medialog

It's a comedy until it isn't, and I was really shocked by how freaked out the ending made me after the note the movie starts on. It almost puts a bad taste in your mouth to watch the Very Visibly Adult Matt Johnson in a high school riffing on school shooters, a year after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Using the same sort of guerilla filmmaking that makes up NTBTS's whole bit, the movie itself serves as an interesting statement about the lack of safety precautions around violence in schools (at least in 2013). Then-28 year old Matt, who you never really buy as a teenage highschool student even when the real teens in the film are playing along with him, frequently has worrying interactions with real-life adults in positions of authority who aren't in on the bit. He's allowed to trespass, carry around obviously suspicious props onto school grounds, and gets the blueprints to the real life highschool that the film is shot at-- he can't help breaking character to remark into the camera about how easily they handed this information to a random adult man.

I know I tend to go into things with my fujo glasses activated, but I would very honestly consider this a textually queer film in ways I was surprised by! I saw someone on twitter when the NTBTS movie was getting its fanfare describe Matt and Jay's relationship as something like being 13 and in love with your best friend, and so paranoid that he will discover girls and abandon you that it leads you to act kind of insane and obsessive. I hope this movie reached whoever that person was, because The Dirties is that idea turned up to ten.

I'm really fascinated by how in at least two distinct works, Matt characterizes 'himself' as the best friend you can feel yourself kind of outgrowing, whose behavior is starting to get less fun to be around, embarrassing at best in his obsessive tunnel vision and lack of tact and outright malicious and scary at worst.

The character of 'ultimately harmless friend you kinda worry about' gets more and more scary. It feels scary in how plausible it is, the sort of nasty behavior that being seemingly harmlessly naive and out of touch can become. I guess I really wasn't expecting that sort of performance out of him?

I need to watch more interviews with this guy

I do think that representing buried trauma as a malevolent fey force and presenting coming to terms with it as playing along with the rules of an unknowable force of nature is interesting. I particularly like the way the movie likens a CSA survivor feeling unable or unwilling to put a name to what happened to the idea that you shouldn't give a fey your name, that doing so grants them power over you. Something about this movie just didn't stick the landing for me, though, and it's hard to place what exactly it is.

Seeing other reviews of this movie, I was surprised that other people disliked it for being too opaque and 'weird'. Even though I didn't love this movie, it bothers me how unwilling people are to engage with stories that incorporate folklore and fairytale elements or treat anything with their inclusion as completely impenetrable. It felt very obvious what this movie was saying, a little on the nose at points for me.

also... is this a safe space. The part where Darcy is recording the sound of running a mic through his wife's armpit hair was really hot.

Joanna is definitely portrayed as a victim in a dysfunctional and honestly emotionally abusive relationship, and beyond that, just a very sad and lonely person. Still, it becomes clear that as terrible as James is, he is ultimately a weapon that Joanna is using against herself. Joanna is characterized as someone who... hates herself! But beyond that, the relationship has turned into a vehicle for her to hurt herself.

It feels terrible to say that someone with low self esteem sets themselves up to be hurt, but this movie is an act of pressing on her own bruises. She has clearly already made up her mind that James is bad for her, and that she intends to break up with him, but as the disembodied voice of a friend she calls up points out, she needs to ask everyone's take on it. She sits her parents down to watch him both verbally abuse her and have sex with her on camera. It seems like she seeks humiliation not just from him but from others seeing her with him.

There are these insane??? scenes where her editor, a man who insists on being nude the entire time he's on camera in a way meant to degrade her (while also literally doing so verbally), bluntly calls what she is doing self-harm, in the territory of humiliation fetish, and he's kinda... not wrong.

I didn't like this doc very much, but I feel like we are often uncomfortable with talking about how low self esteem can become a nasty form of self obsession, and I can't think of another example of something so candidly showing the self-absorbed nature of hating yourself. Much less from an autobiographical point of view.

There is a shot I keep thinking about, where Joanna is filming James talking while he stands next to a mirror, zooming in on him and herself in the background simultaneously.

I saw a lot of reviews (understandably!) questioning the 'point' of filming her white boyfriend calling his black audience niggers to their faces, but I think it's an important key to how the film characterizes her and her agency. She passively films it, and at a point tepidly asks a black woman if what James says makes her uncomfortable, but never meaningfully has anything to say about or bothers to challenge this behavior of his.

I don't think I would recommend this, but I did think about it for a long time afterwards.

It isn't a movie with big scares necessarily. It is a mystery, but the 'what' and 'who' of the central incident becomes clear to the audience very early. A woman on a trip with her boyfriend goes missing at a rest stop. We are shown the man who did it, and the method of her kidnapping.

It isn't stated or shown outright that he has killed her, and the movie plays with the audience in such an interesting way here. Though we know more of the truth than the protagonist, her boyfriend Rex, who keeps up the search for years after her disappearance, we are in his shoes. You hope that she is alive, and technically it is ambiguous enough that she could be, but deep down you know that she has been killed.

What remains to be figured out is the 'how', and the movie is really less about Saskia than about Rex's obsessive pursuit, no longer of his girlfriend, but of the details of her murder.

I love a good feel-bad movie, and this put a huge rock in my stomach. Again, there is no big scares or on-screen violence, but the horror is in how mundane the evil is.