Flame: on autism, disidentification, desire, and social anxiety
When I was a senior in high school, I got an unexpected email from my English teacher. Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, about an autistic teenager trying to solve the murder of his neighbour’s dog, was on her British Literature syllabus, and she wanted to know if, as part of our class discussions, I would be open to weighing in with some of my experiences as someone diagnosed as autistic. I had received my diagnosis at age twelve or thirteen, and since then I honestly hadn’t given it much conscious thought outside the psychiatric appointments I had (an hour’s drive away in the nearest moderately-sized city) every few months. But I still said yes, that would be fine, and a couple of weeks later we started reading and discussing the novel in class.
As it turned out, Christopher, the novel’s narrator, wasn’t very much like me at all. He thinks in logical puzzles, equations, and graphs, and struggles to verbally articulate himself with other characters. I, on the other hand, have always struggled with maths and any kind of visual-spatial reasoning, and am hyper-verbal. The more I tried to draw fruitful parallels between myself and Christopher for the purposes of discussion—our shared difficulty knowing when someone was serious or joking, say, or how easily we both got overwhelmed—the more frustrated I became, as the descriptions I gave constantly felt overdetermined. I was keenly aware of how open they left me to misinterpretation by my friends and classmates so that I was constantly having to double back on my descriptions, always having to say, ‘No, it’s not quite like that.’ Around this same time, though, I also became obsessed with an internet personality who may have had more in common with me than I cared to admit.
One of the more forgotten viral stars of the earliest days of YouTube, Dax Flame is ostensibly the online pseudonym of Bernice Juach III, a painfully awkward teenage boy vlogging about his blunders with high school social life. I say ‘ostensibly’, because ‘Bernice Juach III’ is now widely understood to be a fictional persona created and played by Madison Patrello. Even with that layer of fiction, the presentation of Dax Flame’s early videos is unvarnished and often uncomfortably sincere, especially compared to modern YouTube’s more knowingly artificial visual vocabulary and editing rhythms. Like the much more popular Lonelygirl15 from around the same time, Dax Flame’s videos use the simple vlog format to craft a larger, continuous narrative. There are no jump cuts and no polish, just grainy footage of a kid in a bland room seemingly pouring his heart out to a webcam. For both channels, the initial intrigue was generated by the uncertainty and hesitation around whether what you, the viewer, were seeing was real.
When I first discovered Dax Flame’s channel (introduced, as far as I can remember, by my younger brother), he was already nearing the end of his fifteen minutes of internet fame, but I quickly became morbidly obsessed. Patrello’s performance as Dax—if that is, in fact, what it is—is heavily reliant on physical and verbal tics. He speaks with a nervous, stilted cadence, punctuated by the occasional stutter or echolalia; he is unable to sit still in his chair; he fidgets and stims. In the online culture of the mid-2000s, this made Dax Flame an instant target of vicious ridicule that made liberal use of the R-slur, with YouTube Poops and supercuts fixating on and amplifying these tics for comedic effect, as well as of armchair diagnosis. The comments sections of his videos were awash in suggestions, both in mockery and in would-be defense, that Dax was autistic, which he vehemently denied in subsequent vlogs. Despite this denial, Dax’s tics were all too recognizable in myself—but more than this, looking back, his videos articulated a deep loneliness and social frustration for which I didn’t want to take ownership. The pixelated boy I saw onscreen became an abject figure of everything I desperately hoped I wasn’t and was terrified I might be: the socially inept loner, incapable of regulating his emotions or reading other people’s cues, whose desire for connection spills out in awkward ways. I laughed at him—I won’t deny it—and I secretly identified with him. In an odd way, watching Dax Flame’s videos was the first time I remember thinking of myself as autistic in a conscious sense.
The queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz argues that many multiply marginalized people, having no clear, readily available blueprint for identity formation in the dominant culture, instead provisionally and creatively repurpose existing cultural forms and archetypes to articulate a sense of self. He calls this process disidentification, since it involves attaching to a cultural object while simultaneously maintaining a kind of negative relationship to it: no, that’s not quite it. As Muñoz emphasizes, to disidentify ‘is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification’, nor is it ‘to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components’ of the cultural object.[1] Dax Flame, certainly, is a politically and ethically fraught figure; even to this day it remains unclear what exactly was Patrello’s purpose in creating the character (if that is what he was doing). If Dax Flame existed for my teenage self as a kind of bad object or shadow-self—one with which I was intensely fascinated—what would it mean to disidentify with him today?
Many of Dax Flame’s early videos follow a familiar pattern: Dax outlines a plan to climb the social ladder at school or even just make a friend, which we, the viewers, always know is inevitably doomed based on Dax’s idiosyncratic and sometimes outlandish understanding of social interaction. This is often followed—either immediately or with a few unrelated vlogs sandwiched in between—by another vlog in which Dax despondently recounts how everything has in fact gone horribly wrong. If the first half of this formula (if you can call it that) feels like the setup for comedic hijinks, the second half frequently makes for discomfiting viewing, as Dax often spirals into angry or tearful meltdowns, berating himself or laying blame at other people’s feet. Patrello’s performance (if that’s what it is) is unsettlingly grounded in these videos. Dax’s reactions may be extreme, but never so extreme, at least in the early videos, as to strain credulity (although one of the more convincing arguments in favour of Dax’s fictionality asks why someone would knowingly record and then upload multiple videos of themselves spiralling out in this way). The entire time, Dax’s static camera setup remains on him, with no editing to shield the viewer from witnessing the entire ordeal.
Dax’s attempts to fit in and make friends are frequently tinged with queerness and homoerotic longing. One video, in which Dax excitedly reveals his outfit for a school celebrity dress-up day, sees him in a Superman costume with an androgynous slicked hairdo and, incongruously, makeshift clip-on hoop earrings made from binder rings. (In the following vlog, uploaded later that day, Dax, still in full Superman regalia, tearfully reports that celebrity dress-up day was actually meant to be the following Friday.) But the moments from Dax Flame’s videos that loom largest in my mind, and to this day make me wince to think about, come from the very first arc on the channel involving Dax’s attempts to befriend his classmate Jacob, whom Dax describes as ‘kinda cool’.
I don’t really know if I was popular or not in high school. In a small town where everyone more or less knows each other, the popular/unpopular divide holds less meaning anyway. At the very least I was on friendly terms with a lot of people on all sides of that divide, but for a lot of reasons that only went so far. I think some people were a bit cagey because I came from a minister’s family and they felt weird about that; I think I was also guarded and defensive around people; and, I want to stress, I was a weird kid and a lot of them had known me since I was a lot younger and weirder. All of which is to say, I had a lot of acquaintances as a teenager, but not a ton of close friends. So I could understand being desperate for connection.
Dax’s uncontainable elation when Jacob is assigned as his lab partner, and his clear desperation to be friends with this guy, cut close to the bone when I first watched these videos even amid clear suggestions that there might be more to this desire. While Dax’s language remains platonic, his stated desire to ‘impress Jacob’, his insistence that ‘I’ve already made us rings’, and his wistful sign-off that ‘I will be with Jacob’ indicate that Dax’s longing may be more romantic than even he cares to admit.
In my sophomore year, I took part in the spring musical that my high school always put on in partnership with another school. There was this group of guys from that school with whom I desperately wanted to be friends: they were into theatre but in an effortlessly cool way; they were straight but not too macho; one of them had put a cow in their principal’s office and had the video footage to prove it. I wasn’t yet able to recognize my gay desires as gay, but even so, or maybe because of that, my desire for connection with other guys always presented an unsettling ambiguity; I was almost afraid that they would take any overtures toward friendship as a sign I was into them. (And look, maybe I was, at least with one or two of them.) The following year, when our two schools ended up merging, I made a few half-hearted attempts to hang out with them, which actually meant that I just stood quietly in proximity to them. My fear of being too much, in the way that someone like Dax Flame is often ‘too much’, meant that our friendship or potential friendship remained mostly hypothetical, as an abstract possibility or series of ‘what-if’ scenarios. When I did say something, and when I said something in any social setting, it was often the wrong thing.
