Yours portly is playing catch-up on the blog after a grueling Homecoming Week at work.  Apologies for delayed and/or missing posts lately.  —TPP

I’m not a huge fan of “found footage” films, most of which are just knock-offs of The Blair Witch Project (1999).  Of course, I see the appeal for studios:  these flicks are cheap to make, and offer (at least in theory) a more visceral experience.  There are exceptions (such as today’s film), but found footage flicks typically devolve into lots of shaky camera work and improbably perfectly placed cameras that always seem to capture the exact video and audio that they need to tell the story.

Naturally, that’s because it’s all directed and staged, but it reveals the lie inherent in these films.  Far from being “found,” the footage is actually quite curated—but in a sloppy manner to create the illusion of us just picking up someone’s perfectly edited (in-camera!) VHS tape.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of reviewing security camera footage will know that they rarely capture anything worthwhile.  The footage is too grainy to identify anyone positively; audio is lacking or non-existent; footage gets overwritten with new footage quickly.  The frustration for law-abiding citizens, of course, is that security cameras never seem to get the right angle to catch criminals, but always keeps an eye on the rest of us.  CCTV might help keep down crime, but it really just ends up monitoring the rest of us.  It’s the definition of anarcho-tyranny.

But I digress.  I recently watched a good found footage film, 2020’s Spree.  It’s a horrific dark comedy, mostly because it shows the extreme toll of living in a terminally-online world, in which shallow and hallow people gauge their self-worth in terms of likes, impressions, and reactions.

The title is a double entendre:  in the Los Angeles of the film, “Spree” is a ridesharing service like Uber.  A driver for Spree, the alliteratively named Kurt Kunkle, begins poisoning his riders in a killing spree in an attempt to go viral while teaching his tiny handful of viewers “The Lesson.”  Teaming up with Kurt, albeit somewhat unwillingly, is a true social media influencer that Kurt once babysat.

The film naturally unfolds gradually, with the audience meeting Kurt and his “empire,” “Kurt’s World.”  We soon learn that Kurt is a failure in the world of online influencing, despite his constant livestreams, content creation, and musical production.  His father is on the wrong end of middle age and similarly obsessed with Internet stardom, trying to land gigs at seedy nightclubs to “play” DJ sets.  Both father and son are on a quest to get big names to “at” them, but the son is on a darker quest of virality-via-murder.

The film is gripping at points, in part because, with the right male role model and/or some structure, Kurt could be a normal, creative young man.  Despite his horrid crime spree, he is somewhat sympathetic—it’s clear that Kurt has grown up in a world that is superficial and empty.  Kurt himself says (to paraphrase), “Life doesn’t matter if it isn’t documented.”  It’s a sentiment that is humorously chilling when the viewer considers that there are people who really believe that—and it’s sad.

Indeed, Kurt seems to justify his actions in this framework—even his victims become “stars” in his deadly livestream.  Some passengers do get away.  Kurt’s foil, as it were, is a comedienne who the film desperately wants us to believe is funny, but who (fitting the woke cultural Zeitgeist that dominated when the film was released) is just an untalented woman of color.  The actress was actually a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the 2010s, and everyone in the film acts as though she’s hysterically funny and hot (she’s not either of those things).  She is really the sour point of the film, as her “comedy” is basically just scolding people for not being cool and black and a woman.

That said, even this unlikeable heroine undergoes a character arc.  Her character’s catchphrase—“Eyes on me!,” accented with aggressive handclaps—is itself a call to engage in the endless cycle of social media engagement.  She comes to realize the social and human toll, which ironically only serves to catapult her career even higher.

Spree is well worth watching.  It’s on Shudder, and I imagine it’s available on other platforms.  I found it utterly fascinating, and the deaths are truly tragic—innocent victims of a world that is always para-socially connected, but forever isolated.