Pulse
Cam, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, 2018.
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel, directed by Joe Berlinger, 2021.
Fake Famous, directed by Nick Bilton, 2021.
Fake Friends, directed by Shannon Strucci, 2017
The Host, directed by Rob Savage, 2020.
Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, produced by Victoria Gamburg, 2017.
OnlyFans: $elling $exy, executive produced by Steven Baker, 2021.
Pulse, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001.
Unfriended, directed by Levan Gabriadze, 2015.
Like just about everyone else, I am trying to manage my relationship to the Internet. I'm pretty sure it is slowly killing me, so I'm trying to negotiate the speed of that. It's not about addiction, it's not about getting caught up in conspiracy theories and the sudden urge to put on my best fur stole and storm The Capitol, it's the usual stuff. The Internet makes me feel bad.
I don't know that it is exactly like in Pulse, where after you log on for the first time you will yourself into a smoky smudge on the wall, or simply allow yourself to fall from a great height, but it is something similar. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film remains perhaps the definitive statement about what the internet is and what it does to us, and watching it during a plague year does add a certain intensity. We are all spending longer hours online, forced out of the world and into our homes, staring through this device of distortion for connection and company and often finding ourselves twisted and more isolated as a result.
In Pulse, being on the internet has led a lot of people not to want to be in the world anymore. The “Uranus” internet service provider dials itself up compulsively and leads its users to images of the most disturbing and haunting imagery I've maybe ever seen in film. It's not like when a character comes across some terrible video in a film now, that is obviously supposed to be torture or the violation of a child, something too gruesome to actually show to the audience but they want to convey that it's really really bad, so they just show some tough male character contorting himself in horror and confusion, screaming about how a just god would not allow things to happen, like whatever happened in one of those episodes of True Detective. Instead it is just abjection and misery, people sitting in the dark, staring through the screen into your life, a hideous reflection of your own alienation and boredom. The feeling of being trapped, staring into a device that is slowly leeching everything good out of you, until you too want to turn into smoke.
Uranus asks you when you sign up, “Would you like to meet a ghost?” (For the love of all that is holy, please press no if your computer asks you this!) but the real ghosts are all of us. The dead are as lonely as the living, and trying to connect only serves to drive everyone further apart. Rooms in the film's world once loud with voices or crowded with bodies, from universities to libraries, become emptier and emptier.
So I am trying to manage my relationship to the internet, to feel less like I want to turn myself into a smudge on the wall, and this is something that many people are doing. They're taking social media detoxes, they're going on dopamine fasts, they're downloading apps to track the hours spent online and block them from access when necessary. Internet management is just another discipline we must develop, like the planks the New York Times keeps telling us to do to maintain our decaying bodies through another month of sedentary lockdowns.
Since the invention of the Internet, it's mostly been portrayed in films as the scene of horror and death. Other than maybe the very short time we thought the Internet would be a tool of liberation — “Hack the planet!” and all that — we've imagined it as a portal through which demons, murderers, and ghosts emerge. Which is the typical trajectory. The invention of radio and the telegraph led to seances and other attempts to cross the veil. Every time a new technology is invented our first thought is, how can I use this to get off? Our second: how can we use this to talk to the dead?
Pulse, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001.
But often the horror of technology is just in the way it allows people to speed up and expand the reach of their terribleness. The reason why Unfriended is scary isn't because of the gory death scenes. It's because your teenage years are supposed to be about building up a repertoire of humiliations. You are meant to fling yourself about awkwardly and make tragic mistakes and build up a decade of regrets to see you through the rest of your boring fucking life. And it used to be the witnesses to these scenes were equally compromised, and there would be some jokes that would follow you around, stories told by your family at holidays for ritualistic mortification, but it was something you could eventually walk away from. Now videos of our darkest moments can stay in rotation forever, getting us kicked out of college years later, fired from our jobs, or just mocked into eternity.
So when Laura kills herself after a video of a fucked-up moment circulates, her ghost decides, nah, actually, fuck you, and she uses the tools of that dissemination, all of the phones and computers, to torture and murder those who recorded and released the footage. It's such a satisfying little revenge flick, with each new creative murder, I was thinking, “Yes, Laura, do whatever you need to do.” It's only unfortunate that when it came time to make a sequel, they changed the story to one of “the dark web,” where you can pay to watch someone get tortured and murdered, which is such an old, clichéd fear of the internet that there have been multiple episodes of CBS shows that your dad has watched based on this very idea.
