![]() There is no need to intersperse a voice-over that says, “This was irresponsible,” when Charels, for example, has his weapons seized by the police and ends up on national news for posting “one ticket for Joker please” while brandishing two AK-47s. Moyer may not be shy about underscoring some of the men’s positive attributes - Kantbot’s intelligence Charels and Viddy’s sense of humor - she also makes sure not to sugarcoat their lives or paint them as martyrs of modernity in their individual struggles with loneliness and isolation. What these reviews are missing, however, is that the critique of the protagonists, as well as the moment they exist in more generally, is implicit in the honesty of the film itself. The director does focus on documenting and portraying the protagonists’ surroundings, lives, and state of mind, without ever making any clear moral judgment. Since its release, while positive reviews of TFW NO GF praised director Alex Lee Moyer for her lack of sensationalism, negative ones seemed to mostly wonder just where the critique of these guys was. ![]() At the same time, it’s really beautiful, in a way.”Ĭharels passing under a bridge in Kent, WA, in a still from the documentary. None of them seem like actual places you can go to. “ it’s the kind of place where it’s all just like, strip malls and industrial places and empty lots, burned-down buildings. And like the internet, it’s also aesthetically complicated: interviews are flanked between alternating shots of suburban sprawl, New York City, our subjects’ daily lives, screenshots, and memes - all woven together in a way that gives the same impression of hopelessness and despair our subjects, Sean, Charels, Viddy, Kantbot, and Kyle, do. Like the internet itself, the film is fragmentary, with no single narrative arc. ‘Shitposting’ is something to do, and the Internet is a place to loiter when all other places have failed them. The film follows five visibly alienated young men who regularly ‘shitpost’, and explores how such habit has given them a semblance of humor, and in some cases, community, in an otherwise alienating and often humiliating world. At least two of them throughout the documentary are indeed revealed as friends. While I don’t know the people documented in the film, I wouldn’t be surprised if they all turned out to follow one another. TFW NO GF, rather, is a documentary about five different and sometimes intersecting expressions of loneliness, and how they manifest on a singular corner of (for the most part) Twitter esoteric, humorous, right-wing or at least right-wing adjacent, steeped in irony, male-dominated, often provocative. While the internet corners the protagonists of TFW NO GF belong to borrow the aesthetics of other places online, among which are a myriad of internet subcultures, including incels, to say the film it’s a history of or a meditation on ‘incels’ is misleading. Not only that, but it is also not a movie about the phrase it borrows its title from, tfw no gf, which is short for “that feel when no girlfriend.” Nor is it about the “ I know that feel, bro” Wojak meme originally posted alongside “tfw no gf’s” first appearance on 4chan on February 23 rd, 2011, or a documentary about 4chan and lonely men on the Internet en masse. The first thing you should know about TFW NO GF, is that it’s not a movie about incels - which is a real and discrete online subculture with its own aesthetic language, slang, and philosophy. ![]() Seeing the label ‘incel’ affixed to it again and again, I can’t help but ask, “did we watch the same film?” When TFW NO GF (digitally) premiered at South by South West last year, most media and reviews framed it as “the incel doc.” Peter Debruge’s Variety’s write-up reads, “Director Alex Lee Moyer addresses the incel phenomenon as a question of loneliness…”
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