The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his place, recognizes his privileges, and respects — to quote his deity and muse, Kamala Harris — “the context of all in which [he lives] and what came before [him].” If so permitted, he would love art, lounge in cuck chairs, and live in New York. Nothing fazes him more than the inability to think critically, or rather to think about thinking critically; his sincerity must be pegged to the contours of irony in order to demonstrate its authentic, unyielding value. His haters have all kinds of names for him, but these have little more than exculpatory, possibly emancipatory effect. Being “gay” allows him to own it and be one with fashion, being a “normie” enables him to fire back at the loonies and losers of history, and being a “soy boy,” the worst of them all, is a badge of honor for seeking the validation of strong, independent women. It is a mundane existence, to be sure, with stress, bills to pay, the works and all — but it’s nothing that therapy and solipsistic inquiry won’t fix.
Of course, as ideals go, this is itself fashionable nonsense, fabulous caricature. But it’s one which has endured, perplexingly, in an age where the violence of dialectics has never quite diminished. The suffragettes championed feminism, the civil rights movement advocated equality, and love would go on to conquer the world. It didn’t, because it was almost always imposed and universalized, and sometimes even adopted by simpering chimeras of hate. Thus came the bifurcation of two children, light and darkness; darkness chose ignorance, while light found knowledge. But knowledge of what? “The self,” drone the peddlers of autofiction. One of them is Billy Pedlow, and his ultra-micro-budget, NYC-set Me and My Victim — co-directed with Maurane, a Montreal-based multimedia artist — speaks best to this elusive husk of an identity. A multimedia diary entry of sorts, its editing and visuals courtesy of Maurane, Me and My Victim is an exposé and vindication of poetic mediocrity that’s utterly Pedlow’s own. Bookended by the start and (possible) end of a casual relationship, the film manifests the creation of a semi-professional, pseudo-collaborative one between the duo as they trawl through memories and text messages of their desire and disgust for each other.
It’s no Possession, and neither is it even close to the deep-fried saturation of a high school drama. They met on Tinder, went to a bar. They talked, talked politics, had fun, slept together. After a couple dates, they were each seeing someone else. They met up again, and he pushed himself onto her drunkenly, unconsented to. He says it isn’t strictly “rape.” She tells him to Google the word. He’s written a poem about the incident, “unpublishable” as he admits but not enough for him to be “worried about anything. I’m ready to be canceled.” Does it “mean that you’re ready to rape me kind of?” she asks. Liking someone, comes the reply, is tantamount to being canceled these days; the poetic metaphor at hand really revolves around the idea that someone may “trust someone to rape them.”
The temptation to ascribe candidness to the casual and complexity to the candid is arguably a symptom of modern expression’s decrepit state. Me and My Victim is no doubt a confession, embroiled in sheafs of diversions and genuflections that conceal and castigate the fragile white male superego, leaving the id free to revel in all its repressed taboo glory. Pedlow whines like Woody Allen, except that Allen has both literary sense and leftover empathy on his side. For 100 minutes, the ego-tripping ramblings of one co-director assume control and overrule that of the other: sitting at a podcast table, Maurane submits while Pedlow dominates, her native French accent undermining the articulation of her English whereas he plods on, ever determined to justify, if not her misrecognition of their situation, than at least his recognition of himself. Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show is name-dropped for its “intense honesty in the face of everything.” Pedlow reenacts a casting couch sequence with Maurane, the sleazy countenance of James Franco felt in every glib laugh and tousled clump of hair. The film desperately wants to be relevant, cutting-edge; it’s all but cut itself to shreds on its edginess.
But could this all be a bit? The chronically online tell us that media are their messages, that all publicity is good publicity, and in this vein we must read the bare-faced admissions of romantic impotence not as contempt for a jeering audience, but as culpability in constructing the fiction of a post-political male. This is a sketchy argument, not least for its immensely self-absorbed posturing. Similar to Ben Hozie’s PVT CHAT, contemporaneous with the pandemic, Maurane and Pedlow’s film digs deep into the discomfiting reality of American sexual politics as inflected by op-eds and #MeToo. But where PVT CHAT had a minimal — if woefully incomplete — awareness of the myopic cringe culture that was to form the staple of ritual sexual humiliation, Me and My Victim merely suppresses, on instinct, the criticisms of said culture. As a shining exemplar of a love letter both to New York’s art scene and its sad grifters, the film resembles less a cri de cœur of the Jordan Peterson variety than it grotesquely parades its beacon of perverse, creative bankruptcy. All the worst tendencies surface, gradually at first: Pedlow’s insecure and bottomless self-reflexivity, his pathetic and fake emasculation by way of ironically villainizing himself, and — somewhat less damning — the tired homogeneity of Maurane’s flashy and psychedelic Tumblr-esque collages. After the umpteenth panegyric of yet another “fucked up shitty poem about how fucked up I am,” one wonders if self-depreciation and self-aggrandizement are one and the same thing.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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