Prince Hamlet, suspicious that his uncle Claudius has murdered his father, devises a plan. He will commission a troupe of Players to put on The Murder of Gonzago, and write in a scene resembling his father’s killing: when Claudius sees the play, his response to the incriminating scene will determine his guilt. Hamlet sets Horatio to watch the new king, the play begins, and all there is left to do is wait. 

To Hamlet, the first reaction is an infallible proof of guilt or innocence. If Claudius’s wrongdoing does not “unkennel itself”, he says, then his father’s ghost was a mirage and “[his] imaginations are as foul as Vulcan’s stithy”. Not only would a negative reaction be proof of guilt (this is rather obvious), but Hamlet is so confident in the authenticity of the first reaction that even the mere lack of reaction would be, to him, enough to assert Claudius’s innocence. Surprise becomes quite a potent truth serum.

What if we could put Claudius on camera? The twenty-first century’s answer to The Murder of Gonzago is the reaction video. To anyone under 30, they probably need no introduction. People (from here on, “Reactors”) film themselves “reacting”: in its early beginnings, usually to a viral Internet video; later on, popular music, television, and movies were all fair game. Though this system is simple, the Reactor holds a complex and multifaceted relationship to “content”. On the one hand, they are a consumer and an audience: they watch or listen to pre-existing digital material in order to react to it. On the other hand, they are a producer of their own “reaction videos”, and a performer in them; in other words, a “content creator”. Yet they also hold an additional role: standing in-between the original material and their own audience. This mediating role is that of the critic, who interfaces between viewer and viewed, providing their own unique input which modifies the relationship between the two. In these three roles—consumer, producer, and mediator—the Reactor arises as a uniquely useful locus to analyze the nature of digital spectatorship and its complex machinery. It is this privileged position and the unique process of watching people watching that make it important to analyze the reaction video’s potentials for social change in the image-world. Can the reaction be a liberatory-critical challenge to traditional modes of viewing and the dominance of mass culture, or is it merely an affirmation of them?

The reaction video’s simple premise allows for a near-infinite range of possible manifestations. But reaction videos all have something in common. In “Watching People Watching People Watching” from The New York Times Magazine,  Sam Anderson identifies that “Reaction videos are designed to capture, above all, surprise…This is another source of the genre’s appeal: in a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare — a spiritual luxury that brings us close to something ancient. Watching a reaction video is a way of vicariously recapturing primary experience”. The sine qua non of the reaction video is its primacy; it must be—in principle if not in actuality—a “first reaction”.  It seems likely that many Reactors are already at least somewhat familiar with the content they are reacting to—they have to decide what to react to, after all—but these all must maintain the ruse of surprise, of psychic and somatic shocks, the charged moments of primacy that vibrate through the body with the distilled sensation of the new. 

This desire for “primary experience” and the authenticity of reaction is not one unique to YouTube; it is a defining feature of film in general. In film’s (relatively) early beginnings, critical theorist Walter Benjamin marveled at its ability to capture this kind of instinctive physiological response in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”:

Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: he could have a shot fired without warning behind the actor's back…The actor's frightened reaction at that moment could be recorded and then edited into the film. (32)

Benjamin notices here film’s (as opposed to, say, theatre’s) unique potential for authentication, as a result of its particular machinery. It is the technological capabilities of the film apparatus which uniquely allow for it to capture “authentic” experience. On the other hand, film also has a unique potential for artifice—since its very beginnings the ability to cut, edit, and otherwise manipulate a film (to say nothing of today’s CGI capabilities) has made it fundamentally deceptive. These dialectic potentialities toward authenticity and artifice together synthesize into a trueness which is backed by falseness: because we know what we see on film is not real (there is no “original” that is reproduced by film, but a collage of different isolated shots from different times and perspectives), we may expect it to appear real: by contrast, because we know, for instance, the theatre is real, we may suspend our disbelief when it does not look so. 

The reaction video similarly consists of a complex admixture of authenticity and artifice. The authenticity of (narrative) film is nominally directed toward an end—something is authentic in its portrayal of a particular thing. An actor may portray a character believably, or an on-screen car explosion may look like the real thing. But the reaction video divorces this authentic experience from even the pretense of acting; rather than authenticity in performing a part, authenticity becomes an end in itself—the Reactors seek to emulate nothing but, counterintuitively, themselves. The Reactors pretend to be themselves, pretending not to be pretending, performing their own non-performance.  Their art, like Ovid’s dictum, is to conceal art; it may well be that the entirety of their performance consists of obscuring that it is a performance. As Theodor W. Adorno laments of sports in “The Schema of Mass Culture”, “[t]hey are nothing but what they are”. 

