Jack Karlson’s life, which ended less than two years ago, was extraordinary. Never famous until old age, accounts given just before he died (which seem to contain acknowledged embellishments and gaping holes) describe a career as a petty criminal who survived a brutal childhood, teen years spent in and out of jail, brushes with Australia’s most notorious gangsters and hit men, a prison education in theatre and the arts leading to actual stints as an actor, the murder of his wife, and, yes, getting arrested at a Chinese restaurant—allegedly for a crime he had not committed, for once.
Now, the clip that made him an internet legend has been added to Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive—part of the Australian government. Despite his hardscrabble biography and thoroughly blotted reputation, Karlson (whose name almost certainly wasn’t really Jack Karlson) is woven into the fabric of Australian society now. If one were being a tad grandiose, they might call this development democracy manifest.
The Babadook is in the archive. It’s got a huge trove of materials related to the original Mad Max, of course. But now it’s much closer to being complete.
The new section on the National Film and Sound Archive website is called “‘Democracy manifest’: Anatomy of a viral moment,” and it commemorates a relatively ordinary example of local news reporting that went on to become perhaps the purest example of pulsating, white-hot, weapons grade internet content ever created.
If I need to refresh your memory on what happened, here you go:
The story goes that an investigator for American Express came to the conclusion that Karlson was a fraudster, which led to a pretty elaborate police operation aimed at escorting him out of a restaurant and into a patrol car. Perhaps the tale about Karlson being innocent of the credit card charge was true, because it might explain why, instead of just accepting that he was getting booked once again, his prison classes on Shakespearean acting kicked in, and he launched into history’s most famous monologue about democracy.
The archive has a complete account of how the video of Karlson was plucked from obscurity and sent into the stratosphere:
The full performance of Karlson’s arrest remained hidden away on the original camera tapes until 2009. Russell Furman, a Channel Nine presentation coordinator and tape operator, stumbled across it and uploaded it to his YouTube channel. Furman’s intentions were casual: he wanted to share it with some friends and peers that knew about the tape through industry folklore. YouTube itself was only a few years old at the time, having started in the US in 2005, before YouTube Australia launched in 2007.
The clip was a modest success initially, the archive notes, but then it was found by other YouTubers, particularly this one, and the view count shot up. It will spend the rest of eternity getting occasional additional spikes of traffic every time the millions of people who know and love it are reminded it exists and watch it once again.
If this seems like a strange inclusion in a collection called the National Film and Sound Archive, it’s worth noting that over at the NFSA, they do things a little differently. For instance, feast your eyes on the archive’s entry for Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe, a talk show from around 2009 that used to take place within Second Life. It looked like this:
In other words, this archive is the best use of government money I’ve ever seen, and democracies the world over should take note.
I’ve noticed, however, that the archive does not yet include footage of that time their prime minister took a bite out of a Tasmanian onion with the skin on and then nodded approvingly. The archivists should look into that.
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