1
Few works of art have captured the cesspool that is our social media public square as forcefully as this year’s “Red Rooms,” by Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante. The movie introduces us to Kelly-Anne, (played by a frightening Juliette Gariépy) whose life is governed by her own strict control, assisted by an AI she herself trained and firewalled off from the rest of the internet. She lives in a spotless, nearly bare apartment, every day she ingests the same handful of nutrients — smoothie, salad, no avocado, no beer — does the same Youtube workouts, tracks her investments. Out in the real world, she is a fashion model, an impassive, impenetrable visage whose job is to display clothing and accessories for other people — a transformation of a person into an image. If not for her large eyes — her fixed stare — one could describe her expressionless face as vacant, or vacated.
Yet Kelly-Anne has an appetite for risk. The modelling is a hobby; she pays for everything with the crypto won through online poker. And, when the film begins, she is sleeping on the street in a frigid Montreal Autumn in order to secure a good seat at the trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a man who brutally slaughtered three teenagers, and live-streamed the gore on the dark web to a high-paying audience. The audience watches as each day she shows up, carefully runs her things through security, and stares, nearly unblinking, at Chevalier. The murderer has his “groupies,” young women like Clementine (Laurie Babin), who has traveled in from the provinces because she believes she has found innocence in his sad blue eyes. But Kelly-Anne’s obsession is harder to pin down, and for a long time “Red Rooms” turns on the question of why, exactly, she keeps going back.
There is a bifurcation at work, a self-splitting represented by Kelly-Anne’s two-monitor workstation. Framed in one of Plante’s head-on close-ups, we watch as she swivels her eyes between two sides of her life, playing poker on one screen, researching the crime on the other. She quickly develops a fixation on the youngest of Chevalier’s victims — the only one whose kill-cam has yet to turn up. Viewers watch as Kelly-Anne consumes crime scene footage and hacks into her the victim’s mother’s accounts. But she has the wherewithal to pause the obsessive searching for her routine YouTube workout. Unlike the naive Clementine, who is prepared to uproot her life to speak up for a man she is convinced is innocent, Kelly-Anne doesn’t appear to need anything. She has mastered the split between inner and outer life, and maintains the balance with poise enough to play the odds — and, with a bit of luck in poker and in life, bleed her opponents dry.
Compared with the nervy, awkward Clementine, Kelly-Anne’s is the more cinematic face: cool, beautiful and impassive. She projects normality, in all its loaded connotations. The younger woman’s passion for Chevalier unnerves, but it comes from a real (if bruised) morality: if he is innocent, then he should be freed. Kelly-Anne’s interest has nothing to do with goodness. She is drawn in by his guilt, but her gaze rests somewhere else. Midway through the film, Kelly-Anne learns that her new friend “Clem” has not actually seen the two available snuff videos, and suggests that they watch them. Clementine is shocked: “You can’t do that, it’s illegal.” But as quickly becomes clear, not only has Kelly-Anne seen the killer’s videos, she has rewatched them so many times she can provide a running narration, anticipating every horrible act, every movement, every turn to camera before it plays out on-screen. What seemed distant, aloof, now reads as deeply disturbed, even depraved. In the course of a single two-shot, their faces bathed in the red of Chevalier’s slaughter room, Plante changes the question: the viewer is no longer asking why Kelly-Anne is doing this, but what she has done to herself.
2
For as long as there have been movies about the internet, the movies have been warning us about the perils of going on the internet. For every optimistic story about counter-cultural heroes hacking the planet, others predict a future of pervasive surveillance and social alienation, a network of technologies which offers its participants an illusory sense of control over their public image and private life. Early junk, like 1995’s “The Net,” mix technophobia with prescient insight into the impermanent nature of an existence lived online. If your whole life can be digitized, these movies warned, then it can all be deleted.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 “Pulse” took this insight even further. An epidemic of loneliness is sweeping across Tokyo, a state of near existential alienation that inspires its victims to commit suicide. The cause appears to be a grainy web-cam video of a man shooting himself in the head, a mysterious looping image which calls out across the internetwork, drawing in the vulnerable and hypnotizing them into a despondent state. Unlike the haunted video-tape at the core of Ringu, this murky, lagged-out video is entirely real, surfacing a darkness which its viewers have long tried to suppress. How can you go on living, it asks, when faced with such despair?
In this world, the internet, with its promise of connection and communication, has become a conduit for loneliness and violence, channeling our fears and reinforcing everything in us that already longs for destruction. The dead have begun to peek into our world, their ghostly vision distorted and glitchy, at the mercy of our technological limits. The technology does its part too, preserving both the death-like and the already-dead as a collection of lo-res computer images, bodies and faces that waver and loop in and out of shape, trapping for eternity what ought to fade away. (The Japanese title, “Kairo,” translates roughly to “circuit.”) The digital captures, fixes, and deforms our shared experience: “What if death is just right now, forever?” asks one computer science student, gesturing towards an eternity of suffering which she can no longer bear, but cannot escape.
