Jake and Logan Paul are among YouTube’s most talented stars

Jake
and Logan Paul.
Jordan
Strauss/Invision/Associated Press, Richard
Shotwell/Invision/Associated Press

• YouTube stars Jake
  and Logan
  Paul are controversial and easy to hate.
• But both are among YouTube’s most talented
  artists.
• Their videos have an inventive approach to style and
  structure.
• And the Paul brothers are talented performers with
  Hollywood-level charisma.

YouTube stars Jake and Logan Paul
are easy to hate. They’re loud, cocky, and have become incredibly
wealthy (according to 

Forbes

,
each made over $10 million in 2017) in part by making terrible
songs. They’re also two of YouTube’s most talented
artists.

If you don’t watch their videos,
you’re most likely to know them from a pair of incidents that got
them branded as moral hazards. The first came in July 2017 when
Jake, the younger of the two brothers, gave a
smug, defiant interview to a television reporter who had
spoken with his angry West Hollywood neighbors and climbed the
reporter’s van.
The second
came on December 31, when Logan
uploaded a video that featured him and his friends finding a
suicide victim in a forest and making shock-induced jokes as a
coping mechanism. Logan tried to position the video as an
opportunity to discuss mental health, but the line between
advocacy and exploitation was blurry, at best.

The video led YouTube to
distance itself from Logan by limiting his ability to earn
advertising revenue on the site, removing him from one of its
original series (“Foursome”), and halting post-production on “The
Thinning: New World Order,” the sequel to 2016’s “The Thinning,”
which was also produced by YouTube. On Wednesday, YouTube will
release “The Thinning: New World Order” on its YouTube Premium
subscription service,
Variety reports, suggesting Logan is now on better terms with
the site.

Jake and Logan’s behavior in each
video deserves criticism, and many writers have made important
points about the collateral damage a platform that rewards
sensationalism and allows for immense popularity with limited
institutional barriers can cause. But to focus entirely on the
Paul brothers’ mistakes is to ignore some of today’s most
exciting and innovative popular art.

The brothers’ video blogs, or
“vlogs,” resemble reality television made from the perspective of
restless millennials who grew up on the internet, where you can
flip between viral videos, memes, social media, and any other
form of entertainment you can imagine in minutes. Jake and
Logan’s approach to making videos is chaotic, but never
unintelligible, turning unexciting activities — like shopping for
clothes or driving to pick up a customized car — into playgrounds
for visual, sonic, and performative experimentation. It’s like
mixing avant-garde cinema with Instagram, and it looks and feels
like nothing else in similarly popular films, television shows,
or YouTube channels.

They’re inventive and charismatic

The Paul brothers grew up in
Westlake, Ohio, and first
gained fame on Vine, the now-defunct six-second video
platform, where they discovered a philosophy and set of stylistic
techniques they would bring to YouTube. The philosophy was that
every second must be used to entertain, and their style —
fast-paced editing, frequent camera movement, big and energetic
performances — grew from it.

Each brother has performed in
more traditional settings, most notably Jake’s former role on the
Disney Channel show “Bizaardvark,” and Logan’s appearance on “Law
& Order: Special Victims Unit.” But both are best suited to
the internet, where they’re not bound by traditional narrative
structures.

While the Paul brothers have also
made comedy skits and music videos, they’re most effective on
their vlogs. If you watch one for the first time, you may find
yourself captivated but a little confused, as the videos don’t
follow the narrative conventions of any existing genre. It may be
difficult to discern, from moment to moment, where the video is
headed, and its title may hint at an event that doesn’t quite
happen in the way you expect, or that only happens after a series
of tangents.

Jake
Paul.
Richard Shotwell / Invision /
Associated Press

But even at their most prosaic,
the videos are never dull. You’re never asked to bide your time
while waiting for the real excitement, because, like the best
screen actors, the Paul brothers have a rare gift for engaging
with the camera. Each brother has an unusually expressive face
and body and a hyperactive sensibility suited for a platform that
accommodates short attention spans. The Paul brothers don’t ask
for your attention; they grab it.

Their charisma is a different
kind than most other YouTube personalities have. It’s the
movie-star kind, which is not just extroversion, but an awareness
of how they will be seen by their audience, the ability to be
accessible and a little opaque. At any given moment, each is the
most compelling person in his videos. None of the childhood
friends and YouTube personalities that appear alongside them
present serious competition. They’re accessories.

Their videos blend genres and
styles

The experience of watching Jake
and Logan’s videos mirrors the experience of surfing the
internet. Their videos are a frantic, improvisatory mash-up of
genres and styles, equal parts reality show, diary, sketch
comedy, behind-the-scenes documentary, experimental film,
Instagram story, and clothing advertisement (each brother has a
branded apparel line). One moment, they’ll address a hand-held
camera as if taking a selfie or talking to a friend on FaceTime,
the next, they’ll be the subject of an exuberant montage. It can
feel like you’re watching several videos in the span of one or,
more precisely, multiple videos put into a blender.

