NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Her name is not Bree, she is not a
teenager and she has not been home-schooled by parents who are
super-strict and very religious about whatever it is they believe
in, and she seems to have more friends than her film editor pal
Daniel. The YouTube phenom LonelyGirl15 is in actuality just
another aspiring actress. The New York Times Virginia Heffernan
today tells us her real name is Jessica Rose, and she is a "twenty
something" graduate of the New York Film Academy who hails from New
Zealand and Los Angeles.
LonelyGirl15 is actually Jessica Rose, aspiring actress. But we're
not left with a hoax, just the platform for a new narrative
form.
The unmasking follows the creators posting a confession that the
Lonelygirl15 saga was not the efforts of two teenage friends
killing time, but a collaborative effort to tell a story. A Sept. 3
"press conference" from YouTube user Lonesome October, hosted by
Bree's mascot, Purple Monkey, also made it clear this was a story
being told, and not a real girl.
If you haven't caught up to the 4-month-old LonelyGirl15 saga by
now, you clearly have not been paying sufficient enough attention
to the new pop-culture byways. YouTube is no longer the home of all
of teenage America's funniest home videos. It's a platform for a
new narrative form.
With over 30,000 subscribers to her channel, the LonelyGirl15
shorts, which have racked up nearly 5.2 million video views,
attracted an audience who had to put some work into seeking out
this unfolding soap opera of a beautiful young brainiac testing her
wings by posting videos without her parents' knowledge.
Bree -- custom-built nerd bait with her sweetly delivered
monologues referencing everything from Richard Feynman to the
Coriolis effect -- could turn out to be the first bonafide Web 2.0
star. Her videos spawned responses from the YouTube community,
which posted an incredibly high number of their own videos that
acted as subplots to the central narrative. Was Bree a fake? Were
the YouTubers who early tried to debunk her in on the production?
Just what are her religious beliefs? Is her ongoing vlogs on
"Proving Science Wrong" spoofing her parents' beliefs somehow?
What's the meaning was of Adolf Hitler's spiritual adviser Alister
Crowely's picture on the wall? Or the significance of 10/12/06? And
are Bree's parents Satanists? And was she to be a sacrifice in the
religious ceremony she was preparing for (which even her parents
would not be allowed to attend)? Was Daniel her savior or himself a
sacrificial lamb? What about purple monkey? And most important,
will Bree and Daniel become a couple?
YouTube reaction has ranged from extremely angry and profane to
pleas to Bree/Jessica to continue posting. The creators, identified
by Heffernan as Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from
Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker,
have set up a website for LonelyGirl to live and give us the end of
the story. But somehow Watercooler thinks pulling it off YouTube
will mean it could lose the bit that made it so fascinating, the
real-time reactions of an involved audience.
