Unearthed: Internet Story
By Nicholas Russell
I had a friend once, a friend I can’t tell most people about because, when I still talked to them, I didn’t know what they looked like, where they lived, or what their real name was. They went by “Geri.”They said their favorite show was the UK teen sci-fi series Misfits. We met when I was in seventh grade, in the chat section of a free game involving vampires and werewolves that I had downloaded on my iPod Touch and played late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I can’t remember who started the conversation or why, though this fact matters less and less to me as time goes on. If I remember anything about my childhood, it’s that talking to strangers online as a kid held a frisson of adventure and taboo engendered partly by a mutual desire for anonymity—you start chatting mostly for the sake of it. Not long after those furtive initial messages, logging on in my dark bedroom, the glare from the screen hurting my eyes, asking how our respective days went and lying about what we did, it became apparent that Geri was both older and meaner than they had initially let on. We graduated from the game’s chat room to a third-party messaging app. I was introduced to about a dozen other strangers who joined Geri in ragging on almost anything that came to mind, movies, parents, teachers, music, and, most frequently, each other. The friendship I thought Geri and I had was diluted by a constant stream of conversation taking place at all times of the day. When it was suggested that as many of us as possible should try to get together in person, I left the group.
Often, so much of what you see and hear online is illusory, if not complete fantasy. Fake profile pictures, dead links, a voice but no face. It makes sense, then, that horror films, so often the repository of collective fears both rational and paranoid, would gravitate toward the extreme unknowns found in the depths of the internet. What I have continued to find so compelling about the found footage genre, or screenlife as it has fittingly come to be termed, is its ability to more capably depict the reality and strangeness of life than narrative fiction films. This is not because the camera is acknowledged as a camera but because those characters caught in the lens don’t act the way real people do. Or, we’d like to think, they don’t seem to. The irrationality and foolishness so often written and performed in horror—and reviled by audiences keen to point out lapses in dramatic veracity—may certainly be exaggerated. Then again, cinema is not an artform of reflections, but of impressions, remembrances, snapshots of instances where choices, especially the fatal ones, can be analyzed over and over again.
British filmmaker Adam Butcher’s 2010 short Internet Story begins, as so many internet found footage films do, with a desktop. This particular screen winks to life with the thick blue loading bars of dated Windows computers, beads on a digital abacus sliding to the right, disappearing, and cycling back again. Internet Story plays more like an episode of a true crime show than traditional found footage, with a calm, quiet British man narrating the events of a fatal encounter that starts out on innocuous online fringes, those YouTube channels and user-made websites created by far-flung enthusiasts that receive few visitors and ultimately disappear into the ether. A mysterious entity by the username Al1 creates and posts a puzzle, the prize of which is £9,000. An obnoxious young male YouTuber (an anachronistic term in this case) by the name of Fortress sets out to solve the first set of clues: a series of hand-drawn cartoons put together in some sort of sequence.
Internet Story is one of the more transparent, and earliest, works of this subgenre. Fortress is performed with an over-the-top glee by Duncan Wigman, a send-up of the mean nerd whose barbed humor is merely an imitation of the ubiquitous masculine showboating that pervades chat rooms and comments sections. Butcher’s short seems to start from a place of bemusement, highly aware of the internet as a place where people indulge their worst tendencies to gain attention, and not entirely unsettled by it. As for its format, Internet Story’s narrative framing echoes that of Lake Mungo and other mockumentaries, the events having already taken place, the yarn unspooled by an unseen director and editor, with the found footage elements appearing less as real-time documentation than forensic evidence. When Fortress figures out that the series of seemingly random drawings created by Al1 correspond to “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, we see an animated reenactment in the simplistic style of a ClipArt movie, the purpose of which is solely for the audience’s benefit.
