ‘GOOGLING THINGS’, on the left, and, in bigger text ‘IN HELL’, on the right. Oppressive ambient music plays in the background. A percussive string instrument strikes the root note of the droning chord and Daniel’s torso and legs appear. Daniel is sitting on a plastic chair, floating in psychedelic space, holding his phone. We don’t see his face, and we won’t.

We cut to an over-the-shoulder close up of Daniel’s phone screen. He begins to type the word ‘normal’ into the Google search bar. An open caption appears reading, ‘[Normal sized penis]’ in white type on a black box. Square brackets are conventionally used in captioning for non-spoken content, e.g. applause, music, sound effects. Here they show the full search term that Daniel enters into the search bar.

It’s important to note that the caption gives us the full search term before Daniel has finished, because we watch in real time as he types, and as well as the uncompleted search term we can also see Google’s autocomplete suggestions in a list below the search bar. As Daniel reaches, ‘normal sized’ (though, he actually mistypes, ‘sizes’ instead of ‘sized’) Google suggests:

-normal size football

-normal size of endometrium in mm

-normal size basketball

-normal size of uterus in cm

-normal size photo

-normal sized crossword clue

-normal size of uterus

-normal size of ovary

We stay on the over-the-shoulder close up to see Daniel finish typing the phrase, and look at the results. Google shows us a summary of an answer from sciencemag.org as its top result, which tells us that the average size of an erect penis is 13.12cm or 5.16 inches. Daniel starts to scroll down the results from the NHS and a number of other big healthcare information websites. He clicks on a healthline.com article titled, ‘What’s the Average Penis Size?’, accepts cookies and scrolls up and down the webpage, too fast for us to really take in any of the information but we get the gist.

We cut to Daniel’s torso and legs and he begins to type again. A caption appears reading, ‘[Normal sized forehead]’ and then we are back at Daniel’s side, peering over his shoulder as he finishes putting in the search term. This time Daniel clicks on the images tab and scrolls past images of people’s faces, each illustrating forehead size in a different way. The first image is a photograph of the top half of a young white man’s face with his hand coming in from the right of the frame of the photo, holding three fingers to his forehead. The three fingers presumably operate as a heuristic measurement for average forehead size.

As Daniel scrolls through the images of faces - some illustrations with measurements and writing, some photos with coloured zones overlaid, the camera zooms into the screen for an extreme close up. The images are almost all white men apart from the occasional picture of the Barbadian singer Rhiana, who is often cited as a celebrity with a big forehead.

Back to Daniel’s torso and legs (this edit repeats throughout the whole film going between this mid shot of Daniel’s torso and legs holding his phone, to the over-the-shoulder close up of Danie;’s phone screen) and now Daniel is typing in, ‘Normal sized Babybel’. Then we see his phone screen and the top result is a selection of images of hands, each holding a Babybel cheese. But these are not the well known Mini Babybel bite sized cheese snacks. Rather, this is a larger sized Babybel cheese which is as big as the photographer’s palm. These are Maxi Babybel. That there are mini and maxi sizes of the cheese implies that there are midi sized Babybel which would conform to one notion of what normal might mean, but these don’t appear in the search results.

Daniel searches again, this time for normal sized hands. Google returns a few images of hands with measurements marked onto them to illustrate the average proportions of a hand, and a summary from Healthline stating the ‘average length of an adult’s male’s hand’. Daniel scrolls down past some results offering different ways to measure hand size and then past a page from the digital lifestyle brand Fatherly suggesting that it can ‘Explain What the Size of Man Hands Really Means’.

Daniel moves onto searching for ‘normal sized tongue’. Same kind of results as the forehead and hand searches, apart from when Daniel clicks on the image tab, the images are of women and an occasional child. The images are close ups of mouths and tongues and some of them have a medical feel, with the pinks and the reds of gums and tongue pushed towards an oversaturated purple by the flash photography. As Daniel scrolls, his phone must momentarily lose signal, because the images are replaced by solid colour blocks of brown, pink, purple and red which is what Google Search does when the Browser can’t load the thumbnails fast enough.

Daniel searches for the question, ‘Why am I a bad person?’. The format of the search terms has changed. We are no longer in the realm of status anxieties about size, normativity and compliance. ‘Why am I a bad person?’ is an existential question, albeit, rather a leading one. As Daniel types, other questions with a similar vibe pop up in the auto complete suggestions:

-why am i a loser

-why am i a simp

-why am i a perfectionist

-why am i a bad friend

But also:

-why am i a good match for this job

Just as Daniel is about to finish typing the search term, he deletes ‘bad person’ and clicks on the top result, ‘Why am I a loser?’ but ‘[Why am I a bad person?]’ is still the caption on screen. Presumably this is a mistake, either in direction or in editing. Maybe both.

