Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

A year and a half later, I have the option. Nightlife — clubs and bars — has come back. New York City, where I live, has more than a few really great disco parties, provided you are fully vaccinated. Lawmakers and public health experts have loosened messaging and restrictions, even as warnings about the delta variant continue.

But the question that lingers is, if nightlife was shut down so urgently at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, should we be going out at all while it continues? Is there really a responsible way to dance to “Rasputin” in a nightclub full of sweaty people?

The strict and simple answer from public health experts is no, not yet. But if people were strict and simple when it comes to following public health advice, the US would probably be having a different conversation regarding Covid-19.

​​The answer to these questions then involves understanding personal risk and recognizing our own responsibility to the communities we belong to. This past summer, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, public health experts reported an outbreak that was connected to nightlife and affected many people who were already vaccinated. Very few of those vaccinated people appeared to get severely ill, but it was a real-life illustration of the risk that remains.

And on the flip side, some scientists say that outbreak displayed a real-life example of a community coming together and mitigating harm, not only with vaccinations but also by proactively protecting one another. In turn, it provided us a model that we could all use when we think about risk assessment.

What to think about if you’re going to go out

In an epidemiologist’s ideal world, no one would be going out. All of the epidemiology professors I spoke to — including from UCLA, Columbia, NYU, and the University of Washington — said they would not personally partake in a night at a crowded indoor nightclub or bar right now.

Nightlife venues are risky because they satisfy everything Covid-19 needs to thrive. They’re indoors and ventilation isn’t usually great. They’re crowded with people in close proximity to one another. Those people are usually yelling to be heard over the music — yelling propels droplets into the air, which is both gross when you think about it and unnerving when you consider that’s how SARS- CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is spread. Throw the virus into a place with all those combined factors and it could spread quickly and easily. That’s why the epidemiologists I spoke to wouldn’t be going out.

“Epidemiologists are often the buzzkills of the party,” Danielle Ompad, an associate professor of epidemiology at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, told me. “But we are the buzzkill so you can continue having fun. We’re all about harm reduction and let’s have fun in a way where there aren’t consequences. “

Ompad said that on a spectrum of risk assessment, epidemiologists and public health officials skew toward the very careful end. She recently went to a homecoming celebration for her alma mater and said that even with capacity restrictions and vaccination requirements, she still kept her mask on and maintained distance from unmasked partiers.

Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images

Australians drinking in a bar on October 11, after 106 days of Syndey’s lockdown. They are happy.

But a huge part of public health is understanding that humans are going to be human, the epidemiologists also noted. Some will make mistakes. Some won’t follow every rule. Some won’t listen to every piece of advice. On top of that is the year-and-a-half of shutdowns, restarts, and disruption to normal life — things that can affect decision-making, especially impulsive decisions.

Hence the emphasis on harm reduction. Nightlife establishments are open, across the US, so epidemiologists understand that the human inclination is to go to them. They also understand that an idyllic world of regular and extensive testing, masking, and reduced capacity is pretty far from the world we have.

All that in mind, there are a few things epidemiologists say we should consider if we do partake in nightlife.

Barun Mathema, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, explained that there are three general factors to think about with regard to risk: the level of community transmission and vaccination, what precautions a venue is taking to ensure safety, and personal vaccination status.

What you’re looking for is high vaccination and corresponding low Covid-19 positivity rates and cases per capita, within your community; venues that take precautions like reduced capacity, vaccination checks, and ventilation; and making sure you are fully vaccinated. Triangulating those three factors, Mathema explains, can help make something as fluid as risk easier to grasp.

“Risk is a very difficult concept to understand, even as somebody who studies risk for a living,” Mathema told Vox. “If you are fully vaccinated, are healthy, have no underlying reasons to be put in a higher risk bracket, and your environment and community is in near or full vaccination compliance — you can say that’s a fairly low personal risk environment at that point.”

The wrinkle in this risk calculus is, Mathema explains, that there are still a lot of variables. For example, even if everyone presents vaccination records at the door, the efficacy of vaccines generally wanes over time, meaning the people present may have slightly different levels of immune protection. There are also stories popping up about fake vaccine cards. Breakthrough infections do occur and have occurred at nightlife venues. So while these guidelines can help you assess risk in going out, the risk present in nightlife — or really any activity — will never be at zero. The completely safe activity would be staying home alone.