That may sound like a recipe for
incoherence, but the Paul brothers have developed a thoroughly
modern approach to narrative that holds the videos together,
combining the orchestrated spontaneity of reality television with
the urgency and immediacy of Snapchat and Vine. They don’t
operate as if you’ve committed to watching them for an hour. They
work under the assumption that to keep you from clicking to
another video, they have to make every second count.

There are other YouTubers who
share that attitude. But what makes the Paul brothers different
is the scope of their ambition and the depth of their skill.
Their videos are a more difficult balancing act, moving faster
and engaging with more visual, sonic, and performative ideas. If
other YouTubers are exploring uncharted territory, the Paul
brothers are right by their side, juggling torches.

Logan is more sincere 

Logan is the more sincere,
reflective, and relatable of the two. In a video from April,
titled, “The End
of Logan Paul Vlogs…,” he suggests that he might retire his
YouTube channel, but before he gets there, he puts on a riveting
display of performative, stylistic, and conceptual
invention.

In the video’s opening minutes,
he addresses the camera from the backyard of his home in Los
Angeles, referencing the premise implied by the video’s title
without tackling it head-on. Instead, he teases and is teased by
his friends and ends up dropping the matter. Though he stays
within a small radius, Logan never stops talking or moving. The
feeling of activity is visual, too. The camera shakes and zooms,
graphics illustrate Logan’s dialogue, and the video’s editing
creates the impression that Logan is almost teleporting around
the frame.

Logan
Paul.
Nicholas Hunt/Getty
Images

The movement doesn’t stop,
continuing with a flurry of visual effects, montages, and audio
tricks as Logan picks up his customized Mercedes-Benz G-Class,
which he spends much of the video’s middle segment driving. In
the video’s final minutes, Logan thanks his fans for their
support and reveals that, in classic Paul brother fashion, the
“end” he hints at in the video’s title is a misdirect. He is not
ending his channel, he says, just the habit of releasing a new
video each day.

So the video’s title is a bit
misleading. But, as in many of Logan and Jake’s videos,
exactly

what

happens is beside the point. It’s

how

it happens that matters. It’s the way they
talk and move, and how the camera and soundtrack compound their
energy. The cumulative effect of their style is a sense of joy
and discovery, even if it’s sometimes hidden beneath juvenile
pranks.

Jake is more outlandish

Jake creates a little more
distance between himself and his audience. He is less emotionally
accessible and more prone to absurdist humor. For much of a video
he released in April titled, “Jake
Paul Yodeling in Walmart!! *Kicked Out*,” he uses broad
gestures and inflections that don’t resemble traditional human
interaction. But rather than pushing the viewer away, he creates
a sense of intimacy — the feeling of gaining access to the small
group of friends around whom he feels most comfortable acting
without inhibition.

The video begins with Jake and
Kade Speiser, a fellow YouTube personality and member of Team 10
— Jake’s label for aspiring social-media stars — sitting in a
bedroom in the Team 10 mansion and talking about Jake’s plan to
imitate Mason Ramsey, who became a minor celebrity after
a video of him yodeling in a Walmart went viral.

Jake and Speiser act in the way
of longtime friends who have developed a kind of second language
through inside jokes and common gestures. The video consists of
the two planning the stunt, shopping for clothes that resemble
what Ramsey wore in his video, performing the stunt, and taking
pictures with fans. Like Logan, Jake creates a feeling of
constant motion. There are graphics, cartoon sound effects, a
distorted frame, a brief clip from “SpongeBob SquarePants,”
replays, visual filters, and slow motion, stitched together with
frenetic (but precise) editing and handheld cameras. The stunt
itself is childish, but it’s a Trojan horse for Jake’s boisterous
talents.

The Paul brothers have rare skill
sets

YouTube is full of would-be
celebrities vying for your attention. What sets the Paul brothers
apart is their rare combination of Hollywood charisma with an
ability to translate the structures and rhythms of social media,
memes, and internet videos into a coherent form of entertainment.
There are other YouTubers, like Markiplier and Lilly Singh, who
are magnetic on camera, but they’re often bound by conventional
approaches to content and structure. On the flip side, some
personalities, like VanossGaming, have an inventive approach to
structure without a compelling on-screen presence.

The Paul brothers have both and
have used them to envision expansive careers that take frequent,
unpredictable turns. There is precedent for artists who work in
two disciplines — television and podcasts, film and literature,
music production and music management — less so for those work in
five. In addition to their vlogs, clothing lines, music videos,
and intermittent appearances in films and television shows, the
Paul brothers have also dabbled in amateur boxing. (They
fought fellow YouTube stars — and brothers — Deji and KSI in
August).

Sometimes, their ambitions
backfire. Their songs are almost unlistenable, and Team 10

appears to be in disarray, possibly due to
Jake and
his father’s alleged mistreatment of some of the group’s
members. But the Paul brothers’ vision for a new kind of stardom
is compelling. In their videos, you can sense a boundless energy
ready to escape the frame. That energy can lead to stupid
decisions. It can also make you feel like you’re watching the
birth of a new medium.