Shit That We Love: Drunk Redneck Woman Attempts To Skateboard On The Roof — Zatte vrouw op het dak
More than half a million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, and fortunately, most of it will never be seen by anyone. Only a minuscule fraction of these manage to scrounge up a mere thousand views, and an even smaller percentage achieve virility, briefly infecting our timelines until they’re commodified by digital marketing agencies or Ellen DeGeneres. These select few are determined by a set of criteria that over time, we’ve been able to empirically identify.
A “Good” Internet Video must be short, succinct, and require no thinking whatsoever. It should capture our goldfish attention spans and leave us with more questions than answers. It must resonate with our humanity and strike some universal chord within us, activating the fundamental force that compels us to smash that mf’in like button. If possible, a guy should get hit in the nards or a cat should think it is a person.
But even if those conditions are met, it must also have something else, an ineffable quality that’s difficult to define and nearly impossible to manufacture. It is the limiting reagent in the chemical equation that is virility and without it, true pandemic is impossible.
Whatever it is, every so often there comes a video that has a truckload of it. A video that pierces through the noise and transcends Internet ephemera, burrowing its way into our lizard brains and becoming something more. I humbly present my favorite piece of arthouse cinema: Drunk Redneck Woman Attempts To Skateboard On The Roof — Zatte vrouw op het dak.
Though only eighteen seconds long and featuring almost no discernible dialogue, this video serves as a limitless source of unbridled joy for me, while also providing incisive commentary on filmic narrative, viral video content, and (I suspect) the nature of Man. Let’s watch it again in the much more palatable GIF form.
The earliest, and most popular, incarnation of ‘Drunk Redneck Woman’ I could find appeared on /r/whitepeoplegifs in November 2017, garnering over 50,000 upvotes and 1,100 comments, most of them dumb as hell. Its YouTube version, uploaded weeks later in January 2018, adds the subtitle ‘Zatte vrouw op het dak’ — Dutch for “drunken woman on roof” — as well as accompanying description ‘Abonneer je nu en geniet van de dagelijkse updates ! thnx’ — Dutch for “subscribe now and enjoy the day updates ! thnx”.
“Drunk Redneck Woman” features nearly every ingredient necessary to concoct a deeply satisfying viral video — an intoxicated person hurting themselves, a precocious and obscene child, a fat farm animal — all in perfect cosmic alignment. It checks so many boxes that on paper it seems synthetic, like if some marketing department had focus-grouped a viral video ad nauseam.
But artificiality suggests this could be easily manufactured. It cannot. This sequence of events has never happened before, and it will never happen again. If you took those infinite monkeys typing for eternity that will eventually write Shakespeare, and instead gave those infinite monkeys infinite cameras, and infinite drunk redneck women, and infinite profane children, and infinite hogs, I posit they will never be able to recreate this art.
So instead of artificial, it feels impossibly genuine. It is viscerally real, and not it the way online denizens mean ‘real’ when they mean ‘relatable’, because this is absolutely not relatable in any way whatsoever. It’s real because this auteur captured lightning in a bottle, if lightning were strange and stupid instead of powerful and electric.
And in this beautiful accident, ‘Drunk Redneck Woman’ becomes an avant-garde commentary not just on virility, but film as a whole. There are three clear acts, yet no narrative threads connecting them, mocking conventional story structure and forcing us to consider the thematic links between these thirds instead. What is this video trying to say? What is that redneck woman trying to say?
Vine cemented sharp cuts and rapid edits as pillars of the viral video, and yet ‘Drunk Redneck Woman’ eschews both, instead opting for a single long take, most of it a widening zoom-out before the camera steps back and pans 180 degrees to its final twist. This patented ‘one-shot’ style would later be adopted by mainstream Hollywood, perhaps most notably in Daredevil, True Detective, and Birdman.
The video is such a wellspring of satisfaction that the mere act of searching for it is enough for me to achieve nirvana. There are unending permutations of search terms that Google’s algorithm will accept to yield this jewel, each one more fun to type than the last. ‘Roof skateboard woman pig’. ‘Lady skateboard middle finger’. ‘Skateboard drunk woman fuck you kid pig’. They are spoken word poems I recite to myself, prayers to intone as I lay my head to rest.
I have spent hours watching ‘Drunk Redneck Woman Attempts To Skateboard On The Roof — Zatte vrouw op het dak’. Within it, I see something primal and elemental, something that has existed since the Universe was only Chaos, but has never been captured, never so purely distilled into eighteen joyous seconds.
And in attempting to unlock its mysteries, I have found myself in a paradox of needing answers and realizing that the euphoria I mine from this video would be tainted if I ever found them. All I can know is that when I close my eyes, I see ‘Drunk Redneck Woman’.
