Note: I wrote this post a week ago, but accidentally locked myself out of my account (very smart). Now that I have posting privileges again, here is my submission.
On its surface, TikTok may seem like a meaningless social media time suck, designed for materialistic 12-year olds and influencer teens with bright teeth and ridiculous houses. However, plenty of media critics have begun to pay attention to the ways Tik Tok is interacting with culture (see: Hannah Giorgis’ article on the importance of 2020 election satire).
With this in mind, I would like to talk about a particular genre I have observed on TikTok, and how I believe it may be understood using Ellen Seiter’s essay on semiotics. In the tradition of many media critics before me, I have decided to make up a nonsense term to describe this minute phenomenon that only I care about, which I am calling “scene layering”.
In this tradition, creators take an audio clip of some form of content (usually a snippet of a TV episode) and add another layer of meaning to convey their own message. In particular, I would like to focus on a 15-second clip from the Season 4 Episode 10 final of The Crown, a Netflix Drama series about the British monarchy.
The clip is from a fight between Prince Charles (son of Queen Elizabeth) and his young wife, Diana the Princess of Wales. A fictional retelling of a real-life relationship, The Crown has found success by re-igniting and reintroducing a public obsession from more than 25 years ago to a new generation of viewers. In the scene (included below) Charles has just finished yelling at his wife for being rude to his mistress Camilla, (???) and tells her that she is his priority, not Diana (yeesh.)
As the cropped video informs, both actors Josh O’Connor and Emma Corrin were nominated for (and have now won) a Critics’ Choice award for Best Actor and Best Actress. (The Crown itself has been nominated for awards a mind-boggling 142 times.) The comments are full of fans gushing about their performances and loving/hating their real-life counterparts. However, this audio has now had a second life, as seen in the clip below.
Content creators have picked up on the raw emotionality conveyed in the scene in order to express their individual thoughts on other media or funny personal conflicts in their own lives. Clearly this technique of “scene layering” has struck a chord with an audience—at the time of this writing, this video has been watched almost 800,000 times. But the trend is not just for personal anecdotes. In the second example below, the audio is used as a vehicle for fan discourse another popular show.
Just as Seiter suggests, there is “no natural or necessary connection between… the signifier and the signified.” (33) In fact, when writing this post, my roommate commented that she loved the audio, but had no idea where it came from! Yet, she still managed to understand and enjoy the trend.
If we understand the audio clip to be the signifier, then perhaps the signified is the raw, emotional conflict about something completely different. I believe that this “scene layering” allows its creators to change the meaning of the original sign into something softer, comedic, and personal. Of course, understanding these terms is no easy task, and I welcome the thoughts of others. Is my characterization correct? Does the analysis translate?
2 replies on “On Tik Tok’s Layered Meanings”
I completely agree with your analysis, Isabel! I think you raise an interesting point about how we define the “signified” in the connections that we make as the viewer watching a Tik Tok with “scene-layering.” I agree in the way that the “signified” within this relationship seems very intangible if the emotions are evoked. Perhaps it could also be an internal understanding of how the recontextualization of the audio clip applies to the scenario in a Tik Tok that may be completely unrelated. Also, maybe intertextuality can be applied to your analysis as well. Even if you don’t recognize the reference, this application of the audio in an unrelated scenario creates the baseline of your recognition and registering of the idea conveyed with the audio and the clip layered over it. So, if you come across The Crown sometime after watching a Tik Tok with that audio playing, you create that connection between texts. Both Tik Toks with the layering definitely got a laugh out of me.
Isabel, I really like your analysis of TikTok’s layered meanings and description of how each of these texts are able to influence each other. I think that this example relates really well to Gray’s analysis of intertextuality. We see from your examples how each text influences the other, in a non-linear way. The original TikTok creates an initial meaning, then the next TikTok builds upon this meaning by using the same audio file but gives it a completely new context, and finally, the second TikTok actually changes the initial one’s meaning. Each text is able to be understood without the knowledge of the other, but when the knowledge of the two are put together, they create an entirely new, culminated, text. I think it could also be interesting to apply the concept of flow to TikTok and how it creates an endless, completely personalized, sequence of media texts.