The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

REVIEW: We Live in Public

This film is a must-see if you are a slave to your Facebook updates  or you spend too much time blogging about the fact that you have just changed your socks and found a cat under your bed. This cautionary tale will make even the die-hard “social networkist” squirm grudgingly in their seats.

BY ORLA MACKLE

‘We live in Public’ is the first of many documentaries scoping the explosion of the 20th Century Dot Com Industry; the birth of the internet .Arguably the most influential and important invention of our time. The director Timoner opens this piece with a fact-bursting introduction to the 90s boom and the creation of the “Dot-Com Kids” club, this century’s millionaire entrepreneurs. Among these computer boffins is the creative cyber genius, Josh Harris, who we are told at the beginning of the documentary is, “The greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”. This piece centres on this profound individual and how he came to be the first to predict the invasion of the internet into our private lives that has now been realised through an array of social networking sites erupting onto the scene in the last few years.

The documentary takes us through life with Harris and an array of social experiments he conducts on the intertwining of humans and the virtual world. The first of which is his big brother style rat cage trial, “Quiet”, in which he places more than one hundred artists in a series of “bed pods” and places them under 24 hour surveillance. We watch them defecate, screw each other, and shower together in their won little world. Timoner, being one of the “in mates” in the social experiment swelling with Orwellian overtones, is privy to this “virtual world” and what she uncovers is nothing we wouldn’t expect to happen. Chaos, madness, even ending in attacks and rages of jealousy, this exploration of what Harris deems to be the future of man-kind in an information age, is then shut down on New Year’s Day after conspiracies that he was raising a cult of followers.

Harris loses millions on the experiment but he is not about to quiet his revolutionary ideas, which some would use to describe him as “The Warhol of the Web”. Next we watch him create his own internet utopia in his flat with his then “pseudo” girlfriend and I believe this to be the most compelling and yet disturbing part of the film. As time passes, we watch the demise of the couple.They go from enjoying feeding their exhibitionist natures, to becoming more alone and more secluded and highly critical of themselves and each other. This comes to a head in a scene which had me shifting apprehensively in my seat and watching nervously as the sex-starved Harris attacks his girlfriend accumulating in her walking out of the flat, the experiment, and his life.What follows is too sad for even words to explain. We watch fearfully and yet with hungry voyeurism as Harris descends in madness in an uncomfortable scene in which he stands in front of a mirror repeating his words over and over, in manner of Jack Torrance. He leaves the flat stating he is becoming mentally unwell.

My only criticism of this piece would be its lack of narrative structure, and it is unclear what exactly the message is that Timoner is trying to tell us. She skips from one venture to another, one clip to another, losing me as an audience member several times. But then again, perhaps this chaotic narrative is testament to the subject at the heart of this film, the brilliant yet narcotic mind of Harris.

Overall I thought this film was a delight to watch, informative and funny, yet at some points demoralisingly chilling. It is a fascinating snap-shot of the times we live in and indeed makes us fearful for what future lies ahead for our race with the internet growing and expanding day by day. Not only is it a disquieting portrait of what the digital age has done to our individual perceptions of ourselves, but also the fascinating study of a man who tried in vain to “live in public”.

We live in Public is showing at the QFT.

www.queensfilmtheatre.com

Tags: Gown, newspaper, Orla Mackle, QFT, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, The Gown, We live in public

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Arts + Ents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.