What makes Covid-19 precautions so complicated is that our personal decisions don’t just affect us. The coronavirus is contagious. It spreads via airborne droplets. If you get sick from visiting a nightlife venue, you could put the people around you — at the grocery store, at the cleaners, at a restaurant, etc. — at risk. Conversely, you could have a situation in which you contract Covid-19 without even being at a nightclub — you just happen to come into contact with someone who was.

“That’s always been the problem with these types of respiratory-based diseases. It’s not just about your risk. You can’t just say, ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I’m young and healthy,’ because you may be unfairly and unknowingly putting other people at risk,” Mathema said.

To fully grasp the personal risk of going out to bars or clubs during Covid-19 means not just thinking about if this kind of risky activity presents a danger to you, but also how it affects the people around you. It means thinking about the communities and social circles you belong to, and how to keep people within those spheres safe.

If you’re going out, protect the people around you

While partaking in nightlife and fun might be optional for many of us, there are a lot of people in the service and entertainment industry where it’s their livelihood. Terence Edgerson, a nightlife producer based in New York City, saw the pandemic shut down the city that never sleeps and then watched it slowly reawaken in recent months.

“I would say it’s been a roller coaster without any stops,” Edgerson told me. “Usually you have the option of getting on or off. But this was one where I didn’t have any options. It’s different when your work is your life and that it’s also your livelihood.”

Edgerson credits his friends with helping him while nightlife was put on pause. Slowly, outdoor events — New York City allowed outdoor dining and drinking with social distance restrictions in June 2020 — were allowed to happen again. But it wasn’t until around June 2021 that Edgerson’s parties were happening full- time again, with proof of vaccination, for Pride. (New York City announced a vaccine mandate for indoor venues in August, but many businesses, including Edgerson’s parties, were already implementing similar restrictions over the summer.)

“All of our parties have been vaccine-only and we’ve gotten no pushback and no blowback from it,” Edgerson explained. The fragility of New York City nightlife in 2020 changed the way Edgerson and many in his cohort looked at vaccination mandates and safety measures. Instead of viewing them as hindrances, he sees them as ways to keep his friends safe and keep his livelihood intact. In epidemiology-speak, Edgerson was thinking about protecting his community.

Any pushback against vaccination checks and safety precautions such as reduced capacity, Edgerson asserts, would be dwarfed by the backlash if a party was the epicenter of an outbreak. New York City nightlife, especially gay nightlife, is intensely interconnected. An outbreak at one party could hypothetically set off a chain reaction in which parties, clubs, and bars around the city could get shut down again.

An outbreak did happen around the Fourth of July, about 200 miles north of New York City in Provincetown. P-town and its indoor venues, including nightclubs, bars, and live shows, saw an estimated influx of over 60,000 people over the holiday weekend, and with it saw a surge of more than 1,000 Covid-19 cases, according to the Washington Post. Many were alarmed that the coronavirus spread in a town with vaccination checks and in a county with a high vaccination rate.

That 1,000-case figure might seem like a startling number, especially for a town that had just a handful of cases prior to July 4. But it’s less than 2 percent of the estimated 60,000 people who visited over the weekend. Further, thanks to vaccinations, many of those cases were asymptomatic or mild. Only seven people were hospitalized, and no one from that cluster died.

Instead of being a nightmare scenario, some public health officials are looking at Provincetown’s outbreak as a community success. The vaccination rate and the vaccination checks at the venues are evidence that these pre-emptive precautions help keep people safe, they argue. But there’s also another element: the way in which people in P-town, gay men especially, were proactive about testing and public health measures. This, some experts say, can be traced to the way the gay male community responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially when the American government failed to act in its early stages.

“In P-town, I think that there was a community of gay men who understand the importance of contact tracing,” Pamina Gorbach, a professor of epidemiology at UCLA who has an expertise in HIV. Gorbach explained that in the absence of tools and structural support, the gay male community had to come together to protect one another.

Those important lessons are being reflected and praised in this pandemic.

“I think being public about infection, letting people know — that’s a great example of community care,” Jennifer Balkus, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, said. “Talking about testing openly is one of the key ways to help reduce stigma. And that is super important to promote testing and eventually isolating, and quarantining if they need to.”