Kurosawa’s film inspired many American imitators, even a direct remake. Unlike the original, they locate danger on the surface of the technology, rather than the deeper human impulses it helps to tap. The “Unfriended” films are the best of these, discovering all manner of cruelties and traumas in the mundane image of a desktop homepage. If we’re going to live our lives in these machines, then it makes sense we would also use them to explore our worst impulses, from bullying to blackmail to snuff films and more, a cruelty so frictionless it comes to seem casual.
Most of this work comes from filmmakers who matured before the advent and omnipresence of the internet; even the master Kurosawa observes his subject from the outside in, taking in the network effects without full insight how the network is actually structured. A younger generation of digital natives, raised on the internet, have started to fill in that gap. In a series of short films and full-length Youtube uploads, the comedian Conner O’Malley has been cataloguing the strange admixture of knowledge and self-delusion that comes from living online, skewering hopeful influencers, right-wing streaming warriors, and repressed suburbanites with a knowing affection.
More withering, and more upsetting, is Jane Schoenbrun’s “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Made while the director was in the process of coming out, it centers around the web-cam videos made by Casey, a young and exceptionally lonely suburban girl. Casey has decided to take on the “World’s Fair Challenge,” an online game in which participants record themselves talking, sleeping, and otherwise going about their lives to prove that something strange is going on with their bodies. Though Schoenbrun focuses the film on Casey’s growing estrangement from reality and herself, they open the film up to take in a wide swathe of other game-related content, vloggers who tug arcade tickets out of necrotic sores, and record schlocky computer generated music videos with titles like “I am turning into Plastic.”
Among these participants is JLB, an older man who has taken it upon himself to watch out for other members of the game. Wealthy, middle-aged, and male, he seems like Casey’s complete inverse. Yet when glimpsed in his mammoth McMansion, he appears just as isolated, and as lonely, as the people he watches over. JLB’s interest is neither wholly benign nor explicitly predatory, existing, along with everything else connected to the game, in an uncomfortable middle ground. He reaches out to Casey by manipulating one of her videos, a horrific deformation that comes to feel like collaboration with this girl with seemingly no one else in her life.
“World’s Fair” maps a topography of suburban loneliness no less atomized than the Tokyo of “Pulse.” In Kurosawa’s film, the video gazes out at you; in Schoenbrun’s, the video gazes back. Casey is recording an experience which she feels slipping through her fingers, to hold on, yes, but also to have others see her, a form of digital record no less spectral than Kurosawa’s ghosts. On some level, those who participate in the World’s Fair Challenge understand that they’re playing a role, acting out the transformations which the other players expect from them — sometimes so convincingly that the playacting becomes automatic, even unconscious. Who they are in the moments between videos becomes increasingly determined by who they become when others watch those videos online, a shared identity which alternates depending on who is viewing, who is being viewed. Alone in her snowbound house with her agitated single father, Casey needs to be seen, even if the image recognized by others distorts who she really is. This eventually becomes a kind of self-nullification, a further shell erected around her unstable core. And if existing online requires being recorded, then to stop making videos would mean that you no longer exist. “I swear, someday soon,” she promises the camera, “I am just gonna disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me.”
3
This more or less is the story Plante is telling in “Red Rooms,” though it takes some time before he reveals it to us. We have little sense of Kelly-Anne’s life before the Chevalier trial. She seems to have no friends, no family, no one to talk with other than her manager and her AI. As a model, she serves as a malleable image, able to modulate her expression, her gaze, even her body to reflect the look required of her. She is seen, yes, but not recognized; when the worm turns, her photos come down, and are seamlessly replaced.
As she grows closer to Clementine, the rural obsessive is revealed as a sensitive creature, nearly quivering with the desire to be seen by others, even as an insult. She speaks to TV news crews outside the trial, and calls into a late night panel show to tell off the hosts for refusing to grant Chevalier the benefit of the doubt. Their cynical responses bruise the girl, but do not crush her essential courage: she guides herself by what she distortedly and manically believes to be right. His probable innocence, and the proof of his guilt, hold real weight for her. When she recognizes the killer’s sad blue eyes in his snuff-videos, she packs up and returns to her hometown, leaving Kelly-Anne to attend the trial alone.
Kelly-Anne wants to be seen too, though in a very different way. “Red Rooms” proceeds by a process of estrangement, rendering its protagonist more opaque the deeper we dive into her motivations. Online, she goes by the username LadyofShalott, after the Arthurian lady cursed to view the world indirectly, reflected in a mirror. Yet her piercing glare seems to swallow everything, seeking out the terrible perversity of the Red Room, and making it her home. These videos have run rampant inside Kelly-Anne, transforming her into someone capable of betting everything to see more. Like a participant in the World’s Fair Challenge, she has become a character recognizable to other players of a shared game — a group which includes the killer. As the other parts of her life fall away, she begins to take on the role of his youngest victim. She appears at the trial dressed up in the victim’s school uniform and wearing a wig resembling the victim’s hair, hoping for Chevalier’s recognition, a victory which comes at the cost of her professional and public life. She is dragged from the courtroom by police officers, a scene which is filmed in ostentatious slow motion, and acts as a kind of purification, a sloughing off of her old respectable skin, making way for something much worse.