You could do a whole franchise of revenge — from girls who killed themselves after revenge porn was posted or videos of rapes and assaults, there is a never ending source of dead girls needing vengeance. Before watching Unfriended, I had just watched episode four of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel, when an online mob of “crime solvers” descends on a man as the “obvious” murderer in a cold case because he plays death metal and wears grotesque stage makeup. He was like, “Guys, I was in Mexico? Where I live? When the murder was committed?” and no one cared. He was harassed daily until he nearly killed himself. The Internet was supposed to promise us community and acceptance — we could be our weirdest selves and we would find weirdos just like us. Instead we have a lot of suburban middle class bores who love to play hall monitor and chase anyone who deviates even slightly from their mundane expectations to their suicides.
Part of my trying to manage my relationship with the internet is that I will watch just about any garbage documentary on any garbage streaming service if it promises to explain the “dark side” of internet culture to me. And not just the true crime ones, like Netflix's Click for Murder, where our host's eyes gleam as he talks about young women who were “luuuuuuuuuuured” over social media to their bloody deaths. I also mean documentaries about how social media is bad for your health. (Speaking of dead girls who need revenge, or at least revenge horror films, I have seen hours of documentaries about teen girls who killed themselves supposedly from the pressures put on their physical selves by FaceTuned Instagram influencers.)
YouTube is manufacturing Nazis, a UK parenting forum called Mumsnet is radicalizing women into hardline TERFs, Reddit is (supposedly) creating an army of monstrous incels, Twitter is just incredibly dumb, it is where higher brain function goes to contemplate whether this celebrity relationship is a good relationship or a problematic relationship based on metrics like age gaps and the perceived creepiness of the male, but it is Instagram and OnlyFans that so many of these dumb documentaries are obsessed with. Someone is creating a false version of themselves and commodifying their lives to sell you products and posting photos of sourdough toast? Call the fucking police.
Unfriended, directed by Levan Gabriadze, 2015.
HBOMax decided to do a little experiment with Fake Famous and see if they could create an influencer from scratch, and it is very boo-hoo, these people with their plastic surgery and their free vacations to Bali and their constructed public selves don't understand the true meaning of life, which is to get paid by HBO to host a documentary and be slightly pudgy and, you know, “family” or what have you. They pluck three aspiring content creators and show them, and us, the tricks and lies that make the life of an influencer possible. Guess what, people buy followers and rent sets that make it look like they're on a private jet and airbrush the fuck out of their faces. Two of the new influencers balk at the process. One realizes that increased attention means increased negative attention from random people probably sick of being told how amazing other people's lives are and he bails. Another wants to be famous for being his authentic self, he is sure he is just on the edge of global domination. I had never heard of him. And then the third does really well, she gets a lot of free stuff in the mail and goes viral for a video where she tries out a bidet that someone sent her. The host can't stop talking about how fake all of this is, as if he doesn't have a staff of editors and makeup artists and writers around to make him seem smart and passably attractive.
For all of its scolding, it doesn't get at the horror of being a public person trying to get attention for your “content.” In the ABC documentary OnlyFans: $elling $exy, a man refers to the persona he created by taking mostly pictures of himself as he tries to get his personal training business off the ground as “a caricature version of a character based on me” and there are just layers of pathos in that. He has to come up with a forever refreshing supply of outfits, poses, activities, and backgrounds with which to tantalize his audience, and the whole thing seems exhausting. But they always show people who are doing really well in these things. They never show anyone who took their tits out online and no one would pay to see them.
“My competition is myself,” explains another woman in the documentary, who escalated things from topless photos to sex scenes with her boyfriend to getting breast implants in an attempt to keep viewership and income forever rising. The horror of this statement is realized in the film Cam, where a camgirl one day finds her account hacked, being run by an inexplicable doppelganger. Alice, who uses the name Lola when she cams, runs a kind of quirkydark account, flashing her tits but also faking her suicide. She's upper tier but not top 50, and she keeps escalating the stakes of her shows. But every time she goes offline to sleep at night, her rank slips. Every interaction becomes a possibility for monetization; covered in fake blood after pretending to slit her throat on camera, she shares her bath virtually with the highest bidder.
Cam makes camming look like a series of glitter fantasylands: scrolling through the feeds finds naked women covered in blue paint reading a book out loud, girls in a pillow fight, girls just lounging around in wonderful lace and leather. It's a lively world of variety and play, but in the top ten it's all just skinny girls in lingerie, cooing to their anonymous male followers that they love them. When the proximally real Lola One is replaced by the mysterious, identical Lola Double, her show flattens out. No more nights devoted to the Seven Deadly Sins with elaborate sets, no more bizarre theatrics, just splashing around in a kiddie pool in a bikini saying things like “I just need to get fucked, you know?” And to Alice's horror, Lola Double is much more successful.