Balkus, Gorbach, and epidemiologists I spoke to said that masking at venues would be ideal, as would treating each outing like a possible exposure and following CDC guidelines. This means that if you go out on a weekend, you would then get tested three to five days after, wear a mask in public, and limit your exposure to people in the meantime.

Epidemiologists also stressed the importance of regular testing and communicating the results, especially with the lack of robust contact tracing here in the US. That might be as simple as shooting a text to your friends or anyone who was out with you or calling the venue if you test positive. Or in the social media age, it’s posting to your followers.

Ilker Eray/GocherImagery/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Here are some people dancing in Istanbul. Are they dancing to “Rasputin”? I’m not sure, but I hope so.

Edgerson explained to me that in the wake of P-town, and in rare cases of breakthrough infections, he’s seen friends post about testing positive and telling people who they were with to go get tested. He said he gets tested often, and he urges his followers, friends, and fellow partiers to get tested regularly — before and after his parties.

“If one of us gets sick, you know, many more can get sick — it affects us all,” Edgerson said. “And dancing, and queer dancing especially, is so vital to us. It’s our mental health escape. It’s so vital that we take care of it and take care of each other and ourselves.”

The response to the Provincetown outbreak offers lessons about personal accountability to the people around us and perhaps a model for anyone who’s going out. Hopefully, there will be a day when we can, if the spirit moves us, dance to “Rasputin” in a sweaty nightclub without a worry in the world. For now, it’s helpful to know how to think about those worries, and how to act responsibly in the meantime.

Jeremy Irvine as Ivor Novello and Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction.

Terence Davies’s last film, A Quiet Passion, centered on the poet Emily Dickinson, painting her as a saint for uncertainty and depicting a bitter life; in Benediction, Davies turns to a different poet, Siegfried Sassoon (a terrific Jack Lowden). Benediction — which means “blessing” — spends most of its time on Sassoon’s passionate but thwarted relationships with several different men, after which he eventually married a woman. The whole story is framed by Sassoon’s late-in-life conversion to Catholicism, amid his soured marriage and his son’s derision. There is no happy- go-lucky ending here, only the sense that an ineffable longing we have, to know and be known, is so precious and rare that most of us never find its fulfillment here on earth. But the film’s title lays bare its aims: To offer words of blessing over a man who never quite found the love he craved and, yet, kept looking.

How to watch it: Benediction is awaiting US distribution.

Bergman Island

An early contender for one of my favorite films of 2021, Bergman Island is a layered and lovely film about the tension between making art and living real life, and how the two feed one another. Vicky Krieps stars as Chris, a filmmaker who travels with her partner Tony (Tim Roth), a more commercially successful filmmaker, to Fårö island for a creative retreat. Fårö is where the great director Ingmar Bergman lived and made his later work. As the pair spend time on the island, they start to be drawn apart; then, Chris’s new film starts to take shape, and we start to understand how life experience filters into her work. Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve — and presumably based, in part, on her own experiences with former partner Olivier Assayas — Bergman Island is like a diamond that you can turn over and over, seeing the light refract through each facet in new ways.

How to watch it: Bergman Island opened in theaters on October 15.

C’mon C’mon

Joaquin Phoenix stars in C’mon C’mon, the sensitive and huge- hearted new movie from Mike Mills (whose last film was 20th Century Women). Phoenix is Johnny, an artist interviewing young people around the US about the future: what they hope for, what they dream of, what they fear. But when his semi-estranged sister (Gaby Hoffman) suddenly has to attend to an emergency, he ends up caring for his precocious and eccentric 9-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman), and both of them learn a lot from one another. The premise of C’mon C’mon could easily swing into way-too-precious territory, but Mills’s steady hand and feeling for story rhythms, along with Phoenix’s performance, keep the ship on course. The result is a warm and winsome meditation on the ties that bind us to one another.

How to watch it: C’mon C’mon opens in theaters on November 19.

