They Called Him Mostly Harmless

I was living in Naples, Florida when the news was first reported that a man had been found deceased inside a tent in the woods of the nearby Big Cypress reserve area. And I remember that the angle of the story was one of mystery as to just how the man had died and that his identity remained undetermined. The case was in the news for a few days, then it essentially vanished and we, the public, moved onto other things.

So I was genuinely a bit surprised to learn that the search to find out just who the person was and how he died had become such a massive undertaking by those people on the Internet who style themselves as amateur sleuths.

This documentary is an interesting look at how those Internet communities, along with law enforcement and the assistance of a sophisticated DNA lab, were finally able to determine who the deceased man, known by his trail hiking name as "Mostly Harmless," actually was, and just what his backstory consisted of.

And the final reveal definitely included some real surprises, once the actual truth is discovered.

Like all of these kind of modern documentaries that look at the world of amateur sleuths who immerse themselves in true crime and other similar unsolved mysteries, there is good and bad and even some extremely ugly aspects to what people will allow themselves to devolve into so far as their emotional investment in a case is concerned.

Worth a watch if you enjoy this particular genre.

The internet sleuthing dimension got in the way of a really compelling story imo. I don't mind that they talked about the search and the communities cultivated online (emphasis on "cult"). But I wish the producers didn't focus so much on those elements. A nice tight one-hour doc about a man whose isolation led him permanently into the wilderness- and whose identity was only discovered through new technology, crowdfunding and the will of strangers- would have been solid. Instead, too much time was spent on the strangers. The more "serious" it got the more I laughed, and the film lost its punch in the process.

I still think it's worth watching, tho. I won't jump on the hate bandwagon lol. For one, I had never heard anything about his story before and it left me with plenty of food for thought. While this man did something very few (if any) of us would ever do, his life was still surprisingly relatable. How much of that has to do with what you know about him, and how much of it has to do with what you don't?

I thought the quote the producers found from Adams' book was a gem, and really captured the central theme of the project: "Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future." Such a pointed reminder for everyone involved: be it those of us watching at home; characters who participated *from home; and maybe most notably "Mr. Harmless" himself, who could never find his way home at all.

Vances are born unfortunately into chaos they make chaos and leave chaos behind if unfound. This story strip away the myth of connectedness in modern world and introduce the lonely lives that exists in shadows. Retrospectively the sleuths of whom most are falling into the aforesaid shadow realm put up a wholesome collective effort that gives a John doe a name that he himself wanted the world to forget. It's sad yet a mysterious venture of social detective work. A story told well methodically and cleverly. Rather than making a regular true crime doc this sleuthing odyssey is a unique and an inspiring social commentary.

If you've ever seen one of the interminable Netflix true crime docs where they cram 30 minutes of information into 3 hours, you have seen this documentary. The balance of this thing comprises people who don't leave the house talking about their online obsessions with people they don't know. The rest of the documentary is people opining, speculating, and drawing lines where there is no evidence. It's such a spectacular bore. You'd be better off reading a Wikipedia page and the. Getting on with the rest of your day. It's the documentary equivalent of this review, where you just keep going because you have space they're requiring you to fill.

I cannot with these internet sleuths, they are ridiculous, sitting at their computers, harassing real people and only thinly doing good things. Then they try to lay claim to discoveries that they are loosely connected to uncovering. Centering a documentary around these people gives them notoriety that they simply do not deserve. The story itself is interesting if you're willing to weed through the self-centered commentary by the sleuths and focus on the mystery. The ending is pretty good, but mostly goes to show how off kilter many of the tangents the "facebook group" took were, just doing too much.