Anyway, the results for ‘Why am I a loser? appear on Daniel’s phone screen. The top result is for a webpage by BetterHelp Online Therapy titled, ‘I Try My Best: Why Am I such a Loser?’ but Danile scrolls down and clicks on a result from Quora, a social question and answer website, titled, ‘Why am I always a loser?’. Daniel scrolls down to the first of fourteen answers offered by users of the website and then we zoom in towards the screen. The first two sentences of the answer read, ‘You called yourself loser (sic) that means you have already given up on every things (sic). This happens when you developed (sic) a (sic) low self-esteem by comparing too much (sic) with other people’s achievement (sic).’

The music plays on. Daniel, mute against the spinning shapes, searches for the question, ‘Why does my cat eat my earwax?’ which again is a bit of a shift: from the shameful fatalism of the previous search to an upbeat quirky, pet loving energy. The search results are generally positive about cats eating earwax, and Daniel clicks on a webpage from Travelingwithyourcat.com titled, ‘Gross but Healthy Reasons Why Cats Eat Human Earwax.’

Now, Daniel tries the question, ‘Why does my vaginal discharge smell?’. Google offers a summary from Mayo Clinic Healthcare’s website describing bacterial vaginosis as the most common vaginal infection.

‘[Why do my testicles feel like a bag of worms?]’ appears on screen, and we see Daniel’s screen as he brings up the search results. Mayo Clinic Healthcare’s website is top of the results again, telling us that, ‘A varicocele has been described as looking like, ‘a bag of worms’. Daniel clicks on the image search but there are no gruesome pictures to be found, only illustrations from medical textbooks and a photo of a man’s hand holding a writhing bundle of actual worms.

Now Daniel searches for, ‘Why do I keep crying?’. The top result is from the NHS, with a web page titled, ‘Get help from a mental health charity’. Google also tells us that people also ask the following questions:

-Why do I cry easily all of a sudden?

-What causes crying for no reason?

-Is crying a symptom of anxiety?

-Is it normal to cry every day?

Daniel clicks the images tab, scrolling through memes and infographics about depression. He settles on one black and white meme of a cartoon woman crying, with overlaid text that reads,

‘I think I might be depressed. I keep crying for no reason and it’s getting harder and harder to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I’m scared to go to the doctor and find out I’m right.’

Daniel types, ‘why do we die?’ into the search bar. The top search result is the Wikipedia entry for death, which is already maybe a slightly literal interpretation of a question that reads more like a howl of existential terror rather than a request for information, but Google has also selected quite a specific quote from the Wikipedia page that reads,

‘The leading cause of death in developing countries is infectious disease. The leading causes in developed countries are atherosclerosis (heart disease and stroke), cancer, and other diseases related to obesity and aging.’

The video mostly avoids questions of wealth and inequality, but here, because of Google’s literalism, all of Daniel’s search terms Daniel are suddenly contextualised by his location in a developed country. Daniel’s (or the directors) concerns are fundamentally defined by his relative security in terms of healthcare, food supply, shelter and other basic needs, which along with internet access and high end video equipment, make the performance possible at all.

Daniel doesn’t linger on that top result, but rather scrolls down to a clickbait article from the Independent called, ‘This is what happens when you die, according to people who died.’

Daniel changes tack. He asks Google, ‘Why is contemporary art so bad?’ but the results aren’t so helpful. There is quite a particular page on Quora where someone asks why contemporary art is so bad in comparison to medieval art, but it feels like that isn’t quite what is being asked.

Daniel moves on, asking, ‘Who is the best person?’, another seemingly impossible to answer question, but it brings up a web page confidently titled, ‘the 100 most influential people in the world’, from Biography Online. The top five are Muhammad, Isaac Newton, Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha and Confucius which actually, are probably not that hard to agree on re: influence, but again, there is a slippage here, from ‘best’ to ‘most influential’. Google can’t quite answer the question, partly because the content of the question disguises what the questioner seems to be getting at. Daniel scrolls quickly down the list of names so that they are hard to read, though the camera lingers long enough at the bottom of the list to allow us to see that number 100 is Mahavira, the ‘principal figure of Jainism’.

Finally, a note of hope. Daniel searches, ‘When can we love again?’. He scrolls through results from various self help websites before settling on, ‘How to Fall in Love Again’ from Wikihow, a website notorious for its bizarre illustrations. We cut to an extreme close up of the phone screen, which shows a mangaesque illustration of a woman looking pensive, with her finger held to her mouth. Underneath is point one of the how-to list, ‘Understand that it’s normal to feel confused about your feelings’. Daniel scrolls past point two, illustrated by an image of the same character standing in between two friends, then point three, illustrated by an image of the same character in a cross legged yoga pose. Point four has the character in an academic gown receiving some kind of qualification and point five has the character speaking to a man in a pose that suggests she is giving him a list. The music is fading out. The final point is illustrated with the character, standing with her arms around a man. They look happy.

We cut away to the mid shot of Daniel’s torso and legs, then back to the over-the-shoulder close up of his phone, before he swipes the browser away, and we see his home screen for a second before a flute sample plays, and Daniel disappears.