I ended up inviting all those guys to my 17th birthday party. My friend Blair, who had designated herself as my protector way back in primary school, caught wind of this and pulled me aside in AP History class. ‘Just promise me you won’t take any kind of shit off them,’ she said. I still don’t know whether she knew something I didn’t, or if it was just general protectiveness that made her say that. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. The party was fine; the guys were perfectly nice.
Dax’s efforts to court Jacob’s friendship are, of course, disastrous. The arc culminates in two videos in which Jacob comes over to work on a lab assignment. After Jacob, oddly, agrees to let Dax film the session for his vlog, the camera observes them from a distance in an unbroken shot as Jacob attempts to get work done while Dax vibrates with nervous energy across from him, clearly more interested in hanging out and attempting to crack jokes that don’t make a ton of sense. The phone rings, and the video cuts off; in the next video, with the same camera setup, Dax tells his mom that his dad called and said he would be home soon, and we hear a voice offscreen say that Jacob will need to leave soon. Dax spits out a mouthful of Pepsi. ‘He’s not going home,’ he insists, the lump in his throat audibly rising. ‘He’s spending the night!’ ‘It’s okay, I can go home,’ says Jacob, clearly trying to remain nonchalant. In a panic, Dax rushes over to grab Jacob in an odd kind of caress, realizes he’s crossed a line, and quickly tries to apologize. ‘We’re still friends, right?’ he implores. Jacob drops the polite veneer. ‘Dude, you just spit on me, and we were never friends,’ he says, leaving the room.
I’ve never had an interaction with a would-be friend as cataclysmic as Dax’s study session with Jacob, but the way the intensity of Dax’s desire for connection makes Jacob an unwilling pawn to a scenario Dax has built up in his mind has haunted me in the eighteen years(!!!) since I first saw the video. It took me until my late twenties to get comfortable with the notion that my friends and partners genuinely wanted me around and weren’t reluctantly humouring me. Even now, in my mid-thirties, it can take me a while to pick up on the fact that someone is trying to befriend me, especially if I also want to be friends with them. I’m overly wary of pestering people, or presuming on a familiarity that might not actually be there. I can be reticent and overly formal with people I admire, which I know can be annoying in its own way. And I don’t think that’s because of a handful of YouTube videos from almost two decades ago, to be clear—I don’t want to invest them with that kind of power. It’s more that they revealed and laid bare the anxieties I already had, and in some ways still have, about reaching out to people.
The internet of the 2000s was not a kind place for people outside the accepted norms of society who went viral: this was also the era of Cara Cunningham’s ‘Leave Britney Alone’ rant and the ensuing barrage of homophobic mockery she endured. Despite the fact that he’d been initially presented to me as an object of ridicule, though, the more I watched Dax Flame’s videos the more I searched for a reparative reading. When I got a Facebook account in 2008, I reached out to someone named Madison Patrello who seemed like he could reasonably be the person behind the Dax Flame channel: a naïve gesture in an already naïve era for internet culture. I told him the videos had a strange resonance with me as an autistic person; I told him I admired his performance as this character. I think I was looking for confirmation that there was some deeper and more provocative intent behind the videos than most people could see. In response, I got a four-word answer: ‘im not real dude.’
Glancing at Dax Flame’s still-active YouTube page, it seems like the line between Madison Patrello the person and Dax Flame the internet persona has gotten stranger, simultaneously blurrier and more shrouded in layers of what could be irony or could be genuine eccentricity. There’s an uncanny quality to his more recent videos that suggests he’s constructing a subtle but elaborate bit in a Nathan Fielder kind of way, but who can say? I have no real interest in Dax Flame’s current video output. Nor, to be honest, am I remotely interested in discussing his earlier videos as good or bad representation of (implied) autistic or (implied) queer people. They just are. Queer people and autistic people often talk about the importance of ‘seeing ourselves’ in media or ‘feeling seen’ by it, in a way that easily lapses into sentimental platitudes. For a disidentifying subject, though, the question ‘Do you feel seen by this?’ never has as simple an answer as you might expect.
[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 12.