the /tv/ discourse around burt has finally shown its whole hand

burt is the most interesting person to come out of fishtank. that is not a question.

a guy who claims every job simultaneously, masturbated on live television while pausing to wave at the audience, has had muscle implant surgery, holds alleged credentials from three separate high-iq societies, and identifies as a bisexual west african body trainer with a dream role playing a sweet man who is secretly a monster. chat, this is not a character. this is a fully realized human being who operates on a frequency most people cannot receive.

so it has always been slightly funny watching the /tv/ threads try to process him. the lore around burt has been running for weeks now. film discourse, credentials roasts, insider claims, a times of india article about a slap. the orbit keeps widening.

but a thread surfacing on /tv/ on august 17th finally makes explicit what was lurking under a lot of this. the thread, which appears to use burt's ghanaian descent as a jumping-off point for racist generalizations about the film it's ostensibly discussing, is not subtle about what it's doing. per the catalog snapshot, the framing is that depictions of black poverty are realistic because of something something, and i am not going to repeat the language used because we both know what it says.

here is my point of view: a meaningful portion of the burt discourse was never actually about burt. it was about the fact that a guy who looks like burt and acts like burt won. and some people cannot locate that in any file system they possess. so it comes out sideways as credential skepticism, or character criticism, or a thread like this one that isn't really about a film at all.

burt himself, to his credit, has never once appeared to care. he is a man who masturbated on camera, smiled at the lens, and kept going. he is not reading the /tv/ threads.

anyway. the high-iq society can have him. the rest of this discourse can sort itself out.