Ebele Wybenga Discusses Cinema and Visual Culture Intersection, with a Focus on Lifehack Repair Videos

Ebele Wybenga about what strikes him at the intersection of cinema and visual culture.

A criminal decision was made once in my house: all the window sills are made of MDF. Medium density fiber board which consists of wood pulp with a lamellar coating that is inferior to real wood in all respects. Moisture is MDF’s biggest enemy and that is exactly what window sills have to endure when the window is open due to a rain shower.

My windows, once painted a thin creamy white, showed a poor appearance, a landscape marked by swollen spots where drops had once landed, full of rings of fibrous brown . Those cramped windowsills weighed me down every day. The carpenter who had offered to replace it with mahogany never spoke again.

My salvation came in the form of a YouTube video posted by ‘Painting Company Edens’. I watched as a hand with a triangular scraper mercilessly attacked the MDF growths on a window that looked just as ugly as I did. He continued to scrape until the surface was smooth again, he reduced everything, sanded with sandpaper in three grades from fineness to an unrecognizable smoothness, he covered everything with a special primer the -anti-absorption, sand and varnished, sand and varnished. I didn’t know this was possible with MDF and otherwise I wouldn’t have wanted to do it myself. The video lasted less than a minute, but it gave me all the information and inspiration to tackle my own windows.

This video introduced me to the world of lifehack repair videos. As soon as you start watching them, whether it’s on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, you’ll see more and more. It is a genre with its own stars, revenue models and hundreds of millions of views. A man in his sixties from Florida has been so successful with his ‘DIY home repair’ videos on TikTok that he is being endorsed by WD40, the famous sprayer for squeaky hinges and other strong inconveniences.

Clever things with screws, painter’s tape and wooden ties now dominate my social life. A prime example is holding a screw or nail in place between the teeth of an old comb. Or that tutorial that shows how to improve the hinges on kitchen cabinets.

Videos with repair hacks give a feeling of satisfaction in a few seconds, because things are suddenly straight, fit perfectly, come loose or become clean without a streak. They usually only last a few seconds, all in fast forward and big jumps. This is an online phenomenon and I am very grateful for it.