The other night my friend Sophie stopped me as I was watching the above video on my phone. Our friend Dana had just said, “AM I WRONG?” in the same cadence as the guy in this video, and I was overcome with the urge to watch the video again.
“You know how I know you have the hyperactive kind of ADHD?” Sophie asked. (She also has ADHD, and we talk about it often.) I said “Of course I don’t, Sophie.” She responded: “Because you’ve now watched that video three times in a row.”
I’ll admit, there’s a MalonEmail essay in my future about how being diagnosed with ADHD in my late 20s was the match in the powder barrel that set off a chain explosion of existential crises, forcing me to reframe and reconsider almost everything I ever thought I knew about myself and the life I’d built around that. But such an emotional vivisection is for another day. Instead, let’s channel all my energy of denial into overthinking what is—in my mind, but also objectively, do not question my authority, I am an EXPERT—nothing less than an Internet Masterpiece.
Why “The Wicked Witch of the East, Bro!” is the platonic ideal of a meme, broken down into a 10-step play-by-play
“HOLD ON. HOLD ON. HOLD ON. You’re—HOLD ON.”
We begin our tour with the kind of steamroll-yelling that sends my stress hormones through the roof, while also inspiring awe at how much screaming cis white dudes routinely get away with, even toward other cis white dudes. (Men are clearly too emotional to hold positions of power!) This opening is irritating, you might be thinking, and I now resent the person who sent me a bros-doing-dumb-shit viral clip, Devon. Fear not, my curious comrades, for there is more.“HER SISTER. WAS A WITCH. RIGHT?”
Wait—“And what was her sister? A PRINCESS.”
HOLD ON. You may need a minute to fully grasp the hard left turn we just skidded through. When you arrived on this tour, you may have been under the impression we’d be viewing two grown men yelling about…wait, who are we arguing about, now? Some kind of battle over a game of…Candyland? (It very well could be; the Mandela Effect is an indiscriminate terrorist.) And where, you might be asking, are we going with the baffling logic puzzle that is “This character is a witch, which, as we all know, makes her sister a princess”? Perhaps you feel like you’ve just walked in on an SAT tutoring session at a troubled-youth boot camp five minutes before child services shows up to shut the whole thing down.“THE WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST, bro!”
Oh. OH. Okay, so now it’s starting to make sense. Right? Kind of? At the very least, we know this is an argument about The Wizard of Oz. What argument he’s trying to make is still unclear: is…the Wicked Witch of the East…the princess…? Who hurt this man? (Related: what is it like to be a man, so deeply confident in your trivia knowledge and expertise that you jump directly to screamsplaining, instead of second-guessing yourself to the brink of madness at the mere inkling of a suggestion that you could be incorrect, possibly? Amirite, ladies??)
Allow me, at this point in the tour, to also encourage you all to appreciate the body language: unhinged head-bob punctuating each word, plus whatever these emphasis prayer hands are doing. 13 seconds in and now we’re getting into undiluted, Vine-grade internet fire.The other guy going from “It’s my favorite movie”…
Initially, you can’t help but feel bad for the guy sitting there and taking this. Like us, he seems to be sitting there gritting his teeth, attempting to ride out this dumbfounding blitzkrieg of toxic masculinity like the rest of us. His favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz! You know we stan a confidently soft bo—
…to “I’m gonna stab him.”
Welp. He had to go and look at the camera. It clicks that his emasculation is being recorded, and we watch him decide to save face by pulling out a switchblade and threatening to shiv the guy mansplaining the identity politics of The Wizard of Oz.At this point, you have to start wondering: is this one of those clips where the guy being yelled at actually thoroughly provoked this response and the video was just edited in his favor? Is this a frame job? Who will have been to blame for the Shakespearean tragedy about to unfold before our very eyes? No matter; the whiplash has fully taken hold. Please fasten your seatbelts, keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle and out of the way of the knife, and pray we all get out alive.
“You’re gonna sit there and you’re gonna tell me that I’m wrong? AM I WRONG?”
Is it possible our star mansplainer has been to anger management? Sure! At one point he voluntarily removes himself from the confrontation, stomping into the other room to sulk about *checks notes* being told he’s wrong about the Wicked Witch of the East? However, if he did, he clearly did not complete the program, because at this point he comes back around, hands held out like a very, very out-of-character shruggy guy: I DEFY YOU TO FIND A FLAW IN MY UNIMPEACHABLE LOGIC THAT THE WITCH WHO WAS KILLED BY THE HOUSE PROVES THAT THE GOOD WITCH (?) WAS IN FACT A PRINCESS, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE ALLEGED PRINCESS IN QUESTION ISN’T EVEN RELATED TO EITHER OF THE WITCH SISTERS WE’D HYPOTHETICALLY BE USING IN THIS ARGUMENT.“SHE WORE A CROWN AND CAME DOWN IN A BUBBLE, DAWG.”
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that this argument started after they lost a round of that ubiquitous mobile app game Head’s Up, because the Knife Guy failed to connect that Mansplainer’s “princess” clues were actually supposed to have been pointing towards the answer “Glinda the Good Witch of the North.” Yet the fact that both of these are used as arguments for why Glinda the Good Witch of the North is, in fact, a princess—that she wore a crown (actually a good argument) and came down in a bubble (???)—defies reason. Nevertheless, have you ever heard such divine madness? I’ve been converted. Glinda is a princess. Princesses travel in bubbles. It’s canon now, dawg.“Grow up! Grow up, bro.”
Have you ascended to the next plane? I certainly have. Just an impeccable end to what might be the platonic ideal of the kind of unhinged, overzealous mansplaining logic that has come to define not only the internet but now the meatspace universe, too. At this point, with so many possible armageddons (armageddi?) waiting on the horizon, each waiting to take their turn at the total annihilation of humanity, you’ve gotta wonder whether the only reason so-called civilization is still hanging on in 2020 is a result of the sheer momentum generated by the absolutely unstoppable conviction of people (jk, cishet men, lmao) who regularly remain so utterly wrong and still, somehow, win the argument?? If only we could harness it; “her sister [being] a witch” could surely function as an alternative energy to replace coal. At least!“Get educated, buddy!”
After all of this, all the strife, the attempted violence, the positively transcendent forensics that have gotten us to this place, Knife Guy (is his name Doug? conflicting accounts exist as to whether he’s saying “in a bubble, dawg” or “in a bubble, Doug,” but knowing what I know about this particular breed of white hoodie bro, I absolutely must believe it’s the former) has the gall to suggest that this man educate himself? You might as well recommend a coat to a man with frostbite. You might as well advise Buffy Summers to try not being a slayer. We are so far past the point of no return here, DOUG. To suggest there is still hope for the redemption of objective facts at this point is not just folly; it is hubris of the highest order. Begone with your vanity, man! Sheath your sword! Fight another day!
Anyway, he’s lost this thing, and he knows it.The girl filming just living for this
As we round the bend to reach the end of this tour, you may notice: this girl, this intrepid documentary filmmaker, has been with us the whole time. She is us, really.