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By Joseph Lavers
Good morning 🐣
A grainy early-2000s webcam is set up in a room with bare, maybe purple walls. Yellow fabric is crumpled up in the corner. A 15-year-old boy comes strutting into frame carrying a golf ball retriever, inelegantly swinging it around like a lightsaber and making swishing sounds, getting more and more into it, unfazed when he almost trips.
The video was never meant to be seen, but when it was uploaded by classmates back in 2003, the “Star Wars Kid,” as Ghyslain Raza came to be known, was ridiculed and bullied worldwide, mocked for essentially having fun and minding his own damn business. He became an early example of both viral videos and online harassment. Jokes were even made at his expense in mainstream media: shows like “Arrested Development” and “The Office,” as well as music videos and video games.
Now twenty years later, Raza has opened up about this episode in his life in a new documentary titled “Dans l’ombre du Star Wars Kid.” (He’s French-Canadian.) He even met with up Andy Baio, the blogger who initially spread the video on a mass scale. Baio, who regrets ever posting it, reflects:
Like so many others, I saw my geeky teenage self when first watching the Star Wars Kid video, and sitting across from this 34-year-old man, I saw a parallel-world version of myself in my 30s. I first fell in love with the internet at age 15, the age Ghyslain was when he made the video.
That night, I couldn’t help but wonder how his life would have changed if it never happened. I was surprised to see that in the final film, there’s a moment where Ghyslain talks about our meeting, and wonders exactly the same thing.
I think we all know that double-edged sword: both the Internet’s supreme magic of possibility AND how cruel it can make us.
Now watch this 👀
Two new films (one in theaters, the other streaming) address those themes. While both satires, they play in two very different genres.
The first is “Not Okay” (2022 • Hulu • watch the trailer), which starts off with a content warning (“This film contains flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist. Viewer discretion advised”) — a joke that inevitably flew over the heads of some online folks — and is divided into nine chapters, with titles like “No One Understands Me,” “I’m A Good Person Now,” and “I Don’t Get A Redemption Arc.” It’s a funny, sometimes anxiety-inducing film that lives up to its warning.
Zoey Deutch plays Danni Sanders, a depressed, wannabe social media influencer with a guinea pig named Guinea Weasley. She just wants to be loved and famous for literally any reason, so she spontaneously decides to fake a trip to Paris for the likes and follows. When a bombing happens in the French capital while she’s supposedly there, her lie spirals out of control. She’s championed as an inspiring hero and strikes up a friendship with Rowan (Mia Isaac), an actual survivor of a school shooting and now teenage activist. Watch Danni dig and dig and dig deeper into her lies and shameless attempts to be seen.
And then there’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022 • in theaters • watch the trailer), technically a horror film but quite possibly funnier than the advertised comedy, “Not Okay.” And a big part of that is thanks to Lee Pace (“Pushing Daisies”), who plays a forty-something hanger-on amid a gaggle of Gen Z rich kids — among them Amandla Stenberg (Rue from “The Hunger Games”), Maria Bakalova (Rudy Giuliani’s missed connection in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”), and Pete Davidson (“The Angry Birds Movie 2”). Pace’s character’s obliviousness to everything is amazing to watch as they all party in a remote mansion while a storm passes through.
The group decides to play the titular game, a version of “Mafia” or “Werewolf” where you have to guess who the “murderer” is, but one by one they start actually getting offed. (I was gonna title this week’s newsletter “Selfie Styx” but turns out I don’t know how to have fun.) Paranoia sets in as they wonder who the real murderer is, shouting each other down with accusations of gaslighting, narcissism, toxicity, triggering, and other self-diagnosing buzzwords. At one point Rachel Sennott’s character vehemently defends her new Tinder date: “He’s a Libra moon!” You’re right; he couldn’t possibly be the murderer.
Written by Sarah DeLappe and based on a story by Kristen Roupenian (you might remember her viral 2017 short story, “Cat Person”), it’s a fun, brutal satire of our very online culture. But come for the Lee Pace, stay for the Lee Pace.