In a recent review of Elle Reeve’s book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics, Becca Rothfeld analogizes the crowded anonymity of the nascent internet by talking about a meme. “In 1993, after dial-up but before smartphones, the cartoonist Peter Steiner published a drawing in the New Yorker that would come to define the early years of life online. In the picture, a mutt seated in front of a computer explains to a terrier: On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’” Here, the joke of the cartoon belies its more direct illustration of a vast, murky landscape where anyone can be anything and someone is always watching. Indeed, this constant looking supplies the very foundation of found footage, sometimes transforming cinema’s inherent voyeurism into a sadistic act of witnessing. Like reality television, like true crime, found footage presents a warped version of reality where the fact of our watching alters everything the audience sees. After all, these are constructed formats, directed to appear messy and spontaneous, modified for maximum suspense and drama, with a tenuous relationship to both the characters captured and the (in)visibility of the camera. The internet found footage subgenre only deepens this artifice, except now, beyond the webcam, there can be as many cameras and as many screens as necessary for the plot to continue.
Fortress’s treasure hunt becomes all the more comedic, and disturbing, for the fact that very few people seem to care what he’s up to. Internet Story’s irony lies in the knowledge that only after his death has Fortress’s existence become worthy of noticing. One of the short’s motifs underlines this disparity, with quick cutaways to Fortress’s dismally low view counts, his melodramatic, adolescent antics in the glimpses of his videos that we see indicating a lonely but abrasive soul. In many ways, Internet Story is the antithesis of the new generation of screenlife films like Host or Searching, both of which turn on the live presence of multiple characters whose screens act as those of the audience, and whose reactions stem from the horror of watching unspeakable things happen to their loved ones from afar. By contrast, no one was watching Fortress when it mattered, his alienation merely a fact rather than a caution.
And yet the question of the short’s presentation is never fully answered either. The narrator begins the film on a desktop and seems to manually search for each element, whether a video clip or a photograph, on Google. While the narrator’s remarks are prepared, his assemblage of the facts isn’t. We might assume he’s cut everything together later, but there are key moments when even this construction is interrupted, as in a YouTube clip of Fortress finding another clue. Holding a camcorder and a pen knife, Fortress struggles to open a locked cabinet, but instead of cutting to the opening, the narrator clicks ahead multiple times until the cabinet is finally unlocked. These are meta acknowledgments of authorial presence rarely shown in screenlife or found footage films. While a film may cut between characters’ screens, or contrive an overarching narrative in the style of a documentary where expected trappings like music, flashbacks, and talking heads function as built-in embellishments, rarely does the audience get to see a third-party perspective, in which the work is actively being tinkered with.
Perhaps this is because the disbelief found footage asks its audience to suspend is already delicate enough. To dramatize life in cinema is to distort it. This distortion can be an act of total and specific focus, the microscopic emotion, decision, omission, fight projected, blown up, and dissected for parts. Sometimes, the distortion begets an even greater distortion, an uneven tangle of images coming into focus, a funhouse mirror rather than a petri dish. If title cards and police reports and fake interviews aren’t enough to burnish a film’s “found” elements, why would a director tip their hand even further by drawing attention to the elaborate production taking place before the audience’s eyes? In reality, this is one of the genre’s strengths, the ability to play with veracity by layering external imperfections and interruptions thrown in by the third entity present in every movie, no matter what style. There is the story and its characters, the audience, and the filmmaker. In Internet Story’s brief runtime, the audience’s desire to follow the tantalizing, dark thread of “reality” to its final conclusion is aided by the film’s slight amateurism, its silly jokes, its affected, eerie soundtrack, its sudden, late-stage willingness to be ambiguous where before it was almost too clear. In other words, there is the feeling of a personality behind what the audience sees, a set of aesthetic and dramatic choices made, qualities that might be more easily attributed to the unseen narrator than the film’s actual director. Describing the appeal of horror, writer B. D. McClay describes what we might call Internet Story’s ultimate project, an exercise in genre but also a small, lingering lament over what we try to hide in the darkness of what used to be more widely, and descriptively, called the web. “I want to read or watch something that treats people as bottomless and doesn’t try to tack a fix-it solution on at the end,” McClay writes. “We can’t see all the way through ourselves. We’ll never really know who we are.”