A Winner Is Just a Loser Who Tried Again Meaning
Get-go Words
The 'Loser Edit' That Awaits Usa All
If you have ever watched a reality TV show and said, "He'south going domicile this evening," yous know what the "loser edit" is. I imagine information technology started as a matter of practicality. If you have 20 contestants, they tin can't all receive equal airtime. When an obscure character gets the boost-ho, the producers have to cobble together a coherent story line. Intersperse the snippets beyond the 60 minutes, and nosotros can identify sins and recognizable man frailty that need to be punished. Anyone tuning in for the showtime time catches up quickly. The loser edit is not just the narrative arc of a contestant about to exist chopped, or voted off the isle, whatsoever the catchphrase. It is the plausible argument of failure.
The concept first bubbled upwardly out of the pop-cultural ether when competitive reality shows hit upon their formula, in the form of "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race." Tv enthusiasts — part fan, part Roland Barthes with a TiVo — congregated on online message boards like Television Without Pity, creating a new slang with which to dis and deconstruct their favorites.
Xv years subsequently, the critical language used to carve up the phonies, saints and sad-sack wannabes of reality shows has migrated, and the loser edit has get a limber metaphor for exploring our own real-world failures. Fate doles out ideas for subplots — burn her, dump him, all species of mortification — and nosotros eagerly run with them, cutting loser narratives for friends and enemies, the people we have demoted to the condition of mere character. Everybody'due south setbacks or degradations have been foreshadowed if nosotros look hard enough at the old tape. We adapt the sequences, borrowing from cultural narratives of disgrace, sifting through the available footage with a chip of hindsight — and in plow, we suffer our own loser edits when we stumble.
With so many media bloggers staggering under daily content quotas, rooting through the digital-content vaults, we can now assemble the montage of public shame more apace than ever. A few weeks ago, NBC told Brian Williams to pack his knives and get. Cue the supercut of Williams spinning dissimilar accounts of dangerous helicopter rides in Iraq, the gradual embellishments creeping in over the years. Cue Williams in a Hurricane Katrina documentary telling us how he heard that a man committed suicide in the Superdome, juxtaposed with an interview years after in which he says he "watched" that suicide actually happen. How could we accept missed it?
Information technology was inevitable that Bill Cosby would receive a thorough loser edit after his regular army of accusers began stepping forward. There were too many sleuths nosing around for clues, downloading ancient standup routines, borer search words into digital scans of out-of-print books: "cocktail hour," "consent," "things America's favorite dad said that are creepy in retrospect." Is he really joking virtually dosing women with Spanish fly on a 1969 comedy anthology? On a talk show in 1991? Information technology was right in forepart of us all along. Embed the prune, tweet information technology out. This Cosby edit is on VHS, recorded over the videotape of your childhood illusions, and it cannot be undone. If that tin be erased, what else?
How stupid of them to leave all that incriminating prove out there.
The footage of your loser edit is out there as well, waiting. Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where yous bought a lottery ticket like a chump. From the A.T.M. that recorded you taking out money for the romantic evening that went bust. From inside the black domes on the ceiling of the train station, the lenses that captured your boring walk up the platform stairs afterwards the doomed excursion. From all the cameras on all the street corners, entryways and strangers' cellphones, building the digital dossier of your days. Maybe nosotros tin can't clearly brand out your face up in every shot, but anybody knows it'southward yous. Nosotros know you lot similar to slump. Our unabridged lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to exist recut and reviewed at a moment'southward notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit. Any time the producers make up one's mind to enhance the stakes.
Occasionally, on a "Acme Chef" or a "Project Runway," a contestant suffers a monstrous loser edit, one that lasts a whole season. The unlucky contestant isn't sent home at the end of the dark, merely is instead doomed to perform personality deficits episode after episode. The supporting thespian trapped first by an attribute of himself or herself, and then by editors who won't let him or her escape the casting. We need a goat.
Maybe you have a personal acquaintance with this phenomenon, slogging through months and months of your own terrible editing. The audience takes in the spectacle, pressing suspension for a quick trip to the kitchen so they won't miss a second of your humiliation: This is destination telly. Your co-workers rewind your loser's reel, speculating over why you didn't get that promotion, where it all started to go wrong. If you ask me, information technology goes back to the Peterson account. Your ex's buddies pass the murphy fries and barely pay attending, texting pals, making jokes on Twitter — they knew before the first commercial break that you lot were being voted off the island. Your friends and family, who of course love you very much, are tuning in, even though they know all of your story lines by middle. They've seen this episode earlier. In that location he goes once again.
When life gets the drop on the states, nosotros accept to submit to the framing. We leave too many traces of our failures, too much material for a ruthless editor to work with. As if we didn't already have ane in our heads — cut and splicing a lifetime of bad decisions and bonehead moves into an existential montage of boobery:
"Why did I say that?"
"What's wrong with me?"
"Why do I keep falling for that?"
Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in ho-hum motion across the atrocious bits so that we retain every detail.
Can we escape our editing? In their wisdom, the philosopher-consumers of Television Without Pity also identified the loser edit's opposite number and antiparticle: the winner edit. If there's a loser edit, there has to be a winner edit. Makes sense. Over the class of a season, the inevitable winner thrives. He or she volition endure some setbacks for drama and suspense, sure, simply the background for victory is established challenge past claiming, week by week. It has been written, by fate or the producers, pick your deity. It cannot be reversed.
You know the golden boys and girls who sail through life without intendance, recipients of an enviable winner edit that lasts season after season. Untouchable. Everyone else has to do information technology past himself or herself, assembling our edits through a grand compulsive Facebook tweaks, endless calibrations of Twitter personas, Instagram posts filtered of all disturbance. Should I wear spectacles in my contour pic? How do I limited solidarity with the freedom fighters? The exaggerations and elisions on your dating profile, and the ridiculous however oddly calming amount of time you spent choosing the proper font for your résumé. I hear employers associate Calibri with diligence and follow-through. Marshal the flattering anecdotes, cord them together into a leitmotif of confidence and composure. Cut when this scene establishes the perfect pitch of self-deprecation, cut before anybody can encounter your humility for the simulated modesty information technology is.
Do y'all think it's working? Did you become away with information technology today?
We requite ourselves loser edits and winner edits all the time, to clasp meaning onto experience. Sometimes you render both kinds of edits in the aforementioned day, maybe even the same afternoon, deleting certain scenes from your memory, fooling with the dissimilarity, as reality presses on you lot and directs your perceptions. Pull it off, and maybe you'll make it to bedtime. Why practise you recall they call information technology "Survivor"?
Splice and snip. The contradictory show falls to the cut-room floor, and nosotros affirm order, shape a narrative, any narrative, out of the chaos. Whether you tend to give yourself a loser edit to feed that goblin part of your psyche or you fancy the winner's edit for the camouflage and safety it provides, it'due south ameliorate than having no arc at all. If we're going downward, let u.s. at least exist a protagonist, have a story line, not be just i of those miserable players in the background. A cameo'south stand-in. The loser edit, with all its savage cuts, is confirmation that y'all exist. The winner edit, fifty-fifty in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows upwardly.
Take the footage you need. Burn the rest.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/the-loser-edit-that-awaits-us-all.html
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