Indeed, in many ways the Reaction (I use “Reaction” to mean the performance itself which is captured by the “reaction video”) resembles an athletic performance. It is a challenge which is, in the most cynical reading, entirely physiological: a test of the Reactor’s ability to emote and jerk wildly, almost, perhaps, a stunt. “Reactors are not ‘acting’ but they are not not acting either,” describes critic Caroline Carrêlo, in a case study on the “REACT” channel, “Undoubtedly the Reactors are still themselves, however, there is a clear heightening of their reactions to what is seen. The more vocal, excited, and emotional the filmed reactions are, the more views and rewatches the video gets. This is contingent on the media containing surprises, spectacle, or payoffs proportional to the performed reaction in the eyes of the Viewers.” A Reactor’s income, from ad revenue or monetized subscriptions, depends on keeping an audience entertained with emotional performance, and hiding that they are doing so.

The reaction video’s centering of primacy stems from its privileging of authenticity. In Minima Moralia, Adorno analyzes the fetish of “genuineness” as symptomatic of the new bourgeois morality that has lost the foundations of religious or civic obligation, voicing, “If nothing else can be bindingly required of man, then at least he should be wholly and entirely what he is.” Adorno identifies this genuineness or authenticity with the principle of non-reproducibility, derived from the propagation of standardized yet pseudo-unique commodities. What is supposedly genuine, like gold, is the irreducible agent that represents the process of exchange; “genuineness…express[es] only the fungibility, the comparability of things”. The Reactors are in themselves commodities. They take themselves to the digital market to be sold, and it is their “genuineness” that determines their exchange value. 

Adorno’s critique of personal genuineness is that it valorizes an illusory “authentic self” and thus obscures the social and economic relations which shape a person’s character. Separating the unitary biological self from the social structures which underly it, he contends, is an illusion: there is no “true self” which is not composed of the property relations impressed onto it. The fetish of the reaction video’s genuineness likewise obscures the market forces which underpin its content. Reactors are not only producers in the sense that they produce content: they are also economic producers who aim to reap economic value from their enterprises. Reactors therefore depend on maximizing their reactions to critical moments—of laughter, fear, or disgust—in order to maximize audience engagement. At the same time, they must do this carefully, in order to maintain their “authenticity” and not come off as forced. Their supposed authentic reactions are foundationally subjected to market forces; their entire “selves” are commodities crafted for the market.

But is this model of authenticity truly appropriate to the reaction video? Adorno’s counterpoint to the fetish of authenticity is unabashed artifice: “Anything that does not wish to wither should rather take on itself the stigma of the inauthentic”. Walter Benjamin, exploring the relationship between audience, actor, and technology in his essay on “The Work of Art”, writes that “the film actor [takes] revenge on [the masses’] behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph.” In this paradigm, the pleasure of film is always a vicarious one. For Benjamin, watching an actor defeat the film’s machinery is a form of vicarious revenge upon the industrial machinery that defines the worker’s daily lives. Yet most importantly, this revenge use the industrial apparatus’s own  machinery against it. In today’s world, it is the digital machinery of videos and images that must be defeated. The Reactor uses this digital apparatus—as in the cuts and editing required to avoid copyright claiming of their videos—in service of a new kind of radical human authenticity. Its authenticity rises out of its artifice. The Reactor uses technology to capture a sort of distilled humanity, one which pushes the human body to a heightened state of physiological and emotional performance. Again Carrêlo: “The more vocal, excited, and emotional the filmed reactions are, the more views and rewatches the video gets.” Reaction videos bring the human body to the apex of performance. They capture through the camera the heights of our joy and sorrow, our fear and disgust, the profoundest registers of our human voice. For indeed it is our voice that we hear from the Reactors, and the stirrings we feel at hearing it are ones of self-recognition, of seeing and hearing another human being and knowing that we are one too. In this light, the reaction video begins to take on a redemptive dimension.

However, the reaction video’s redemptive potential is at odds with its complete dependence on, as Adorno and Horkheimer called it, the Culture Industry. Reactions serve to intensify the emotional and sensory experience of media consumption. The amount of attention and effort spent to obscure copyrighted material so that it is barely legal enough to show suggests that much of the enjoyment of a reaction video derives from the source material itself, with the reaction serving to accentuate rather than replace it as the central focus. In this manner, these videos are inherently affirmative (even in the rare case that the Reactor does not “enjoy” the original content). Going from the dictum that “all publicity is good publicity”, even a successful “hate reaction” will spark more interest, discussion, and viewership of the original material. Creators may object to their revenue being stolen by reaction creators, but in the image economy, at least, reactions propagate and intensify the images they respond to. 

