Likemeback
Smartphones took center-stage in three of the films featured at this year’s edition of the Locarno Festival, each exploring so-called “selfie culture” and its purportedly noxious effects on teenagers, especially teen girls. More than being a simple critique of modern forms of narcissism, these male-helmed films also reveal an underlying aversion towards how females are specifically interacting with social media.
Until recently, cellphones were conspicuously absent from most films (one may even wonder whether some are set in the nineties simply to avoid the hassle of representation), or relegated to the status of simple plot devices, Chekhovian guns which only helped set the narrative in motion. I can think of only a few counterexamples in which smartphones are used casually by protagonists, such as Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha. There, the titular character has relatively mundane experiences with her cell, ranging from her checking in on friends who are late for a meeting, to leaving voicemails for those whose phones are turned off for days on end.
As smartphones and social media have become ingrained in our daily routines, representing their usage has too become almost unavoidable. Some films explicitly aim at doling out harsh critiques for on how social media and instant messaging are negatively shaping our interactions and self-image. This year’s festival included three films which addressed the issue of smartphones and social media, more or less overtly; all of them adopted a very cynical and critical outlook on its effects, especially as it pertains to teenage girls (the protagonists for two of the three films). Maybe paradoxically—maybe predictably—all three films are helmed by male directors. To varying degrees, each of these filmmakers seem preoccupied by notions of innocence and purity, clashing with this modern, sexually emancipated form of femininity.
The most overtly critical title on the issue in Locarno’s roster is Likemeback by Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli. His is a teen drama centered around three teenage friends—Carla, Lavinia and Danila—who go on a boat ride across the Croatian coast. Rather than enjoying the peace and quiet of the seas, the girls seem rather more preoccupied with sharing every single detail of their trip online, to what appears to be Instagram. The majority of the film portrays them as either glued to their phone screens, or locked in endless discussions about their content. An event early on in the film is treated by the characters as something of a catastrophe: Carla drops her cell in the seas below, prompting her to leech those of her friends. They get increasingly exasperated by her repeated requests. Quite predictably, the trip ends with actual catastrophe: the sultry, yet still-virgin Lavinia posts footage of Carla having sex online in an act of inexplicable revenge. Danila, the trio’s resident egomaniac—a superficial social media influencer—is horrified to discover that Lavinia engaged in revenge porn, in the film’s only true shocker: that Danila’s character actually seems to have a conscience, less than ten minutes before the ending. The archetypes upon which the three protagonists are constructed are high caricatures (the popularity queen, the sycophant, and the bookworm); any credibility that they might have in Seragnoli’s modern parable is out the window so early on that its ultimate showdown comes across as slightly ridiculous. In so far as Danila and Lavinia are imagined as totally self-enamoured and obsessed with taking suggestive selfies (the latter is the star of a painfully contrived segment in which she poses nude for the webcam, whispering dirty talk), Carla is initially prudish and a party killer, only to turn “slutty” under the bad influence of her friends and to end up penalized for her divergences. She’s an easy target for the role of the obligatory victim, in the script’s economy of roles and archetypes.
Arguably, one could say that Likemeback is not entirely driven by a male gaze. For the majority of the film, the female characters are seen amongst themselves, seeking validation from each other more so than from men. Of course, Lavinia’s nude webcam scene implies exactly the posture of a peep, but she’s seen rather through her own eyes as well, as she’s controlling the image that is on screen. Seragnoli’s approach also tries to elude the trappings of this male-centered gaze, as he actively encouraged the three main actresses to participate in the construction of their characters. One has to wonder whether the three leads aren’t also, like their director, using their space to vent frustrations aimed at “superficial” and “snotty” girls.
Alice T.
Radu Muntean’s Main Competition entry, Alice T. is, by contrast, more subdued in its representation of the inherent evils of social media—it’s more preoccupied with making its lead character seem like a remorseless monster. But the underlying message seems to be quite the same: that modern communication technology enables completely irresponsible behavior in teenagers, especially in ones that are impetuous by nature. The film’s main plot point is revealed by the protagonist’s smartphone, as her mother confiscates her phone and glimpses messages that reveal her teenage daughter’s pregnancy. It should come as no surprise that the messages are immature jokes made by Cesonia, Alice’s friend. Muntean’s movie is geared towards painting the titular character as a standoffish brat driven only by self-interest; she goes forward with taking abortion pills, yet pretends to still be pregnant in order to capitalize on the preferential treatment she’s suddenly receiving from her family and school as a mother-to-be. In his grand scheme to demonize the protagonist, Muntean includes a smattering of gratuitous nudity. It speaks volumes about his perception of teenagers and their smartphones: Alice sends nude mirror selfies to a married man she barely even knows. Her irresponsible and aggressive pursuit of hedonistic pleasure is enabled by her use of the phone which becomes yet another vehicle with which a troubled teen can continue to wreak havoc on her surroundings. The man, it is worth noting, reacts by giving her a stern warning not to contact him anymore, lest his marriage be ruined—his wife also saw the messages. Rather than giving any rationale for Alice’s behavior (beyond very simplistic tropes: she’s adopted, her parents split up, her mom pushes her stereotypical failed female ideals onto her, et cetera), the film seems poised to create a list of everything that can go wrong with a female teenager, and smartphone usage stands in as a handy prop in this atrocity exhibition of sorts.