By streaming his videos on the dark web, Chevalier seemed to be attempting to contain them, as the suicide rooms in “Pulse” are sealed off with red tape, broadcast to a select crowd ready to keep his secret. So too the public prosecutors who display the snuff films as evidence, but not to the public. As Kurosawa so keenly intuited, this kind of spectacular violence is contagious, it leaks out, dispersed among a network of watchers and obsessives who duplicate the act in image and deed. And images of violence are an inescapable part of online life. Anyone who spends a decent amount of time on Twitter or Instagram is used to scrolling through a timeline that equally weighs entertainment news, white power race science, idiotic memes, and footage of war crimes. Like Kelly-Anne’s dual monitors, the alternation of the banal and the atrocious collapses any distinction between them, placing both on an equal plane.
This process charges even the most mundane posts and images with the possibility of violence, while lowering the threshold for violent threats to nil. In the time that I was working on this essay, a health care CEO was shot, and the internet celebrated; a British woman posted a photo of her doctoral thesis, and received death threats for days on end; a New Yorker was acquitted of strangling a homeless man to death, an act first documented on social media, and was invited to meet the Vice President-elect. I experienced all these things like almost everyone else: online, mixed in with news about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, and middling reviews of a new biopic about the life of Bob Dylan.
So what are we doing here, really? One cannot imbibe such diverse, daily horrors and not be made coarser. It has been argued that this presentation dulls us to violent images by making them seem less real, but I think we are experiencing something more akin to a levelling, in which images of violence are made to seem just as banal as all the other images or thoughts we see online, both disarming the violence and infecting the mundane with a violent energy, a tincturing which degrades both at the same time.
In the final act of “Red Rooms,” Kelly-Anne joins up with a community of other dark-web dwellers, anonymous posters with names like Faggotmom and Ching Shih, a community of VPN-masked edgelords in search not only of illicit thrills, but of the victory — over the victims, over society, even over each other — which possessing these videos seems to bring, a counter-society of techie Raskolnikovs operating on monitors, in boring apartment buildings, visible only to those with the technological know-how, and the willingness to tolerate (or even cultivate) a keen sense of depravity. To win the opportunity to watch a Chevalier kill-video aligns the viewer with the killer, not the victim, and places them above the average citizen too afraid or too poor or too pure to gain entry. One of these edgelords has the last of Chevalier’s undistributed snuff films, and they’ve all joined up to get it.
Something has happened to these people, a corruption stemming from the minimal mastery of the technology required to evade a merely moral law. These are hardly fictional creatures. They can be found right here in our world, on Kiwi Farms, the 754 Discord servers, 8kun and TruthSocial and Elon Musk’s Twitter replies, all the many forums of the mass that Simon Leys named the Empire of Ugliness, that portion of humanity which despises beauty in all forms, and makes a mission of destroying it. “Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge,” he writes, “obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule.”
We can see these forces everywhere, in the fossil fuel CEOs who consciously destroy our planet, the tech VC billionaires who commit their fortunes to end democracy, the president-elect who promises to make public life hell for all manner of minorities. These are vicious, vindictive people, obsessed with their IQs, who preen over their supposed genetic superiority, yet must purchase a prominence they cannot earn. Leys found them not only in the realm of aesthetics, but even more in ethics: “The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.” They can destroy whatever is good and beautiful in society, can attack it in others, can push their technologies to the edge, yet they are totally incapable of producing anything but ugliness themselves. It should disturb us that so many identify with and celebrate them. Their empire is everywhere, and we are all stakeholders.
By the end of “Red Rooms,” Kelly-Anne is lost in this pit. She bets everything in a poker game, gaining just enough crypto to outbid her competitors and win the final snuff film. Pascal depicts this hellish descent with the calibrated tension of a heist sequence, and does such a masterful job that by the end we are rooting for Kelly-Anne to succeed. Her viewing is ecstatic, a kind of apotheosis, as if she were at last looking directly upon an image of true beauty. The music surges, and the color swells, a bright red hue that deepens and deepens until her face has been totally washed out, annihilated by the light of the screen. The image might be heavenly, if we did not know the hellish source.
It recalls the climactic image with “World’s Fair” in which a distorted flash of a young girl’s face decompose in the dark. Two faces, two videos, two disintegrating realities. Like Casey, like Kelly-Anne, we’ve all gone inside the screen, and we’re not coming out again.