For anyone who was online during the halcyon years of the 2010’s, Boogie was one of those guys that you just couldn’t help knowing about. Even if you didn’t watch his content, you knew his face, and you knew that he had a reputation for being one of the nicest people around, if one who could stand to spend more time on his health. And when I at some point found out that he had gotten a gastric bypass surgery and later saw a clip of him on the H3H3 podcast in which he had lost significant weight, I kind of gave Boogie an internal easy-rider nod and tucked him away into my mental filing cabinet of happy endings. Boogie was going to be alright. 

How wrong I was. 

Not only did Boogie not ride off into the sunset, but in the past year or so, his downfall has become a matter of more than casual interest to internet historians. But then, I’m guessing you already knew that. Though there have been others, the recently released documentary by Mike Clum is by far the most professional effort to reveal the truth of Boogie’s new reality and it is…hard to watch. 

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way, the doc doesn’t make Boogie look good. And people have collected hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views by stating the obvious. Others have taken an extra step of being deliberately uncharitable in order to make him look even worse. This mostly comes up in regard to his statements about sex-workers. 

“How dare Boogie want to have sex with women that would not normally want to have sex with him! How dare he talk about Arkansas 8s and LA 10s and bragging about how he was able to sleep with them. Look how entitled he is! Look how he’s objectifying women!” 

This kind of “I learned about feminism at school today, Mommy!” Perspective would work better if it wasn’t wrapped up in logical inconsistency and this kind of cynical faux-naivety. 

Yeah, you’re right. It’s crazy to recognize that there are variations in human attractiveness and that some people are so attractive that they can make money by granting forms of sexual access to themselves to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to very attractive people. That’s just bonkers. 

There are people literally losing their minds over his statement about deserving to do xyz with a hot girl and somehow construing it as Boogie saying that he deserves to own a beautiful woman or something. It’s fucking stupifying that I have to explain this, but what he’s describing here is how he would rationalize spending these insane amounts of money. People say this all the time when they are persuading themselves to make an impulse purchase on something that they know they don’t need. Please stop sperging out over the use of a word. 

But apart from these specific issues, the general problem is that apparently nobody can get past the question of whether or not Boogie is a good person. It’s not that Boogie hasn’t done objectionable stuff, doesn’t do objectionable stuff in this doc, it’s just that most of the people talking about it are so fixated on the most obvious commentary available that they aren’t even able to engage with anything interesting. Millions of people have come to warm themselves beside the Boogie 2988 dumpster fire, but no one wants to ask any serious questions about it—I suspect because those questions might lead to some uncomfortable realizations about the extent to which many of the people now beating this dead horse have more than a little in common with it.  

So instead we have Boogie2988 as pure spectacle. This is Boogie fulfilling his destiny, completing the final phase of the cash cow life-cycle, going out like some beached whale so that the crabs and the seagulls can shred his carcass to grow their own brands. And certainly I’m no different for making this video, except in the fact that I’d like to offer a sincere effort to try to respect the person that we’re all cannibalizing and to give some reflection on the tragic fall of Boogie 2988. 

And I might never have even thought to offer this commentary if it hadn’t been for the segment of the documentary in which we are introduced to Dezi, Boogie’s new, much younger girlfriend. 

Naturally the fact that Dez is less than half Boogie’s age has led to all kinds of speculation about the nature of their relationship. That’s to be expected, but what has been surprising has been the amount of vile, venom-spewing vitriol that has been generated by seeing these two humans together. There are people unironically suggesting that Boogie has kidnapped or trapped this girl in this relationship. Please get off Twitter. You have been mentally compromised. 

But it’s not unreasonable to question the motives involved in this unlikely pairing. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if Dezi is only with him because she sees some way to personally benefit from it. Obviously, Boogie is currently in a bad way, but it’s not hard to imagine him having a comeback, and getting into a relationship with him now could be like buying a stock that’s busted on the chance that it’ll go back up. Or it could be that she’s simply desperate for totally unrelated reasons and compared to other options, Boogie is actually the best one. What bothers me more is the possibility that Boogie is himself simply using Dez as a port of last resort, and that if things were to improve for him, he would cut her loose. 

At one point, the two discuss the possibility of marriage and it is frankly gross. It’s gross because of the way that Boogie toys with the possibility, dangling it out in front of this young woman just to see how she’ll react. He turns to her and asks whether she would say “yes” if he proposed to her right there on camera. She tells him that she would, and Boogie turns back to the camera, like an asshole, and says “That’s a good sign.” 

Never ever do this to any woman. This is pathetic. 

I’m getting away from the point, and that point is that it’s hard to look at Boogie and Desi with uncynical eyes. The fact that neither of them seem able to explain their relationship either doesn’t help to convince me or anyone else. And Clum does basically everything that he can to make Des come across as emotionally stunted and infantile. 

Tell me Mike, was it really her idea to start playing with a couple of stuffed animals on camera? You just hit record and said, “So tell me about yourself,” and she said, “Hey let me go grab some Pokemon so I can really undermine any sense of my own agency”? Cause I’m finding it tough to swallow Mike. 

Did she really want her first establishing shot to be one taken from behind in which her ass is hanging out? Was this her idea? I don’t care if she chose to wear this, you didn’t need to shoot from this angle and certainly didn’t need to make it one of the earliest shots you show of her. You didn’t need to show her in the bath without her underwear. You didn’t need to do a lot of things Mike. 

Regardless, like I said, it’s not easy to believe that there’s a real connection here, especially not from Boogie’s end. 

