Never Allowing Herself To Settle, Memes, and Monsters — Juliana Paracencio

Memes

Memes are the new Print. And I'm very serious.

I'm obsessed with pop culture, but memes specifically are one of the most underrated creative formats in existence. People dismiss them as internet noise. I look at them and see the purest form of communication there is. A tiny space. One image, one or two lines. You need to be direct to the point because there's simply no room for anything else. But that's all you need to tell a good idea. The constraint isn't a limitation. It's the whole game.

The best memes aren't trying to be funny. They're trying to be accurate. They come from observation, from someone noticing something true about daily life and having the nerve to say it in public. That's an insight. That's what we spend weeks trying to find in advertising, and some anonymous person nailed it before breakfast. If the idea I'm working on can't survive being reduced to a meme, I start to wonder if it's actually as strong as I think it is.

Life is too short to stay in the same place

Moving to different places was the way I found to keep creative. The logic is simple: when I notice I'm getting too comfortable, it's time to leave. I've lived in five countries. Brazil, Germany, the Middle East, Spain, and the UK. Comfort, for me, is a warning sign. When everything starts feeling familiar, something in the work goes flat. Moving resets that. You notice what locals have stopped noticing. You find the thing hiding in plain sight.

London is a special case. I've been here longer than anywhere else and I still haven't run out of new things to bump into. Every agency here has been a completely different experience from the last. The city keeps reinventing itself before I have time to get comfortable with it. And for someone whose creative strategy is essentially "leave before you get bored" — that's saying something.

Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017)

I'm a big fan of comedy. Ricky Gervais' The Office, Larry David, Seinfeld. Old shows, I know, but still gold. Every episode is a great observation about life. Just watching the world carefully and reporting back with precision. HBO's Succession is a different beast, but the same principle; writing so precise and layered that every scene is doing three things at once. It's just craft.

Jordan Peele comes from that same world. And then he made Get Out. A horror film that is also a comedy, a political essay, and a piece of precise social observation, all at once, without any of those things getting in the way of the others. The first time I watched it, what floored me wasn't the comedy/horror bit. It was the script. I don't think I've ever seen anything written so tightly, surprising me from the first scene to the last. Peele committed to the craft completely, and because of that, the idea was free to be as big as it needed to be.