Congratulations, you found four guys on 4chan who were cocky enough to show their faces for an interview, was my first impression of this documentary. TFW spends very little time trying to contextualize or inform beyond the impromptu interview that it does with young white men wending their way aimlessly through the suburban communities where they live, a metaphor for the movie’s directionless drift. There is a little indication of facility with internet subcultures in general: the documentary mostly floats on the surface of these five men’s testimony, occasionally providing a definition of a term from Know Your Meme or Urban Dictionary, giving the impression (if not the reality) of hastily-arranged, sloppily-researched high school essay turned in at the last minute, as opposed to the work at Gimlet’s Reply All (a spin-off of On the Media’s TLDR podcast), which feels like the gold standard of both internet journalism and journalism specifically about this topic (The story was also covered in print media at the BBC back in 2015).
I don’t often write about documentaries. I think this might be the first time in the two years (!) since we started. For the most part, I think the quality of Marble Hornets on YT (not gonna drop this recommendation) really spoiled me early on the potential storytelling impact of the docu/mocku/mentary format, but I’ve had my eyes out for something as good as the Mask You Live In, which I saw a few years ago, to think more deeply about the way we tell stories about young men in America. TFW’s chief stroke of genius is its investment of time into these young men. The two year gap allows for a lot of change in their interviewees’ lives and gives us some sense of their direction and trajectory, but without couching their stories into a narrative informed by data and experts, it feels a little too anecdotal and uncertain of a way forward.