But what comes through during the brief amount of speaking time that Dezi is given, is that she might believe the things that she’s saying. And it was thinking about that possibility that helped me to understand what Boogie really means to those of us who have gotten to witness, even from great distances, his rise and fall. It was her that got me to ask the question: is it possible for someone to actually love Boogie? 

And the strange thing is, I felt like I could get it. 

It’d be insane to call Boogie2988 a great man, or a heroic one. He has essentially no character. If I were to say that he’s a person of magnitude, it would only be interpreted as a jab about his weight (it’s not). But there is something to the fact that someone can make a documentary about this man, a man who has not been relevant online in years, and it gets 2 million views in barely more than a week. There is something to the fact that the doc seems to have resonated with so many people online. And sure, there is no shortage of people who watched this doc for no other reason than to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, but if there’s any part of this circus that could be called a Culture, then Boogie was, for a brief while, an important part of that culture. And there’s something about his fall that feels momentous, and somehow important. 

In the 19th Century novel Madame Bovary, there’s in which the young heroine, who is an idealist and a romantic, goes to a fancy ball put on by a bunch of French aristocrats. And while she’s there, among all the young and beautiful ladies of French society, she catches sight of an old man, eating almost by himself without any concern or self-consciousness, letting gravy drip down his chin, and Emma Bovary recognizes him and realizes that in his youth, he lived a life of insane excess: 

“He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family…He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens!” 

Despite the man’s unimpressive appearance, Emma Bovary is able to see the grandeur of the life that he had lived.

Now Boogie is no King Lear, but I could understand a woman being fascinated simply by the scale of his destruction, the fascination of watching someone who had once been loved by millions burn themselves away. Something like the female equivalent of a white knight complex. 

Boogie does have one thing that goes a long way to redeem him and it is the fact that his sins are real, his sexual sins in particular. I think that the most powerful condemnation of our age is that even our sins are trivial, but Boogie is truly a glutton. To blow thousands of dollars on sex-workers is an unhinged act of lecherous wastefulness, but it is infinitely better than the hours upon hours that other “good” people spend watching pornography or drooling over Instagram models.  At least what he did had magnitude. As pathetic is it might seem to you, he blew more money than a lot of people make in a few years on having affairs with beautiful women. It’s not right, but at least it’s got scope. As Kierkegaard said, the demonic is closer to grace than than the complacent and the comfortable. 

And it was in realizing this, that I finally understood what it is that I appreciate about Boogie2988 and why I simultaneously find him so disappointing: and it’s the fact that he can’t face his own situation. The entire time I was watching his documentary, I just wanted him to drop this cringe millennial performative “look how screwed I am” act because I know it’s not real. I know that what he wants out of this is just to keep on living as a crowned prince of nerd culture, to keep talking about video games and Magic the Gathering into his fifties, and even his sixties if he makes it that far. 

Even when he is admitting that he has been the author of his own destruction, he has to turn it into a joke or some performative gesture; he can’t help but try to turn his tragedy into an entertainment commodity. I look at Boogie and I see someone with the potential for a certain kind of greatness or nobility, but he’ll never seize it because he made his bread and built his celebrity on something that was essentially fake and cringe. Whether it was the wave of fraudulent Upworthy positivity that marked the early 2010s and which Boogie rode to such great heights, or whether it’s the general fakeness and hollowness of nerd culture (in which the fake is continually elevated over the real) and which he continues to this day to sell to his audience, Boogie has never touched anything that has weight. Even his alter-ego, Francis, whose exploits and tantrums brought him his early fame, was a sophisticated illusion, not because he was playing a character but because the character itself, was only a slightly exaggerated version of Boogie is himself. Francis is a morbidly obese, video game obsessed, man-child, and what is Boogie but a morbidly obese, video game obsessed, man-child. It was the difference between Boogie and Francis that was in fact the illusion, the fake. 

And in this way, Boogie is a metaphor for our culture writ large. Our problem is that we are living in a tragic age, but we are too cowardly to admit it. Instead, we divert our attention into endless forms of distraction and self-destruction rather than face the reality that life is going to be painful and full of heartbreak and disappointments, and we do this because so few us have the emotional or intellectual resources to do anything else. A diet of TikTok and Marvel has done nothing to prepare us for the realities of suffering and so we have no way of suffering gracefully. So what else could Boogie say except “enjoy what you have while you have it” as he sucks down some hyper-palatable slop? What more can he do than pathetically try to wring one more drop of pleasure from the husk of his life. 

But what is happening to Boogie now is real. And you’d think that if there was anything that a man could take and harness and turn into a spear to puncture this veil of bullshit, it would be watching your life burn down around you. But he just can’t seem to do it. In the days following the release of the documentary, Boogie could be found on Twitter soaking up his (I presume brief) return to the limelight, talking about the improved stats on his most recent uploads, and begging God himself to give him the strength to continue to make a living by talking about fucking GTA and Magic the Gathering. 

It’s all just so small. It’s so insignificant when compared with the scope of his downfall.  

Nietzsche once said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” When Victor Frankl was living through the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, he took strength throw these words and from the why that made his suffering endurable. He later wrote about his experience in Man’s Search for Meaning. But the culture industry leaves few why’s worth believing in. What resources does Boogie have to bring to bear against his situation other than sickly hedonistic bromides like “enjoy what you’ve got when you’ve got it”? The closest he comes is in the moments after his psychedelic experience in which he seems to almost reach an appreciation that he will not ever be grasping his previous success again, and he praises the fact that he burned brightly for a time.  But to me, Boogie has never burned more brightly than he does now, as he is burning himself into nothing, maybe burning himself into some deeper layer of the human experience than most will ever encounter, some new continent to which he has been blessed. It’s just a shame that he can’t seem to see it.