It's all the flattened same in the upper echelons of online content. They're holding their phones at the same angle for the perfect selfie, they're staging the same scenes of wealth and excess, they're all going to Bali. And people fucking love it. Everything interesting just gets worn down as you chase the followers, and the viewers prefer the fake and the flat, like Nigel the Gannet bird who fell in love with a concrete decoy, and died curled up next to it, preferring its stony perfection to the noise and mess of its own kind.
Nigel's story is told as part of Fake Friends, a two hour YouTube video by Shannon Strucci, an investigation into the parasocial relationships that prop up the influencers, the Twitch streamers, the YouTubers. It's a relationship that relies on heavy amounts of manipulation, both to make your life or self look glamorous or enviable enough to inspire emulation, but also to make it seem like you actually care about your audience in the hopes they will keep subscribing, keep buying your product, keep smashing that like button. In Cam, Alice has to spend a lot of time doing emotional maintenance for her regulars, cooing to them and pretending to listen to them. And there's something deeply manipulative and fucked up about that interaction, as if the concrete bird was actively emitting the sounds and smells to keep Nigel the Gannet away from real birds who might actually reciprocate his affection. But Cam pulls back from exploring that side of it and makes all the men who watch Lola dangerous and violent creeps, meaning that it doesn't matter she lies to them, uses them, exploits them in some ways, because they're all terrible anyway.
Strucci makes it clear it's much more complicated than that, that this relationship between creator and audience, without the intermediary of an industry, creates shifting and sometimes dangerous interactions between the two. And while there is genuine feeling and gratitude on the most part by creators, there is also flagrant misuse on both sides. The assumption is always that it's the follower who is delusional to feel things for the micro-celebrity they're financially supporting, but that micro-celebrity is telling people they love them, memorizing details of their big spenders, and presenting a very processed version of their lives. That artificiality can create the parasocial relationship but also hostility. In Cam, there are abusive viewers, people (men, it's assumed), who urge the cam girl — sitting there, pretty and sweet — to kill herself, to use a knife as a dildo, and so on. And when Lola Double takes over, Alice, watching the stream, starts demanding that her simulated twin hurt herself, first with spanking and then more serious flogs. She, too, wants to see herself bleed. She wants to strip away the shiny facade and get to the gore beneath.
In the “Take Me Private” episode of Hot Girls Wanted, a cam girl meets her long-term supporter in the flesh for the first time, a man to whom she has cooed that she loves him, a man who helped pay for her breast implants and rent, a man who basically has not dated other women in a long time because he is tied up emotionally with her. “I'm basically a therapist,” the cam girl explains, but her supporter seems to have withered in her care. When they meet, his needs, no longer kept at a distance through a screen, overwhelm her and she breaks down.
Fake Famous, directed by Nick Bilton, 2021.
Cam, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, 2018.
But even then, I kept wondering how this story of her manipulation of a supporter is being manipulated by the documentarian to prove a point. The series is produced by a woman who refers to sex work as “trafficking,” and most of the other episodes are about how sex workers are all miserable parasites hurting feminism or whatever. It's all a distortion, all the way down, and we can't help but be transfixed by it.
The real horror of the internet isn't that it makes the worst people famous — the worst people of the world have always found a way to hold our attention — or that it has revolutionized paid work so much none of us have it anymore. It's that this tool of connection is mostly used for isolation. Your mother watches a couple YouTube videos and all of a sudden she has cut you off as an oppressive presence because you don't think the world is run by a bunch of Satanic pedophiles — or at least not like that. Every time you match with a promising prospect on Tinder there's a 90% chance you'll be catfished, ghosted, or luuuuuuuured into polyamory.
The isolation of these virtual spaces — people gathered together but physically and emotionally far apart — is repeated in The Host with a group of friends who accidentally summon a demon via a Zoom call. They all watch in horror as one by one they are picked off. No one thinks to smash that “Leave the Meeting” button and get the fuck out. Made as an experiment in the early days of the pandemic, back when everyone was still obeying lockdown orders, it's actually a really good depiction of what it's like to live in this stupid time. We all collectively and unintentionally summoned this darkness, but we can only watch as our friends and partners and family members and strangers and neighbors struggle to survive through depression, illness, poverty, eviction, and unemployment as individuals. Who needs demons to terrorize us when we have society to do it for us?
The Host, directed by Rob Savage, 2020.
