Angel MaMii and the Virtue of Unintended Chaos
Many people scoff at the idea that art can be anything. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, for instance, draws derision from most. It is simply a urinal turned 90 degrees, they say. How could this be art when I am merely moved to pee in it?
Yet Duchamp’s legacy, both within and beyond Fountain, remains one firmly entrenched in artistry. So it will be with Angel MaMii, the first TikTok user to create a truly generational form of content.
For as much as I love to spin words about a person’s qualities, quirks, and -isms, MaMii defies even my greatest description. It’s best to just provide video.
This, put as simply as possible, is an unrelenting NyQuil-induced roller coaster from start to finish. The conflict, set-up, backstory… none of it matters. Nothing matters in this video at all. I don’t know what the pivotal moment is. I’ve watched it upwards of 20 times in sheer befuddlement.
This is the only time I’ve watched a video with absolutely zero takeaways except outright confusion — and that’s the genius, whether intentional or not, of what Angel MaMii has created.
Every millennial went through the “random phase.” Maybe every Gen Xer did too. Maybe every zoomer will. But I know for sure that every millennial watched Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and lost their collective minds when Cheese started screaming about potatoes. We were born into that unpredictability and I don’t think we ever fully recovered from it. Maybe that’s what it is about MaMii’s content that draws me in so precariously: it feels reminiscent of the unbound, directionless chaos that was such a key event in my childhood without feeling over-the-top in intent. It doesn’t try too hard, because frankly, I’m not sure it’s trying at all. The intent plus the delivery that I perceive from MaMii seems to be a genuine attempt to create relatable content, but there’s virtually nothing that anyone can relate to.
The situations she draws up are isolated incidents to the point that I’m not even sure how she created them. See here:
What is it. What. Please.
It’s a situation that simply does not exist. Not in a million years. It’s not even hyperbolic of any situation that I’ve seen. All the same, the way that things are shot, the dialogue is paced, and events unfold leads me to believe that she expects a reaction out of the audience. There’s a punchline hidden somewhere in these videos, reachable and translatable only by its creator. It is unintentionally, as far as I can tell, chaotic. It’s perfect. It’s almost Dadaist in its disregard for life’s meaning, but it lacks that intentional edge of critique. It’s not quite surrealism; perhaps it’s the natural culmination of /r/Ooer and surrealist memes taking off over the past few years? Or maybe it really is something new.
I wish I could provide a more nuanced criticism. I wish I had an overarching point to connect here. Really, though, I’m only writing this because I need to talk about it. It feels important, somehow, even though it shouldn’t. It feels weighted, even if it’s the most throwaway thing on earth. Angel MaMii has done something.
I just don’t know why it matters to me.
