The Long Take: Throwback to TFW NO GF.
Reposting this old review of Alex Lee Moyer's take on alienated men that came out in 202.
There’s a documentary from Alex Lee Moyer that came out about the unpersoning of Alex Jones, which predictably inspired a wide array of opinions. Is it a glorification of the Sandy Hook truther, or is this a slight defence of him and his views? I am reposting a review I wrote on Moyer’s previous effort TFW NO GF, which was released at SXSW 2020 as an online exclusive. Like that film, there’s also a bit of venom made towards the filmmaker because of the subject matter at hand. In TFW NO GF, the documentary takes a look at a specific constituent of young white men, who are otherwise lonely and isolated, relying on the provocations of the Internet and becoming distinctive personalities for a brief period. One of these involves a guy who went under the alias of Kantbot, who rambled about the emergence of German realism to some TV reporter when Donald Trump was elected as President in 2016.
I am reposting a review that I wrote of TFW NO GF for the defunct Rebeller Media. At the time, I presumed, like a lot of critics, that it was going to be an authoritative take on incels. After all, the traits of those subjects overlap. But in an interview with Matt Taibbi, Moyer clarified that it wasn’t, because she hadn’t thought about that phenomenon, even when it had a name. One may claim that she was being ignorant, and this criticism is usually coming from the lucrative cottage industry of digging up so-called right-wing extremism.
TFW NO GF had little distribution and Alex Lee Moyer went off the grid, physically hanging around with the more heterodox subset of the Internet like Glenn Greenwald (and not Thomas Chatterton Williams). Looking back, it is pretty much a curio as it was then. In that same interview with Taibbi, Moyer claimed these men she would count as sincere friends. But Moyer is building a name for herself to a terminally Online audience dabbled in Marxism and traditionalism. It would be important, not to put her aside.
Here it is, as it was originally published:
Many, if not most, internet subcultures raise eyebrows for the simple reason that they are weird. But there isn’t a subculture that inspires more rage and/or disgust than incels, the term used to describe self-loathing, isolated men with a desire to find a sexual partner and an inability to win them over. Often characterized as misogynist and sometimes lumped in with white supremacists, incels score a spotlight whenever a mass shooting is attributed to the yearning for a girlfriend. So, when the documentary TFW No GF, which had been scheduled to play South by Southwest, announced it will premiere on Amazon Prime (which you can watch for free if you are an Amazon user) about this group, we shouldn’t be surprised it was met with bewilderment.
TFW No GF is directed by Alex Lee Moyer, who stands out as the only woman in a sea of bulgy and inert men. A former documentary editor, Moyer follows the lives of five extremely online boys. We are introduced to Sean, a self-described NEET (not educated, employable or training), who we see lifting large weights, living with his mom and spending most of his time occupied on the message board 4chan, posting about feeling alone. The second and third persons, one of them known by the name of Charles, are not dissimilar in appearance; they troll on Twitter and have a collection of firearms. The next is Kyle, who walks alone in his cowboy hat, and goes to clubs. Kyle believes that “meeting up with people isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing.” Probably the most prominent person in TFW No GF is a guy known by the handle of Kantbot, who came to fame because of an esoteric video in 2016 where he rambles that Trump’s eminence will mean the rise of German idealism, which holds the idea that consciousness is the most sure thing we know, while we are unsure of anything in the outside world.
Kantbot is more identifiable by his interests in philosophy compared to the socially awkward Sean, the stoic Kyle and Charles who has his moments of anarchy. Moyer’s lo-fi visual aesthetic, accompanied by Ariel Pink’s post-punk score, complement the bleakness of the film, with vastly desolate areas surrounding them into a spiritual malaise.
4chan and social media are the primary outlets by which these men channel their primitive humor, scoring empathy with anonymous posters. Like most internet documentaries, TFW No GF is sprinkled with jargon and meme lore such as “blackpilled,” which means that users drown in nihilism and despair and their emotions are represented by a hand-drawn mascot called the “wojak.” It draws from hysterical media coverage, like the uproar surrounding the film Joker, which some in the press believed was a manifesto for incels. The men see this and dismiss it, suggesting real-life examples of violence happen because the perpetrators chose to go beyond playing an angsty character.
The coverage surrounding incels often focused on male entitlement. Yet the larger and revealing context is that they admit this is all a pose and a theatrical reaction to the harsh, atomized world to which they succumbed. It is a mostly male sphere, where millennials are having less sex, thanks largely to the maximal sexual choice offered by dating apps and pornography and financial uncertainties that trap them in their parents’ houses as they enter adulthood. These factors are hinted at in TFW No GF, rather than being explored thoroughly — a missed opportunity.
Moyer never really finds narrative momentum for the film. The beginning is planted with seeds of internet lingo, but mostly focuses on the subjects trying to find something to do to withstand their boredom. Charles, for instance, plays with his guns with a friend in a vast winter to pass the time. It’s a provocative moment, if only because the worst of these alienated men all happen to be mass shooters. It foreshadows the second half of the film, where Moyer meets with them again years later and has them confront their past selves. Kantbot is getting better with pursuing women, Kyle realizes his online crusade against political correctness was awfully banal, while Sean improves himself by being exposed to philosophy and literature through following Kantbot and regularly going to the gym.
If these are the choices they make, the question lingers to what led them to be more productive. The answer may lie in the point that much of our expression of what it means to be isolated on social media can become performative and insincere — that none of it actually matters. These people happen to be us, where life is an eternal struggle until there is a light in the tunnel. That’s probably why TFW No GF serves more as a hangout movie for Moyer and her interviewees, rather than a direct diagnosis of the incel phenomenon. While it’s too simplistic to be insightful, it’s morbid enough to be its own curiosity of internet culture. When you are extremely online, everyone’s a doomer.