National Film and Sound Archive of Australia Adds ‘Succulent Chinese Meal’ Guy

Jack Carlson’s life, which ended less than two years ago, was extraordinary. Never becoming famous until old age, the accounts given just before his death (which include admitted embellishments and open loopholes) describe a career as a petty criminal who survived a brutal childhood, spent adolescence in and out of prison, feuded with Australia’s most notorious gangsters and hitmen, parlayed a prison education in theater and arts education into a real stint as an actor, murdered his wife, and, yes, got arrested in a Chinese restaurant – allegedly. But for a crime he didn’t commit, for once.

Now, the clip that made him an Internet legend has been added to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia—part of the Australian Government. Despite his difficult biography and thoroughly tarnished reputation, Carlson (whose name was almost certainly not actually Jack Carlson) is now woven into the fabric of Australian society. If one were even a little grandiose, one could call it development democracy manifest.

The Babadook is in the collection. Of course, it has a wealth of material related to the original Mad Max. But now it is very close to completion.

The new section on the National Film and Sound Archive website is called “‘Democracy Manifest’: Anatomy of a Viral Moment”, and it recounts a relatively ordinary example of local news reporting that has 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 Carlson was a fraud, leading to an elaborate police operation aimed at escorting him out of a restaurant and into a patrol car. Perhaps the story of Carlson being innocent of the credit card charges was true, as this could explain why he was being sued, rather than simply admitting that he was being sued. once againHis prison classes on Shakespearean acting began and he began history’s most famous monologue about democracy.

The archive contains the full details of how Carlson’s video was plucked from obscurity and sent into the stratosphere:

The full performance of Carlson’s arrest remained hidden on the original camera tape until 2009. Channel Nine presentation coordinator and tape operator Russell Furman discovered it and uploaded it to his YouTube channel. Furman’s intentions were casual: he wanted to share it with some friends and peers who knew about the tape through industry folklore. YouTube was only a few years old at the time, having launched in the US in 2005, before YouTube Australia launched in 2007.

The archive notes that the clip initially achieved modest success, but was then found by other YouTubers, especially this one, and the number of views increased. It will spend the rest of eternity receiving periodic additional boosts in traffic every now and then as the millions of people who know and love it are reminded that it exists and will visit it once again.

If this seems like an odd inclusion in a collection called the National Film and Sound Archive, it’s worth noting that at the NFSA, they do things a little differently. For example, feast your eyes on the archive’s entry for Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe, which was a talk show from around 2009 that used to live on Second Life. It looked like this:

In other words, this collection is the best use of government money I’ve ever seen, and democracies around the world should take note.

However, I notice that the collection does not yet include footage of the time their Prime Minister peeled a Tasmanian onion and then nodded in approval. Archivists should take note of this.