Ghyslain Raza unwittingly became the first viral meme on the planet in 2003. The video of him, a teenager, clumsily wielding a stick like a lightsaber by Star Wars has been viewed over a billion times. Twenty years later, the one we know as the Star Wars Kid returns in a documentary on this humiliating and difficult episode in his life. He hopes his story will help raise awareness of cyberbullying, especially younger generations who are more addicted to their phones and social media than ever before.
“I wasn’t even a big fan of Star Wars […] It was a video that was made for slapstick humor if you will, that was for myself, not to be broadcast or shown to anyone else. It was really just to let go of my madness, ”says Ghyslain Raza in the documentary “In the shadow of the Star Wars Kid”, broadcast next week on Télé Québec.
On screen, he takes us back to the fall of 2002, with 14-year-old Ghyslain filming himself in a room at his high school, the Saint-Joseph seminary in Trois-Rivières, imitating a Jedi. He was training, he said, to help a comrade on a movie parody project. He never would have thought that ill-intentioned students would come across his recording and broadcast it on the Internet without his knowledge. He expected even less that the video would be shared around the world and that people would make endless parodies of it.
In a few weeks, the Star Wars Kid video thus became the first meme in the history of virality, even before the appearance of social networks. And Ghyslain Raza became the first known victim of cyberbullying on a global scale.
“Ghyslain was patient zero in 2003. He was embarked despite himself in a cultural phenomenon that overtook him,” observes the director of the documentary, Mathieu Fournier, in an interview. “Several people found it funny and shared it without thinking or understanding at the time what it implied,” he adds.
Not only did Ghyslain Raza have to put up with the taunts and insults of his classmates at school, but the humiliation continued when he got home, since his story was all over the internet where hateful comments multiplied in all languages. Not to mention that the media have started to get involved, from local media to the New York Times or the BBC, and relayed his story again and again.
“We gave my name, my school, where I lived, the journalists went to the field in front of our house, he recalls. A juvenile delinquent, we do not have the right to give his name, his image. If I had committed a crime, I would probably have been better protected,” he says in the film.
Ghyslain Raza’s family had to hire a team of lawyers – who are notably given the floor in the documentary – to manage the “incessant” media requests and to initiate legal proceedings against the parents of the teenagers who allegedly broadcast the video.
“For a long time it was difficult to accept that these two minutes came to define who I am. This character was created outside of me on the Web, this digital identity took over who I really am, ”confides the Trifluvien now in his thirties, in an interview with Le Devoir.
Out of the shadows
If he agreed to come out of the shadows today – he who has been far, very far, from the spotlight for twenty years – it is because he felt “ready” to return to the subject. “Time has done its work. For me, things have improved,” says the man who is pursuing a doctorate in law at Queen’s University in Ontario.
He also felt challenged by director Mathieu Fournier’s proposal to make a documentary that would not dwell “tearfully” on his story but rather start from it to initiate a reflection on the issues of cyberbullying and of cyberbullying. Several pop culture, new technology and media experts intervene throughout the film to analyze the phenomenon. Ghyslain Raza also goes to meet secondary 3 students at his old school, to explore the subject with them.
“It is certain that the ultimate wish through this documentary is to contribute to awareness. […] There is a desire to make a documentary that has social utility,” he insists.
Because although he doubts that a young person can today experience a situation of the same magnitude as him, he is convinced that this online violence is much more frequent than during his adolescence and that it has equally important consequences.
“Today there is more of this effect of the drop of water which is lost in the ocean. Situations of cyberharassment, cyberbullying, there are probably more of them and they are more insidious because they do not tend to stand out, they pass more under societal radars, ”he believes.
“I hope that with this documentary, we will never again be able to watch the Star Wars Kid video with the same eyes as before,” adds director Mathieu Fournier.
“In the shadow of the Star Wars Kid”, Wednesday, March 30 at 8 p.m. on Télé-Québec. The documentary will be available from March 31 on the ONF website. that.