Viral video: First, strangers kissed; now (surprise) they disrobe
The recent success of a film for a fashion designer has spawned a sequel: strangers removing clothes and getting into bed.
I want to reveal some secrets for making sure your YouTube video goes viral.
Inserting cats almost never fails. Nudity and sex also help enormously.
There are clear and deep psychological reasons for this. Appealing to the essentially animalistic nature of humans is just one.
So how clever of filmmaker Tatiana Pilieva to follow up her runaway viral success, which featured alleged strangers kissing each other, with something even more bracingly viral. Yes, alleged strangers taking each other's clothes off and lying down.
Should you have been unreasonably detained by a Kathy Bates lookalike and forced to write poetry for the last year, you might not be aware of the original. This was a supposedly artistic oeuvre featuring kissing. It turned out to be an ad for a fashion designer.
This didn't stop 86 million people from peepholing it.
The new film depicts strangers put together on camera and removing their clothes in a rather awkward way -- as is often the way when you remove a stranger's clothes because you've only just met in a bar, or because you chose a career as an ER nurse.
Pilieva says on YouTube that the rules were simple: take each other's clothes off and get into bed.
What follows, therefore, is a series of encounters that, quite naturally, ends up with at least one make-out session.
After all, this video has a commercial cause just like Pilieva's last one. This time, however, it's to advertise the new Showtime series "Masters Of Sex." You've never watched it? Oh, you will now.
Since the video's launch two days ago, 1.5 million people have stopped by to idly gawp.
I wonder, though, whether they're struck by my own misgivings. Pretty much everyone in the film is impossibly pretty. These are people whose clothes you really would like to remove, should your relationship status and morals allow it.
I am also troubled by the nature of this alleged undressing. In my own culture, when we undress we tend to remove all our clothing. Here, for some odd reason, these lovely people leave their underwear on, an oddly puritanical gesture.
And I thought anything goes on Showtime.