In “In Defense of the Poor Image”, German artist Hito Steyerl speaks to the resurrection and circulation of visual media as low-resolution digital “poor images”. Reaction videos serve as a decentering and an accelerating of media through the poor image. They create multiplicities of watching. They are appropriative and distributive, Robin Hoods of visual culture. In the picture-in-picture frame of viewing, they hold the potential of infinite recursion, reacting to reacting to reacting. The unique modality of watching a reaction video has affinities with other forms of multi-watching that have become predominant in the current media culture: for instance, videos with a Subway Surfers or Family Guy clip playing alongisde them, or the “duet” feature of TikTok. Rather than speak of an “authentic” video and its progeny, it might be more useful to think of these as image-networks, webs of interconnected and overlapping sights and sounds. The propagation of these image-networks is one of the reaction’s powerful innovations. To bastardize Newton, every action contains its Reaction, though perhaps not an equal and opposite one. Reaction-networks install viewing as an integral and inextricable aspect of visual media itself. They multiply the video into a rhizomatic network of pluralistic viewership.

Despite existing in these non-linear networks, the reaction video also holds an intermediary potential. By mediating between the original content and their viewership, Reactors determine the nature of their audience’s reception. If the Reactor is opposed to the original content, they watch it with an air of mockery, and thus the audience will follow their lead. Such a video has been legally upheld (in the United States) as “transformative” of the original content:

As asserted by the Hosseinzadeh court, not all reaction videos constitute fair use. However, the court did imply that the format that is arguably the most popular…which intersperses clips of another’s work along with their own (or another person’s) commentary (hereinafter the ‘critical reaction video’)—may be considered as a parody, which ‘has an obvious claim to transformative value’. (Gretchen Casey, “Courts React: Popularity of YouTube’s Reaction Video Genre Sparks New Discussion on Fair Use Defense.”) 

This “interspersion” of clips holds an important relationship to filmic montage. Adorno argues in “Transparencies on Film” that montage is the solution for film to capture the problems of the real world without simply reproducing them. However, that montage must be intentional to maintain critical value—a deliberate breaking down and reconfiguring of the world in particular ways to deconstruct its illusions. Not every reaction video is critical just because it uses montage—it depends on the reactor’s abilities and disposition toward their subject. Rather than simply reproducing the subject, and thereby endorsing or at least further distributing it, the critical Reactor’s commentary imposes new meaning onto the content they react to. 

Can the reaction video be transformative? Can it be critical? In its best conception, the reaction video can be imagined as a disruptive force: one which, as Brecht envisioned, shatters the audience’s absorption into the plot and forces them to be aware of the act of watching. These are an unintended consequence of the laws of copyright—the  intrusive commentary or frequent pauses in a music reaction that are necessary for legal reasons  force us to stop for a moment and to think; the slew of cuts from a TV reaction bear a similarity to the filmic montage which disrupts the continuity of action like a bucket of water in the face. The Reactor, as critic, uses their technological or even bodily means to disrupt the narrative, to shatter illusions and invade the space of watching.

Yet the valorization of primacy is in direct opposition to the reaction video’s critical potential. The status of the professional critic is rooted in a depth of knowledge in the field and in the world. Nothing should be a surprise to a good critic: if anything is unfamiliar, they work to understand until it is not. But the Reactor is necessarily un-knowledgeable. Everything must be a surprise. The reaction video holds within it a nostalgia for knowing less. We long for first times: to see the world confronted without the weight of all that we know about it. There is a reason that “Kids React” is one of the most popular subgenres—the child holds the Reactor’s ultimate primacy, and the failure of its critical potential.

The format of the reaction video is one which threatens to destabilize and interrupt the hierarchy between watcher and watched, between original and copy. Yet its subjection to the demands of authenticity holds the potential to render it impotent. By fetishizing the authentic and the ignorant, the reaction video creates a gradient of knowledge that flows toward the Reactor and away from the viewer: the audience watches the reaction video to observe someone who knows less than they do, not more. Is this inextricably linked to the concept of “reaction”, and an inherent element of the video format? Perhaps not. The “critical reaction video” as described by the court in Hosseinzadeh v. Klein represents an alternative. Far from a blind reaction, it is a moment-by-moment invective, which hijacks the original toward its own ends, as in Guy Debord’s conception of détournement. It does not merely “respond” or “react”; rather, it takes hold of the “original” content and reverses its force, turning it against itself. Every moment of the original video becomes a moment imbued with critical power. Here, the reaction video raises its head as a force toward revolutionary imagistic change. It is only the Reaction which throws off the yoke of authenticity, which is unapologetically and militantly artificial, that may have a chance to change how we watch for the better.