I
It’s a cliché to say that increased connectivity has actually driven us further apart, but there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. In a way, we are better prepared than ever through the invention of the computer and the internet to wade out the storm of social isolation. We have practice. It’s still not easy though, and for a lot of people, including young men who have spent their formative years on forums where they feel more comfortable and more accepted than in society, it’s a way of life that is at once freeing and also full of misery. Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary film TFW NO GF (“That Face When No Girlfriend”) observes five young men who grew up on internet boards like 4chan and social media sites like Twitter and became inextricably connected by the use of a meme known as “Wojak.”
Moyer’s film, which was supposed to premiere at SXSW, isn’t particularly introspective or detailed and works mostly as a primer for people who are generally unfamiliar with online subcultures, cutting in cable news segments on an epidemic of male loneliness and giving definitions of various online terms and acronyms like NEET, blackpill, /r9k/ and NPC, among others. Most of the homework must be done on one’s own, because this is a rabbit hole that goes deep and gets very weird. Moyer is a woman in her mid-thirties, someone who’s an outside observer to this realm of culture, but she isn’t looking to be an “interpreter.”
“I feel like there may be an inescapable and distinctly female empathic energy to the film—which is why I did not find it necessary to insert myself into the narrative or make too big a deal of it,” she says of the film, which includes almost no narration. “I just tried to present things earnestly, as I found them.”
Moyer’s film, which was supposed to premiere at SXSW, isn’t particularly introspective or detailed and works mostly as a primer for people who are generally unfamiliar with online subcultures, cutting in cable news segments on an epidemic of male loneliness and giving definitions of various online terms and acronyms like NEET, blackpill, /r9k/ and NPC, among others. Most of the homework must be done on one’s own, because this is a rabbit hole that goes deep and gets very weird. Moyer is a woman in her mid-thirties, someone who’s an outside observer to this realm of culture, but she isn’t looking to be an “interpreter.”
“I feel like there may be an inescapable and distinctly female empathic energy to the film—which is why I did not find it necessary to insert myself into the narrative or make too big a deal of it,” she says of the film, which includes almost no narration. “I just tried to present things earnestly, as I found them.”
Inside the Male-Dominated Meme Hijacked by Trumpsters
The new documentary “TFW NO GF (That Face When No Girlfriend)” examines the wildly popular Wojak meme—and why lost, lonely young men relate to it so deeply.
www.thedailybeast.com
