Sunday 22 March 2020

Use Me (2020) - Movie Review



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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