The Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal Meme Is Vine's Breakthrough Moment
Three and a half months after Twitter's stop-motion inauspicious foray into pseudo-video began, Vine has officially made it in the Internet world, thanks to a pitch-perfect (if kinda creepy) meme built on a meme god of Internet yore (as in, like, last year): Guys, Ryan Gosling just will not eat his cereal. It's a pretty simple gag — a spoonful creeps into the frame alongside one of Gosling's many ornery characters — but it works:
RELATED: Hey Girl, Everything You Want to Know About Feminist Ryan Gosling
RELATED: From Osama to Skrillex: Facebook's Top Memes of 2011
Here's another:
RELATED: Drunk Nate Silver Is Actually Regular and Boring
RELATED: Six Seconds Is the New 140 Characters: Measuring Up Twitter's New Vine App
Since its debut in late January, Vine hasn't quite found its place on the cooler sides of the web. It led to the gross "everybody spurts" meme back in February, but its first big moment arrived during in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings last month, when the app played back six seconds of terror — indeed, a disturbing loop that most of us didn't want to experience over and over again. That certainly put Vine into the general consciousness of non-Internet obsessed nerds, but under the most horrible of circumstances.
RELATED: The Rise of the Accidental Dude Hero
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tried to change that reputation, by creating his very own Vine meme. Using the app's new front-facing camera capabilities, Dorsey decided to creep everyone out by staring straight into our souls while standing in front of things:
It doesn't really count as an Internet meme if it's just one guy who happens to also have a financial interest in the company, though. That's just Jack Dorsey trying really hard to make something happen.
But perhaps inspired by Dorsey's efforts (maybe? Probably not), today Vine has itself a bona-fide meme starring the celebrity king of memes. Because its video-based, Vine makes for the perfect platform to both make and experience the joke. It's pretty easy to film a slow-moving spoon over a Gosling clip with your phone. And the joke has time to simmer, in its six-second form.
So far only one person, Ryan McHenry, has really spent the time to make this meme work, but there's certainly a big enough audience of celebrity droolers to take this spoon thing to its inevitable death-of-a-meme stage. Soon enough we'll be seeing Kristen Stewart Won't Eat Her Cereal, and probably more Vines like it. Then other memes will get memed: eventually Hitler will dramatically not eat his cereal and Marco Rubio will awkwardly eat so much cereal. And then Viners will have to come up with something new, but at least the meme crowd will think about creating on Vine in the first place. For better or worse, a hunk and a spoon were all it took to get Twitter there, finally.
