“Our best hope, our single prayer for this film is that it would strike the moral conscience and people would be upset that there are men living this way, and that we view them sympathetically, or even that they have a better understand- ing of culture than you do....I hope people are struck dead culturally because of this movie. That’s its best potentiality.”
-Cody Wilson,
Co-producer, also founder of Defense Distributed
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century”
-Hanna Arendt
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[Discussed: Incels, edgelords, editing, Wojak, alienation, The Decline of Western Civilization, funding.]
Alex Lee Moyer’s directorial debut, TFW NO GF, premiered at a SXSW music and film festival that didn’t happen. Instead, a consolation prize was offered: The documentary was subsumed (temporarily) by Internet shopping monolith Amazon, offered as a free streaming feature on Prime, and widely pirated--perhaps appropriate given the film’s subject matter. TFW, often casually (and incorrectly) referred to as the ‘incel documentary,’ is an intimate portrait of five alienated young men in the 4chan era, filmed from 2017 to 2019. Its official release takes place this month.
Critics scrambled to assemble the appropriate opinions following the pre-release of the movie. Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson critiqued Moyer’s ‘deeply immersed’ perspective, and web writer Eric Langberg called the film, ‘one of the most irresponsible docs I’ve ever seen.’ Both attacked Moyer’s friendship with her subjects and her refusal to weigh in on their violent or misogynist jokes. The filmmaker’s association with producer Cody Wilson--named one of the ‘most dangerous men on the Internet’ a couple of times by Wired Magazine--served as further evidence of her ambiguous, if not malicious, intentions.
What these kneejerk critiques refused to see was an empathetic look at a timeless condition set against a uniquely modern backdrop—a phenomenon widely hinted at, vilified, and dismissed by media, but rarely understood.
The condition that Moyer portrays in TFW has had, at its most extreme, truly awful real world manifestations, which could explain some critics’ hesitation to accept the documentary on its own terms. Canadian Alex Minassian and Californian Elliot Rodger, who both embraced the term ‘incel,’ killed innocent civilians and targeted women in particular as part of what they believed to be an ‘incel uprising.’ But the human story told here is significantly less horrific and more relatable. It’s an intimate portrayal of alienated young men in a rapidly shifting tech landscape—a look that, without Moyer’s ‘deep immersion,’ could only have regurgitated mainstream media narratives, revealing nothing.
Four of the five subjects in her film--Charels, Riddy, Kyle, and Sean--operate relatively anonymously in the margins of both the vast Internet culture and the real world. They are ‘sadposters’ and ‘shitposters’—pathetic, smart, lonely, self-deprecating, bitter, funny, and disturbed. They exorcise their demons with jokes about suicide, misogyny, misanthropy, and isolation. But these are not the representatives of any identity group or clearly defined movement. They are, like many of us, seeking connection in a world that feels increasingly designed to alienate.
The film’s fifth subject, Kantbot, focuses his posting content elsewhere. He has a passion for aphorisms and philosophical musings, and he sees a lot creative potential in his virtual peers. As the arc of the film takes shape, Kantbot makes the case for elevating the posting medium creatively and philosophically, from a transgressive escape route to something more substantive.
Observing something and attempting to understand it is an act of faith. There are risks involved. The subject may change under observation, or, perhaps more dangerous, the subject matter may alter its observer. We risk seeing parts of ourselves in the film’s subjects and their story, stirring uncomfortable feelings of empathy, and blurring the moral lines that typically delineate these characters’ automatic dismissal.
But effective art, and documentary in particular, is best when it demands these risks of its audience, when it asks rather than telling. There is no ‘whole’ story. We should aim to appreciate, and make sense of, these uncomfortable fragments of truth wherever we can find them.
I spoke to Moyer over the phone in September 2020.
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Do you live in LA, or are you just there temporarily?
I’m here most of the time. Since the movie came out and I didn’t really have to be here I’m splitting my time between here and Las Vegas—because my family lives there—and Austin, Texas. I’ve just been bouncing around basically. But I have a little studio apartment here. This is my headquarters, at least for now.
The release date for the movie fell during a really weird time period. How have things been?
It’s been calm lately. I’m in the lull period before the movie comes out formally. It did its thing, and everybody pirated it, which was kind of unavoidable because of the whole Amazon deal. There’s just no way they were gonna stop that. So everybody’s sort of seen it, but it hasn’t actually come out. It’s in an awkward phase, but it’s formally dropping at the beginning of October.
So you figured out distribution stuff? I’m not really sure how that process works really.
Yeah. There were a few different factors that were obstacles for getting the film out. The first one was obviously coronavirus itself, and the way it brought everything to a grinding halt. The other thing that happened was, the model of the virtual festival is obviously just something they [SXSW] decided to start doing. They didn’t know how it would impact the way distributors saw movies and their investments, and protecting their investments. If the movie has been pirated online and everyone has seen it already, why would the distributor invest in a film? Amazon deflowered the movie, and then sort of cast it aside right after the SXSW thing.
But also, the sort of unspoken dilemma is that the film basically got blacklisted just because it was about edgelords on the internet. It didn’t really fit the guide- lines of what’s safe for distributors to add to their roster right now. I was getting a lot of mainstream buzz, and it got too hot to handle after all of the protest stuff started happening. When it comes to identity politics, these are the people that you are not really allowed to talk about.
Some of the mainstream buzz was kind of negative, right? Like the Rolling Stone piece?
Yeah, lots of negative stuff out of the gate. I mean, this is how spin works, right? I always expected that. The movie’s gonna come out, and people are gonna say, ‘You didn’t have an expert on your movie that said these people are bad people, and that they’re- racist. Or that they’re dangerous. You need to have someone explicitly saying that in the movie, and if you don’t, then nobody knows that, and therefore, you’re irresponsible.’ But that’s totally stupid. Everybody has that cultural context, because we’re living in the soup of it every single day. I don’t need to tell you about shooters, or that there are racist people on 4chan. I’m just assuming that everybody already knows that. Why would I put that in the movie? It’s part of the DNA of the movie. I don’t need to describe something to you in words if you’re looking at it, you know? It doesn’t make any sense, to me anyway.
Yeah. Maybe it would have felt a little redundant, or infantilizing, to spell that out for the audience?
People said that I didn’t interject enough, and I think that was over-prouounced. Because at the same time that people were saying, ‘Oh, she didn’t point out that this is problematic,’ people were obviously saying that the movie is problematic. Why would I need to tell you that if you already think it?
Do you think that’s a way of parsing out whose side you’re on? Is that what they’re actually trying to figure out?
Yeah. I mean, there’s no objectivity at all anymore. I’m not at all interested in telling people how to feel in such a heavy-handed way. If you actually pay attention to the film, and you don’t just try to find things you don’t like about it, or what’s obviously missing from it that you’d find in other films, you can see how I feel. You can see how I feel if you just shut the fuck up and watch the movie. I’m all over the movie.
But also, these are super real people. They’re not celebrities. They’re young people, and they’re disadvantaged people. I didn’t think that it would become me to pass judgement on people who already have enough going against them. Why would I wanna kick people when they’re down?