The Movies on Tik Tok Edition

Amber Finlay works at Nike and most recently wrote the epic Seoul retail edition.

Amber here. For the past month or so, I’ve been on The Summer I Turned Pretty TikTok, watching so many random clips of this teen beach romance drama that I know I’m Team Conrad even though I’ve never watched an episode of this show. But I’ve also been sucked into entire movies, delivered in sporadic clips that land on my “For You” page with no context whatsoever. I realize that this is a universe of my own making, the algorithm feeding me the chaos I apparently want. 

Why is this interesting?

This is basically the mobile version of watching other airplane passengers’ movies through the crack in the seats—aka how I watched “80 for Brady.” The user experience is terrible, it’s a waste of time, and it’s completely hypnotic. 

There are lots of accounts that post movie and TV clips, and the comments are always, hilariously, the same. They almost never tell you the name of the movie (to get you to go into the comments and look, I guess?), and everyone wants them to hurry up and post the next scene. 

CHOP CHOP MOVIE BOY!

This is different from the TikTok fan tidal wave during a popular show or current movie, where you get theories, Fancam montages of the stars, and episode reviews that make you want to watch the whole episode. “Movie Boy” (take that as shorthand for whatever this is) mainly posts scenes from random older shows or movies you’ll probably never watch in their entirety. 

Some of the movies I’ve watched in clips on TikTok recently (spoiler alert):

• Fresh, in which a guy kidnaps girls to harvest their body parts to sell to rich people for dinner. It has the girl from Normal People in it! 

• A movie where two people are stuck in quicksand and are trying to pull themselves out (I still don’t know what movie this is)

• Along Came Polly with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston

Wanting to watch clips like this, with two layers of subtitles over them, weird cropping, and shoddy editing, does feel like the TikTokiest way to watch a movie, though. The content that feels most authentic on TikTok is always the stuff that feels a little hacked and rough—people recording stream-of-consciousness monologues while they’re walking, dancing in a room with a ceiling fan, or greenscreening themselves over grainy pictures. This is why produced videos feel so wrong on TikTok: that’s just not the vibe. When you extend that aesthetic to movies and shows, it all kind of makes sense. 

I am trying to stop wasting my life on this and get back to Skincare TikTok, where I belong. I’ll miss Movie Boy, though. Chop chop! (AF)

Bathmat of the Day:

Like a Diptyque label with a lot to say. (AF)

Quick Links:

• This SNL skit with Pedro Pascal is the perfect GenZ TikTok Fancam explainer (AF)

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Amber (AF)

—

Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).