The Bodies Bodies Bodies are Not Not Not Okay
Why are films about "The Internet" afraid to say anything interesting?
Is there any point in making a movie whose central thesis is that TikTok is bad for your brain? Can we be saved from the solipsism that saturates our interactions both digital and analog? What is the artistic value of a film that is more concerned with maintaining its dramatic irony than with creating a single character that has traits beyond “villain,” “victim,” “wronged lesbian coworker,” or “spoken word poet”? This summer’s roster of Gen Z-targeted films dares to ask these questions.
In my Letterboxd review of Bodies Bodies Bodies, I called it one of many recent films to occupy itself with “trite, meandering stories about anodyne adolescent melodrama.” I received multiple comments saying that I completely missed the satire at hand, that it was truly a feat of cultural commentary. For something to be satire, I believe it actually has to have something to say and to say it in some humorous or intelligent way (see: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Mean Girls, Society). Unfortunately for audiences anxiously headed to A24’s newest threat, director Halina Reijn and writer Sarah DeLappe fail on basically all fronts to craft an engaging, funny, or “accurate” (as many reviewers have claimed) representation of the terminally online zoomer/millennial cusp generation.
I am genuinely baffled by the near-universal praise for a film that, while reasonably well-acted, is so terribly paced, shot, and conceived. How can a movie be a horror-comedy if you’re never scared and there aren’t any jokes? I agree wholeheartedly with K. Austin Collins’ review in Rolling Stone: it lacked any significant tension (seriously, how many times must we see a character aimlessly wander around a darkened mansion with a phone flashlight?) and it is painfully lacking in humor for what was obviously meant to be a Funny Movie (perhaps it would have been more enjoyable in a crowded theater with a bunch of vaping high schoolers, but my Monday matinee audience of six 23-to-35-year-old men hardly made a sound.)
The climactic fight of Bodies Bodies Bodies, if this traipse of a “slasher” were to have one, is a buzzword-laden litany of Shady AF Comebacks at which you couldn’t help but laugh, but almost certainly not in the way Reijn intended. At that point in the film, it feels like you should at least kind of care about any of the characters involved, but you don’t; any one (or all) of them could die and the story would’ve continued and concluded with the same diffuse dullness. If the point of the scene is to show that the language we use — about being “triggered” or “silenced,” about having “trauma” and being “gaslit” — is meaningless and futile in describing the true “lived experiences” of people who “suffer,” it’s just some undergrad-level sociolinguistic analysis. If it’s not, it’s a fatuous attempt to depict how the “real” issues of this generation — addiction, narcissism, paranoid obsession — are functionally irrelevant to our characters who are barely friends to begin with and shouldn’t be hanging out during a natural disaster anyway.
My friend Stevie offered that the film feels as if it’s created by some “Gen Z-borne A.I. bot hellbent on becoming a weeklong fixation of the FilmUpdates twitter page,” which made me think about this quote from star Amandla Stenberg:
“We have to figure out how to engage with social media responsibly, how to engage with it in a way that maintains humanity. The thing about these algorithms is they can so easily become echo chambers for the worst parts of ourselves. And it actually takes us, as a collective, to be the antithesis to that, to ... the A.I. that is shaping our world now, taking our biases and our insecurities and regurgitating it and feeding it back to us.”
Ostensibly, the message of the film is that when people lose access to the Internet, they lose their sense of reality and turn to their most primal, accusative instincts. It talks itself in circles around the concept of agency — who controls what information, and how, and why — and forces you to take the logical step further: that their beliefs and motives have been subtly and powerfully shaped by chronic Internet usage. Yet, it takes the fatalistic approach, claiming that the issue at hand is really The Algorithm, as if any of the characters could discuss how the nefarious actions of tech corporations impact their lives aside from getting fewer likes on Instagram than they used to. It removes any and all moral grounding from essentially every action performed on screen and renders any “humanity” there presented a mere afterthought.
Immediately before the final “twist,” our surviving characters fight about whether one of them cheated on the other and spill around in the aftermath of the hurricane to check the accused’s phone for receipts. It’s one of the few images from the film that resonated even remotely as a metaphor — the “muddying” of relationships and truth as mediated by our phones — but you don’t believe that any character, even after the events of the film, would ever consider “how to engage with social media responsibly.” You don’t leave the theater with a thought other than I wish someone finished the job.
Not Okay, released on Hulu in July and starring Zoey Deutch, was similarly half-baked. The film warns you from the start about its “unlikable female protagonist,” but doesn’t alert you to the banal story that lies ahead. In the opening monologue, Deutch’s Danni claims that she wants “to have purpose,” “to be known,” “to be loved.” You spend the next excruciating ninety minutes watching her in the quest to achieve these goals: lying her way through grief groups, capitalizing on unfairly-earned sympathy to get out of doing any work. You see her manipulate a PTSD-addled teenager and discover the true evil of influencer culture via a hookup-gone-awry with a coworker. You understand that her shallowness is a function of her Internet usage, but the film doesn’t give her a single redeeming quality or you a reason to continue watching. It’s not enough for a movie to make fun of its protagonist at every turn, winkingly telling you that they are Selfish and Wrong. If everyone is a navel-gazing opportunist, then no one is. If everyone is a bad person except gun control activists and survivors of “real” trauma, who’s left?
For all that The Discourse is concerned with vanity, with gender, with The Internet and Its Consequences, why can’t anyone in Hollywood seem to get it right? Why does everyone seem to be grasping at straws, flailing in the maelstrom of Content with nothing new to say? It could be because the culture is simultaneously atomized and stuck, fractured beyond repair into countless subcultures and unable to budge out of any of them, leaving us all to wither in our own corners of the Online World. My friend Jack’s tweet (below) is a true indictment of the current state of cinema; in an age where people spend more time staring at screens than ever before, it feels almost offensive that virtually no effort into portraying or critiquing this tendency has been sincere, productive, and sufficiently thrilling. Is there not a single voice in this chaos that can reject the vapidity and clichés?
Strangely enough, when I think of the best representations of how we use the Internet, as opposed to the nihilistic theory that the algorithms only use us, books come to mind. I think of the e-mails in Sally Rooney’s novels and The Idiot by Elif Batuman, masterful digital manifestations of interiority and anxiety imbued with real emotional weight. Leave Society by Tao Lin and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist have received praise for their commentary on neurotic social media usage, the rabbit holes we dig for ourselves and fall down on our own volition. It’s strange that social media seems to lend itself better to evaluation via novel. Is the Internet, in all of its hypnotic hysteria, so visually unexciting that writing about it has more power than filming it?
There are a few other films I would lump into the category of lackluster efforts to translate The Internet to the screen: Zola, Sharp Stick, Mainstream, Nerve. Each takes an interesting premise or conceit — about artifice, desire, or fame — and absolutely wastes it on simple parody or weak scrutiny. For people looking to cringe for an hour and a half and leave your watching experience no more enlightened than if you scrolled on TikTok for the same amount of time, maybe this genre of movies is for you. As for films that I think understand the deranging power of the Internet in any intelligent and cogent way, I’d recommend Jane Schoenbrun’s lowkey horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and the hilarious Ingrid Goes West. I just hope that the coming decade has a few more films that eloquently describe and satirize The Culture as it relates to the Internet, because if it doesn’t, we’re in for the Boring 20s.
The Bodies Bodies Bodies are Not Not Not Okay
I read this at 12:36 in the morning and I just have to say that this article made me laugh and put me in a better mood. The next film I watch, I promise to ask myself the same questions you asked in your piece. Great work here!