We’re stepping into the Aussie indie files once again, and
you know that things are gonna get surreal when I see the guy who gave me the
screener for this film within the first five minutes. A mockumentary-style
thriller set within the underbelly of online humiliation fetishism, the film
follows director Julian Shaw in his efforts to make a documentary about Ceara
Lynch, a professional ‘humiliatrix’, and the finer details of her line of work.
However, as he finds himself deeper and deeper in her world, what begins as an
expose on fetishes turns into a much darker voyage into the unknown.
As someone with a pre-established love for metafiction, I
already knew I’d be on board with this particular feature. However, I find the
way that the line between reality and fiction gets blurred to be a little…
slight? Maybe it’s because this is the most dramatised work Julian has
attempted yet (his other works are more emphatically documentary), but I kept finding this film to be less psychedelic than it kept
letting on. It’s the kind of situation where it feels like that if it was kept
as straight documentary, it would have ended up a lot more interesting than
what we ultimately get. Not for lack of trying, though.
Shaw and Lynch’s depiction of this online world definitely
hits positivity more times than not, showing kink in a more productive way than
I would have guessed considering the film’s overall mood. Knowing how much this
particularly variety of fetishism is regularly mocked nowadays (what with
‘cuck’ being the lazy troll’s go-to insult), it at least gives it a form of
real-world grounding. From giving men a space to fulfill their sexual tastes in
a safe environment, to how those who allow such services are, in their own way,
a type of healer, it all scans properly.
However, getting back to the reality-fiction line, there is
rarely, if ever, any doubt of what’s really going on. It could just be the
result of me having watched films like The Game or even Cam from 2018, but when
this film tries to twist the narrative, it never really came as that much of a
shock. It doesn’t help that the film’s main reference point as far as
mockumentary thrills appears to start and stop with The Blair Witch Project,
right down to the framing and setting of its climax.
But that’s with the more overt attempts at mindfuck. Where
the film manages to gain a bit of success back is in how the mockumentary style
is wielded by its director, specifically in terms of why we’re seeing what
we’re seeing. The version we get of Julian Shaw is someone who always keeps the
camera rolling. Even when other people would have stopped long before, even
when those in-frame wouldn’t have wanted it, and hell, even when Julian himself
is in the middle of some awful shit, that lens is always watching. In terms of
the voyeurism that’s baked-in when it comes to where sexual pleasure meets the
Internet, it adds a nice layer to the proceedings… but it also unearths
something quite perverse about the creative process itself.
Spend long enough on an artistic pursuit, doesn’t matter if
it’s film, music, writing, or anything else, and it becomes a part of one’s
everyday thought processes. After a while, life itself becomes a building block
from which to create art. I’ve even dipped into this myself, getting into
varying levels of TMI in trying to explain my personal connection with a given
film and my attempts to explain why that connection is there. But there can be
a line that gets crossed, when you start viewing the worse shit happening
around you, or even happening to you, and rather than engaging with that
shit as it happens, the first thought that enters your head is “I could turn
this into something”.
It’s a rather fucked-up mentality… but it’s real, and it
might be a by-product of what this film is ultimately about. No, it’s not
really about online kink or the line between reality and fiction, or even about
Julian’s photographic obsession. Instead, what the film ends up truly speaking
on is what remains one of my least favourite themes in media: The American
Dream. I won’t rehash my sheer apathy towards this ideal, lest I turn into the
same boredom I would be railing against, and instead look at how it relates to
the story being told.
The Internet, for good and for bad, is basically the perfect
arena for the American Dream to exist in. The self-made entrepreneurialism at the
core of the Dream is something that the online space can turn into reality
easier than anywhere else, and as we see with Ceara Lynch and how she makes
money online, it shows the web as a place where you can make people buy, or
even believe, anything. But in its distillation of that ideal, it also carries
with it the predatory cynicism alongside it; the mentality that money is the
one and only thing that can guarantee one’s success, or even one’s freedom, and
everyone else being either roadblocks to avoid or walking wallets to exploit.
Use Me may not be the deftest attempt at reality-warping
fiction I’ve covered, or even the best in its specific brand of
reality-warping, but I still think credit is due for just how much it manages
to cover in its run time thematically. As a look at online entrepreneurialism,
sexuality and the Internet, the more morbid side of the creative process, and
even the suspension of disbelief behind pretty much all forms of pornography,
it shows lucidity and a commendable willingness to dive head-long into its
subject matter. It may have been relatively easy to see through, but that
didn’t make those images any less telling of the human condition in the
Internet age.
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