The documentary is set in a idyllic Serbian village which used to have seven women for every man, but now has no women whatsoever. Three brothers in the village and their lived experiences with inceldom are chronicled.
What's clear is that their struggles are typical for many men of this era, suffering from the displacement and deracination wrought by late stage capitalism, in which sexual immiseration is only the most visible form of social alienation.
**Spoilers below**
The fact that sexual relationships in an environment of social chaos only further exacerbates one's social alienation, a theme that's commonly seen on this forum (with countless anecdotes about sexual relationships ending friendships between men and causing friction between siblings), is seen in the documentary and makes for perhaps the most brutal scene:
At the end of the documentary, the bachelor on the porch above comments: "What a fucked up life. There is nothing here. We must find work. We need to leave here." Work and thing of course, are just euphemisms for women, and you can see how capitalism controls men through the combination of effectively restricting sexuality and actively advertising it out in the open.
Featured in a "traditional" festival in the documentary, where 50 Albanian women were meant to meet eager Serbian men (but couldn't make it), was a lesbian performance between two half-naked girls, which I think illustrates this concept well.
What's clear is that their struggles are typical for many men of this era, suffering from the displacement and deracination wrought by late stage capitalism, in which sexual immiseration is only the most visible form of social alienation.
**Spoilers below**
First off, what strikes the viewer is the coping mechanisms of the brothers. Their living space is littered with cut-outs of female models from Playboy magazines -- plastered on the walls of every room, on the bathroom mirror, and even on the car! It reminds one of anime waifucoping and pornography addiction; and, indeed, they all source from the same origin of inceldom.
As the men meditate on their inceldom, a common saying emerges: "there is no life without a woman." A woman is essential for motivating one to work harder and strive, says one of the brothers with a despondent visage, and an elderly neighbor reflects on how a woman is critically important for helping you take care of the household when you're older.
All the women who used to live in the village have since moved out to the city, the elderly man says; and in this regard, it is relevant how one of the brothers observes that Serbian women are very materialistic and avaricious, doubtlessly a consequence of their acculturation to the bourgeois-cosmopolitan values of the city -- women being drawn like flies to the flames of power, and thus having become ubiquitously urbanized (with all its negative implications) as Serbia went from a predominantly rural society to an urban one.
Paved over and pillaged by the inevitable forward march of capitalism, nihilism and the destruction of tradition is the dominant trend among the men in the documentary. One of the brothers insists that he wants to find a Serbian Orthodox woman to marry, so as to continue his ancestral legacy, but it quickly becomes apparent that they are hard to come by. Instead, finding a conservative woman to marry from nearby Islamic Albania is the easiest option, and even the desirable one, relative to the difficult search for liberal Serbian women, a pursuit where the juice is simply not worth the squeeze.
Despite the fact that Serbia and Albania are historical adversaries, both in terms of religion and nationality, this all becomes irrelevant in the context (or rather, the contextlessness) of late stage capitalism, where everything is reduced into a seedy marketplace. As a glorified Albanian pimp, setting Serbian men up with Albanian wives, says: "supply and demand, do you know what it is?"
Supply and demand now governs the world, and it is not only serving to destroy the Christian nationalism of Serbs, but the Islamic nationalism of Albanians (precisely where tradition should be at its strongest), as both are rendered mere anachronisms by the upward mobility of women -- Serbian women now practicing a form of idolatry in worshiping consumer goods, and Albanian women leaving the influence of their patriarchal Islamic fathers for paradoxically rooted (living off the land) and yet uprooted (disconnected from their heritage) Serbian husbands.
Perhaps these Serbian male villagers are the converse case of Albanian male emigrants to more affluent areas of the EU, who become de-rooted from their land, but somewhat manage to retain their heritage in diaspora communities. They are both victims of capitalism but in different ways, and the effect is largely the same, as immigrant diaspora communities degrade with time and lose their cultural cohesion as the same economic processes which motivated the emigrants to leave their homelands in the first place are replicated until nothing remains.
At a certain point in the documentary, one of the brothers wears a shirt with German words on the back of it, which says "25 Jahre Für Sie Unterwegs" -- commemorating the 25th anniversary of a German transportation company. It is a style of shirt which is really just a corporate way of obtaining free advertising, and the fact that a Serbian man experiencing the death throes of his culture is wearing it is really symbolic of the whole tragedy on display: the homogenizing effects of capitalism which destroys differences and thus cultures; and capitalism marking its anniversaries much like Christianity would mark its Saints' Days, or a nation would mark its independence. Later on in the documentary, German tourists are seen visiting Albania, and learning about a Serbian siege of Albanian forces, treating culture like a commodity.
But more striking in its symbolism is how the brothers watch a news report of riots between Albanians and Serbians, the biggest act of ethnic violence ever since the Kosovo War, on the eve that one of them is set to travel to Albania in order to find a wife, and with naked playboy women on the walls in the background.
A coping Serbian celibate later justifies this by saying that "Albanians in Albania proper are different from Albanians in Kosovo."
And while in Albania, it is said that the sexual tourism of Serbian men is "ensuring the future of Serbs in southern Serbia," an absurd perversion of the 14 Words that justifies miscegenation.
My main takeaway from this documentary is that if men do not possess women, then peoples as a whole will become dispossessed -- losing all their traditions and identities in the process.
The fact that sexual relationships in an environment of social chaos only further exacerbates one's social alienation, a theme that's commonly seen on this forum (with countless anecdotes about sexual relationships ending friendships between men and causing friction between siblings), is seen in the documentary and makes for perhaps the most brutal scene:
At the end of the documentary, the bachelor on the porch above comments: "What a fucked up life. There is nothing here. We must find work. We need to leave here." Work and thing of course, are just euphemisms for women, and you can see how capitalism controls men through the combination of effectively restricting sexuality and actively advertising it out in the open.
Featured in a "traditional" festival in the documentary, where 50 Albanian women were meant to meet eager Serbian men (but couldn't make it), was a lesbian performance between two half-naked girls, which I think illustrates this concept well.
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