Tik Tok

 Someone who has caught my attention on Tik Tok and never let it go is Baron Ryan, who goes by the username “americanbaron”. A one-man show, Baron plays all of the parts in his skits. 

 He has amassed over two million followers on the app by making clever short films with near-professional quality. His videos are typically concerned with philosophy, love, paradoxes and the millennial experience. 

One Tik Tok that I keep coming back to is called “hotel could-have-been”. It is surprisingly complex given the means at Baron’s disposal to upload these videos. One of my favorite lines of his comes from this video when he says, “that’s a good idea. More people should write love letters to themselves.” This line only gets better the more you think about it in the context of the entire video. It is sad, introspective and even a little bit funny, but it is plagued by the same issue that many of his videos suffer from, which is a rushed, almost cliche ending. 

While the temporal limitations of americanbaron’s Tik Toks do, in many ways, hinder the impact of his videos objectively, I find that they make his content more charming altogether. There is something about those endings that come seemingly out of nowhere that make me want to watch them over and over again, and it makes me wonder what he could do if he was given a deal with a major studio to make his own feature-length film.