If anything, the most manifest exploration of such fears comes to fore in—what else?—Claudius Gentinetta’s animated short film SELFIES, part of the lineup in the Pardo di Domani sidebar. Constructed as a high-octane montage made from hundreds of redrawn photos, SELFIES explores images which have become archetypal in the milieu of social media: from vacation pictures and self-portraits to shots of people at an extreme height and photos with celebrities. What is notable in the visual aesthetics is that the portraits come across as intentionally caricatured: the faces featured in the photos are mostly rendered in a grotesque manner, their grins chilling and inhuman. Gentinetta’s critique covers most areas of discourse surrounding the negative uses of social media: ranging from narcissism and overexposure to more subtle issues, such as the usage of online media in constructing social capital (he even takes a jab at Ai Weiwei’s selfies with refugees on the Greek coast), or the issue surrounding copycat imagery (as entire sequences are constructed from images which are almost identical, like mirror selfies, pregnancy photos, “hot dog legs” et cetera). Most of the subjects in the selfies are female, in one instance even depicted in a sexual context, as if to underline that narcissism is more prevalent among women. In this configuration, the males are more present in action-based contexts. Even though they, too, appear at times in completely ridiculous contexts (like toilet selfies—yes, that’s a thing), it is nowhere near as often.
Although all the above representations do carry with them a certain critique of smartphone and social media usage that is, to an extent, one rooted in some valid observations, they each fail at comprehensively (or even credibly) addressing the underlying reasons for which these new technologies breed types of usages that are, at best, amoral. Especially since all three films are preoccupied with representing female characters and figures which engage with social platforms by way of either willfully objectifying themselves in pictures, or by oversharing details of their daily lives. The psychological or sociological evaluations given by the directors range from simplistic to excessively moralistic. The characters’ attitudes are seemingly influenced by a range of factors, from systemic (a societal fixation on individuality in late capitalism) to metaphysical (the youth that cannot fully comprehend life and cause-effect chains, girls being particularly susceptible to being used). The common element of all arguments being that their characters seemingly lack a sense of agency and of accountability vis-a-vis their own behavior—which is problematic.
Notably, none of these filmmakers are preoccupied with the underlying issues surrounding such attitudes, the thought-process and ideation of their subjects. Why, for instance, is Alice sending nude pictures to a married man? What is it that drives Lavinia to be so insecure of her own virginity that she needs to publicly shame her sexually active friends? And why are so many women taking the same pictures of themselves (or allowing significant others to), in the same sexually suggestive poses, over and over again? Through the optics of the male gaze, the answer seems deeply rooted in an underlying fear of female sexuality, and of the way social media and instant communication empowers them to represent themselves and their sexuality. This may be one of the reasons why these films, at times, come across as being outright antagonistic towards their protagonists. What they don’t share is an awareness of how modern communication channels have an effect on how a female is supposed to perform her gender, of how aggressively society pushes women towards being physically attractive. They lack awareness of issues such as self-image, insecurity, and, ultimately, the need to express one’s sexuality and to communicate about it.
Overplaying the use of the characters’ phones and the gadgets’ effects on their day-to-day lives does not add much to the table in terms of discussion—it’s misleading. We not see casual usage of phones; we get a full-force lecture on how these objects act as corruptors, as enablers to some of humanity’s worst, most heinous base impulses. (An exaggeration, to say the least.) Rather than exploring the character’s relationship with technology, the three directors cast what seems to be an a priori judgement of it—that these technologies are definitely bad. Therefore, the only real dichotomy lies between legitimate and illegitimate uses of smartphones. Legitimate, meaning, as in SELFIES, where the only truly sympathetic characters are refugees crossing Europe and the Mediterranean, or people who use their phones to document gruesome injuries. All of which is why, ultimately, all three films suffer from the same problems: their characters come across as one-dimensional, their gestures are at times completely inexplicable, and their movies, as a whole, suffer from these very programmatic approaches.
People will always have the tendency to wag their fingers at the young’uns, and to decry the end of human civilization, as we—well, they—know it. You can’t argue against the fact that modern technology is, indeed, in many ways harmful to the individual. What you can argue against is this pernicious, finger-wagging exaggeration of the problem that never seems to go away.