Drive My Car

Ryusuke Hamaguchi directed and co-wrote the screenplay for Drive My Car, which is based on a Haruki Murakami short story. The film centers on Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director who returns home one day to find that his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a TV executive, has died. Then time jumps forward, and Kafuku is directing a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, with each actor performing in their own language. He decides to cast his wife’s lover, Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), in the main role. Through rehearsals and the relationships that develop during the project — including with Misaki (Toko Miura), the quiet young woman hired to drive him to and from the theater — Yūsuke starts to understand something that’s nearly ineffable about his past and his future. It’s a melancholy, meaningful film, occupied with friendships, old wounds, and the task of continuing to live.

How to watch it: Drive My Car will open in the US on November 24.

Drunken Birds

Ivan Grbovic’s globe-trotting film centers on Willy (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), who used to work for a drug cartel in Mexico but ran afoul of his boss when he fell in love with the boss’s wife Marlena (Yoshira Escárrega). Willy fled to Canada; now he’s a migrant worker in rural Quebec. The family who owns the farm on which he’s working has their own set of family issues, and the gruff but kind employer grows less kind when he comes to believe one of his employees has hurt his teenage daughter. It’s a kind of domestic epic, a story of straining hope and being trapped, full of gorgeous vistas and heartbreak.

How to watch it: Drunken Birds is awaiting US distribution.

Flee

It’s rare to see animation as the main medium in a documentary, but Flee uses it to great effect. Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his friend, Amin, who endured years of horror after fleeing Afghanistan with his family in the 1990s following the Taliban takeover. Flashbacks to Amin’s experiences are mixed in with his current uncertainties surrounding his relationship with his partner, Kasper, who desperately wants to buy a house, get married, and settle down. The effect of his past is a strong one, showing how even after finding safety and relative stability, Amin’s previous experiences will never stop reaching their long fingers into his present. Flee is heartbreaking and moving, and hard to forget.

How to watch it: Flee will open in theaters on December 3.

Listening to Kenny G

A backlit image of the saxophone player’s curly hair. HBO
Kenny G in Listening to Kenny G.

Listening to Kenny G is a documentary about the smooth-jazz sax crooner that sets out to ask a few barely answerable questions: Why do people love Kenny G? Why do people hate him? And what do their responses to him say about taste, preference, and art? In films like Hail Satan? (about the Satanic Temple) and The Pain of Others (about women who believe they have Morgellons disease), director Penny Lane has consistently refused to walk the easy route. There are no pat answers in her movies, and Listening to Kenny G is no exception. The sax player himself is the film’s main interviewee, but he’s flanked by music critics who point out all his shortcomings. What right do they have to tell someone who walked down the aisle to a Kenny G song that they’re wrong? That’s the question Listening to Kenny G raises and doesn’t try to answer outright. Instead, it focuses on a vital secondary question: Is there a dividing line between “I like this” and “This is good”? And should we care?

How to watch it: Listening to Kenny G will premiere on HBO and start streaming on HBO Max on December 3.

The Lost Daughter

An image of two women, one who’s wearing a large hat. Yannis Drakoulidis / Netflix

Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson in The Lost Daughter.

Maggie Gyllenhaal directed and wrote The Last Daughter, based on an Elena Ferrante novel, and it’s an extraordinary directorial debut. Olivia Colman plays Leda, a middle-aged professor of comparative literature who’s on a working holiday in Greece. There, she meets Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother who dearly loves her daughter but finds the demands of parenthood are driving her to distraction. As Nina and Leda spend time together, their story starts to twine with Leda’s past (in which she’s played by Jessie Buckley), a time when caring for her own young daughters pushed her to her limits. The Last Daughter is a marvelously complex story, expertly crafted, with the freedom, loneliness, and claustrophobia of the main characters aptly evoked by the cinematography. Its splendid performances and keen sense of ambiguity feel so true to life that you might feel your heart catch in your throat.

How to watch it: The Lost Daughter will open in limited theaters on December 17 and begin streaming on Netflix on December 31.

Memoria

A surreal drama from the celebrated director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria stars Tilda Swinton as Jessica, a woman visiting her sister in Bogotá, Colombia. One night, she is awakened in the dark by the deafening sound of a bang. Yet nobody else seems to have heard it. What’s going on? It’s never totally clear, but solving a mystery isn’t the point of Memoria. Instead, it’s a slow, odd, hypnotic journey in which Jessica looks for answers, digs into life itself, and comes face to face with what it means to actually be a human inhabiting this planet. The film is strange and engrossing, and if you feel like you’ve slipped into another dimension watching it, then you’ve watched it well.

