TFW NO GF

Five years ago, when woke PC culture was the law of the land, the idea that a movie like this would get released- much less acclaimed by SXSW- would have been unheard of. Now, people are starting to understand that there is a very real problem of white men who feel abandoned by society and unable to compete in the modern world. The men seen in this documentary are not unlike the hikikomori, Japanese men who are unemployed and lead isolated, loveless, friendless lives.

PC culture would have us all believe that being a white male sets you up for life and that any claims a white man might have to being disaffected or depressed are to be chortled at and spat upon. This is not the case. There are a great many men out there who are falling through the cracks and failing to realize their potential. It is not an endorsement of Nazism or the KKK to say that we need to start taking this epidemic seriously and from the vantage of sympathy and support for these men, not casting them as demonic cyber villains out to destroy women and minorities.

Kudos to the filmmakers for letting these men have their say. May they find hope, success and love. May the world at large finally learn to have sympathy for them and stop dismissing them based on their sex and race. You know, sexism and racism.

Interesting look at incels that isn't filtered through media sensationalism and fear mongering. Looks at the conditions that created the subculture and what the people inside actually have to say

It is novel that this documentary follows a few men in the incel subculture over a period of a few years, but the film is mostly lacking narrative or statement.

Instead, we are presented with a collage of clips platforming the subjects' ideas. They do offer some insightful thoughts about consumer culture and the way young men are expected to behave in our society, but the men also spread some blatantly misogynistic or racist ideology, the latter presented caged in a flimsy veneer of "satire" (a term which those in the subculture misinterpret to mean transgressing for the sake of transgressing, rather than using irony to make a larger point).

Personally, I felt that the misogyny and racism were brushed off too easily in favour of humanising the subjects. That may be the best approach for reconciling these sorts of men with society, but it means that we end up with a fairly shallow look into the subculture that only briefly references the hate and extremism it has generated. You get the impression that the incel community is mostly a place for commiseration and that those within it eventually graduate to more typical lives. This is probably true of many, maybe even most, but it still misses an important fact.

At one point, we see a brief clip from the Toronto Van Attack (an act of misogynist terrorism that took place in Canada's largest city in 2018), but its roots in incel fora are not explained at all. The perpetrator was a member of the incel community, and he and other domestic terrorists like him have been idolized in some incel circles since. One could argue that this film is about the less extreme members of the community, and that the hateful acts of extreme factions are for another movie. Frankly though, to me it feels irresponsible to spend so much time in the subculture without directly addressing the fact that it has spawned domestic terrorism.

My advice: give this one a miss. If you want to know more about the incel subculture, listen to the CBC podcast about the Toronto Van Attack, I found it much more enlightening.

You see what's in this documentary everyday when you've grown up with the internet. And not only does this doc cover the common mindsets and themes of this subculture well, it also sticks to the atmosphere of said subculture while explaining it. Its a painfully beautiful thing to see these people at these points in their lives but at least they're going through it together. But hey, we're all gonna make it. Right?

This may have been a sort-of grungy look into incel subculture and their rancid online homes. Unfortunately it'll have to be JUST a look, as all audio seems to be recorded on a 1987 walkman, and put into the documentary without levelling. Most of the people sound like they are in an _actual_ pit of despair, and speaking from the bottom while the mike is hung in another county. Combined with footage that wildly oscillates between 'fair' and 'filmed on a second hand iphone 5' this is borderline unwatchable and unusable as a podcast. How this got past selection on a fairly prestigious film festival is completely beyond me. It wouldn't even pass as a first-year filmclub test project.