Dr. Disrespect was never good

Note: For all intents and purposes, Dr. Disrespect, is referred to in the past tense, as I consider the character to be dead, considering recent events.

If you don’t know who Dr Disrespect was, there’s just two things you need to know:

1. He is a streamer who plays competitive video games and gets mad at them;
2. In real life, he goes by Guy Beahm, but on stream, he dresses up as an over-the-top ’80s-inspired protagonist as a bit.

The glaring omission has been extensively covered by virtually every gaming outlet, and while I’d happily get in line to add fuel to the shit show that is sexting a seventeen year old, I want to ask a different question:

Why did anyone even like him in the first place?

Technically, this is an easy question to answer, as it is obviously because of the aforementioned “bit” (which is made clear by his tropey mullet, mustache, and glasses from John Carpenter’s They Live). And yet, that only makes sense if every satisfied consumer of Dr Disrespect was not critically considering the character.

The entire bit from the get-go was a terrible idea. A 42-year-old man (34 when he started streaming on Twitch) could do all the childish, inappropriate things that other streamers were and still are (appropriately) mocked for, but under the guise of “satire,” most of which is only established by the aesthetic.

The issue here is twofold. Dr Disrespect lived outside of the boundaries of a social norm that must be able to be reinforced , i.e., It is not okay to physically and verbally lash out when you die in a video game. In contrast, as uncomfortable as a “character” and person like Ninja (a streamer of relatively similar fame) is to watch, he is at least unabashedly himself, blue hair and all. When he gets “too mad” at a video game, he is shamed by his viewers, and the social norm of not uncontrollably raging is reinforced. Tyler Blevins, the person behind the character, was too mad. Ninja is just his username.

But it is also fun to watch people get angry. It’s not an indulgence that everyone can revel in, yet if watching someone lose their shit was cilantro, I’m on the side of it being a delicacy. There are those who think it tastes like soap, appalled by the sheer amount of rage compilations on YouTube, but to me, it is fun. Watching someone get angry over something meaningless reminds me that I am not angry; I am sitting on my couch, on the “moral” (for lack of a better word) high ground, proud that I’m in a better state than they were in that moment. It’s an ugly feeling—a part of my consciousness that I like to pretend is not me, or, if it must be there, it is not my fault. I am the one who’s calm, I tell myself, knowing full well that I have also raged in my worst moments, though shamefully, and that feeling of disgust at myself is the distinction. And yet I also know that I broke the left side of a keyboard with my fist once, which left me sulking and disgraced inside a Best Buy. And I wasn’t even streaming.

Due diligence took me to the first result under the search term, “rage compilation dr disrespect.” In one clip, after being killed by another player, he walks off camera, returns, then asks incredulously, “Shotgun? It legitimately didn’t even fire. I pressed it. Did I have ammo? Did I have ammo? Can you guys tell me if I had ammo? Was my shotgun reloaded? Was there a bullet in there?” Side-splitting, I know.

In another clip (linked here because it must be seen), after dying, he yells, “Are you fucking kidding me?” then angrily slams his desk twice and peaks his mic, screaming, chiding the developers. “No hit reg! Nothing?” he shouts, peaking the mic again.

Finally, most tellingly, Dr. Disrespect reacts to a clip of himself, then sinks onto the ground out of frame, positioning himself below the clip version of himself raging. You can see just his hands peeking above the bottom of the frame in a position that can only be read as asking for mercy, as he repeatedly says, “Take it easy.” It’s as if he is the victim of his former self. It’s the only way the actor behind the character, Beahm, can make the moments in which the streamer goes off-the-cuff inappropriately seem intentional or lighthearted,  trying to convince us that we are laughing with him, not at him; that the level of rage displayed is merely a performance; that Dr Disrespect has new keyboards on standby, so he doesn’t need to go to a Best Buy to get another one.

Ironically, there is space for a goofy parody of a Call of Duty bro screaming at his monitor and breaking his keyboard when he dies. Combined with the rage displayed by the worshippers of Gamergate 2, it could be an incisive commentary on the faulty narrative of video game culture as an all-encompassing interest that provides “gamers” with a tangible identity and a false confidence in the literacy of play and design without ever having to critically engage with their singularly obsessive consumption.

In a shallower sense, though lacking the bite of this alternative, it would still have worked and potentially been more interesting (and less worth criticizing) if he hadn’t been actually mad. Imagine the surreality and bizarre tone of a movie scene wherein we learn that the actor is actually as angry as his character is, and about the same thing that his character is angry at. If you want to play a character, your actions and words should be considered in terms of the intended portrayal, but in his performance, he was so evidently actually mad. At a video game. Because he died. But he swears it was just the character.

The rage itself was just the person. Guy Beahm was actually mad. Dr Disrespect was just his username, but still, he was the entertainment. The anger, the frustration, the complaining, the desk-slamming, the yelling, the masculine posturing, the hating every game he played (calling into question the degree to which a fictional character should or should not be interacting with the real world), and the morally dubious behavior for which he has been appropriately and extensively maligned for: All of this was Beahm.