How to watch it: As distributed by Neon, Memoria will open on December 26 at New York City’s IFC Center, then travel throughout the United States, playing exclusively on one screen at one theater at a time. Keep an eye on Neon’s website for details.

Passing

Rebecca Hall wrote and directed this adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, which is about two childhood friends who encounter one another again in adulthood. Irene (Tessa Thompson), who goes by Reeny, lives with her doctor husband (André Holland) and their children in a stately Harlem house. Claire (Ruth Negga) is married to a racist businessman (Alexander Skarsgård), who has no idea that his wife is not white. The film feels almost dreamlike, evoking a world in which the lines that separate friendship from desire, love from hate, and white from Black are more permeable than you might expect — a world a lot like today’s.

How to watch it: Passing will open in limited theaters, then begin streaming on Netflix on November 10.

Petite Maman

Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma returns with a much smaller-scale but no less affecting film. Young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), whose beloved grandmother has just passed away, is helping her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) clean out the now-empty home where her mother grew up. Nelly is close to both of her parents, but is especially concerned about her mother. She longs to have one more day to spend with her grandmother. One day, in the woods, she meets a girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two forge a friendship that might be the fulfillment of her fears and wishes. Petite Maman is a pithy, gemlike film, clocking in at only 72 minutes and as pristine and poignant a reflection on the bonds that tie us to one another across time and generations as one can imagine.

How to watch it: Petite Maman was acquired by Neon and is awaiting a US release date.

Procession

A boy in robes stands lit from below, with a stained glass window behind him. Netflix
A scene from Procession.

Indelible, gutting, and hopeful, Procession is a documentary unlike anything you’ve seen before. The filmmakers, led by director Robert Greene, reached out to six men in the Kansas City, Missouri, area who were abused as boys by Catholic priests and clergy. Rather than proceeding as an exposé, Procession is a collaborative project in healing, as each of the six men creates and films traumatic memories in a drama therapy-informed quest to … well, what, exactly? That’s what they’re exploring: the meaning of healing, the ways we perform to cope and to crack ourselves open, and the possibilities, such as they are, for redemption. It’s a must-see.

How to watch it: Procession will open in limited theaters on November 12 and start streaming on Netflix on November 19.

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion’s first film since 2009’s Bright Star is The Power of the Dog, which is set, despite its New Zealand shooting location, in the American West. For most of its runtime, The Power of the Dog is confined to the big ranch that Phil and George (Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) own and operate. George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and brings her there, along with her waifish teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil despises both of the ranch’s new residents. But people’s exteriors rarely match what they’re capable of inside. The film will keep you guessing as it morphs from a Western to a romance to something deliciously dark, a melodrama with an eerie bite and sweeping, craggy vistas.

How to watch it: The Power of the Dog will open in limited theaters on November 17 and start streaming on Netflix on December 1.

The Souvenir Part II

The Souvenir Part II picks up right where 2019’s The Souvenir left off. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is reeling from the overdose death of her boyfriend (Tom Burke), and she decides, somehow, to process what happened through her thesis film. Meanwhile, her mother (Tilda Swinton) tries to help her get through the grief. The Souvenir Part II (based on writer and director Joanna Hogg’s own memories) is kind of a movie about making The Souvenir. But it’s also about the sly and surprising ways that art can help us cope, understand, and heal from what life throws our way. The film is Hogg’s gentle tribute to her younger, sometimes more foolish self, and it’s very funny, too. (Be sure to watch The Souvenir before you see it; it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available to digitally rent on other platforms.)

How to watch it: The Souvenir Part II will open in theaters on October 29.

The Velvet Underground

Todd Haynes directs a highly satisfying documentary about the legendary Velvet Underground, the rock band that formed in New York City in 1964 and came to embody an important moment in the history of rock. (Plus, they rock.) Haynes is no conventional director, and while he takes a fairly standard approach to the story — beginning with Lou Reed’s childhood on Long Island and moving forward from there — he weaves together more of a tapestry than a clunky paint-by-numbers documentary. The Velvet Underground is as much about the culture of 1960s New York City, dominated by Andy Warhol’s in-crowd and the work they made at his Factory, as the band itself. That’s to the film’s benefit. Using the screen as a window and collaging together images and footage with audio from interviews, Haynes evokes a mood and an era; he reminds audiences that some success comes from talent and hard work, and some of it just comes from being in the right place at the right time.

How to watch it: The Velvet Underground will open in limited theaters and begin streaming on Apple TV+ on October 15.

The Worst Person in the World

One of this year’s breakout festival favorites is The Worst Person in the World, about four years in the life of 20-something Julie (Renate Reinsve). Like many young people, she realizes in university that she doesn’t want to be a neuroscientist; she wants to be an artist. So she blows up her life and starts over, winding up in a relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). That’s just the beginning. The Worst Person in the World tells Julie’s story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue — she is the main character in her own story, one that she’s writing as she’s living it. It’s a film about navigating life as a millennial, trying to figure out what love is like, what work is for, and whether you’re following your heart or whether you’re just, well, the worst person in the world.

How to watch it: The Worst Person in the World was acquired by Neon and is awaiting a US release date.

Unclenching the Fists

Unclenching the Fists is the story of Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a teenage girl from a small village in the outer reaches of Russia’s Caucasus region. She lives with her incredibly controlling father and her younger brother, who is so dependent on her that he calls her “mom.” Having suffered a horrifying accident in childhood, she needs surgery before she can leave home, but her father refuses to take her to get the necessary medical care, unwilling to let her out of his grasp. At the same time, she is also being pursued by a somewhat repulsive young man from the same village, but he’s the only boy who’s ever showed interest. When her older brother returns home from his job in a nearby city, the dynamic at home begins to shift. Ada is trapped, sometimes literally, by the men all around her, and Unclenching the Fists (which won director Kira Kovalenko a top prize at the Cannes film festival) is the tale of a young woman struggling to break free.

How to watch it: Unclenching the Fists was acquired by Mubi and is awaiting a US release date.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

A haunting, funny, tightly written meditation on loneliness and connection, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is set up as a triptych. In the first story, one woman (Hyunri) tells her friend (Kotone Furukawa) about the man one of them recently met on a date; she doesn’t realize her friend is hiding a secret. In the second story, a young woman (Katsuki Mori) agrees to set a trap for her professor (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) at the behest of her boyfriend, but it doesn’t go as planned. And in the third story, a woman (Fusako Urabe) returns to her hometown for her high school reunion and meets with an old love, only to discover all is not as it seems. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi crafts each one as a sensitive and surprising tale, and the result is a film that asks how luck and fantasy operate in the love we preserve and the love we throw away.

How to watch it: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy opened in the US on October 15.

“We’re basically creating an MCU-style universe of characters on TikTok,” says Benjamin. “Some succeed, some fail — it’s the TV pilot season model where we only invest in those that get traction and audiences love.” The company says it’s raised $1.5 million in seed funding so far.

@sydneyplus

Public service announcement ‼️Any big ones missing? #foryou #fypシ #dating #datingapps

♬ Into The Thick Of It! - The Backyardigans

Last week, Sydney, Ollie, and the rest of the characters — Tia, who discovers her boyfriend is African royalty; Carmen, a self-described sugar baby and bimbo; Chris, a father and Army veteran; and “Billy Hundos,” a “finance fuckboy,” among others — convened IRL in Los Angeles, ostensibly to participate in a contest to win a billion dollars. This also acted as FourFront’s “big reveal,” in which the characters hosted a live Zoom event and showed that they all exist within a single universe. In total, the characters have a combined 1.9 million followers and 281 million views.

Fictional influencers are not unique to the TikTok era. In June 2006, a soft-spoken 16-year- old named Bree began uploading video confessionals to YouTube under the username Lonelygirl15. Bree, however, was actually the invention of screenwriters Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders, along with their lawyer-producer friend Greg Goodfried. (Interestingly, Goodfried is now the president of D’Amelio Family Enterprises, the company representing TikTokers Charli and Dixie D’Amelio.) Within months, millions of people tuned in, many turning to message boards to speculate about what was going on behind the scenes, and by September, sleuths had found trademark applications and pictures of the actress Jessica Rose, who played Bree. Some fans said they were “heartbroken” by the discovery, but the videos went on to air for another two years. Asked whether something like Lonelygirl15 could exist today, Flinders told the Guardian, “On YouTube now we wouldn’t get away with this for 30 seconds. People would know she’s fake immediately.”

But perhaps that’s less true for TikTok. While FourFront is adamant that most of its audience is aware that what they’re watching is the work of actors and writers, that’s nearly impossible to know for certain. “With everything that happened with QAnon and how alternate reality games have been weaponized, it’s important that we made our universe light and playful — no cult content, no dark content, and every one of our characters is openly fictional,” Benjamin says. Yet nearly all of the comments appear to engage with the characters just like they would with real TikTokers, giving advice and sharing reactions or their own experiences. Though FourFront has started using the hashtag #fictional on its videos and the word “fictional” in the characters’ bios, to expect that users who come across one of their videos on their For You page to put the clues together is asking quite a lot, considering most TikTokers use unrelated hashtags in their posts to gain more traction and choose intentionally weird bios to set themselves apart.

As a commercial rather than purely artistic venture, FourFront told Fast Company that its long-term revenue plan is to license their AI character voices to other companies, and to make money with some kind of subscription model or by selling tickets to live events starring their characters. “Why can’t I hang out with Harry Potter?” he said. “That’s the question this whole company began with: Why can’t we allow people to get closer to their favorite characters?”

@thatsthetia

yeah so um…any tips on how to handle this?? #boyfriends #blackqueen #royal #BombPopAwards #helpme

♬ original sound - Tia

The company also encourages its most invested followers to text their favorite characters on a separate messaging app and “unlock secrets,” using the AI language GPT-3 to respond. With an earlier character Paige, whose story concept was “all my friends blocked me!,” Benjamin says that when they told audiences at the beginning of the messaging session that it was a fictional story, 89 percent wanted to continue, and 42 percent “shared really intimate emotional data with the character.” (Benjamin says they do not plan to sell that data, but instead use it to improve their own storytelling.)

Those characters, by the way, are conceptualized and written by Benjamin and a team of writers, mostly recent grads from USC’s screenwriting program. Ollie’s bio describes him as “made with love by (rainbow flag emoji) actors and creators,” while Chris’s says “made by veteran actors and creators.” Actors, who film and direct themselves and then send footage to an editor, also contribute to the storylines. Cameisha Cotton, who plays Tia, says the idea was pitched to her agent in February as a web series, and that she’d done augmented reality projects beforehand. “They’re incredibly collaborative,” she says. “It’s the coolest SAG project I’ve ever been able to be a part of.”

FourFront is part of a larger wave of tech startups devoted to, as aspiring Zuckerbergs like to say, building the metaverse, which can loosely be defined as “the internet” but is more specifically the interconnected, augmented reality virtual space that real people share. It’s an undoubtedly intriguing concept for people with a stake in the future of technology and entertainment, which is to say, the entirety of culture. It’s also a bit of an ethical minefield: Isn’t the internet already full of enough real-seeming content that is a) not real and b) ultimately an effort to make money? Are the characters exploiting the sympathies of well-meaning or media illiterate audiences? Maybe!

On the other hand, there’s something sort of darkly refreshing about an influencer “openly” being created by a room of professional writers whose job is to create the most likable and interesting social media users possible. Influencers already have to walk the delicate line between aspirational and inauthentic, to attract new followers without alienating existing fans, to use their voice for change while remaining “brand-safe.” The job has always been a performance; it’s just that now that performance can be convincingly replicated by a team of writers and a willing actor.

“We’re telling stories that are a little bit larger than life, and I think a lot of influencers on TikTok do the same thing,” Benjamin says. It’s true — determining whether viral TikTok videos are “real” or created in earnest rather than ironically is the platform’s favorite sport. Tons of TikTokers play a character, to dramatic or comedic or aesthetic effect, but far fewer actually create a detailed narrative arc. If people really want to know whether someone like Sydney, Tia, or “Billy Hundos” is real, it’s not immensely difficult to figure out. But they fooled at least two newspapers, and if one of their videos came across my For You page, they probably would have fooled me, too. It almost feels like benevolent trolling, a nicer version of, say, a tweet designed to provoke outrage but really only ends up driving engagement to that person’s page. You sort of feel foolish taking the bait, but the internet is full of bizarre characters. How is anyone supposed to tell the difference?

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