The Cyclical Nature of Hilma Af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge

Written by Caterina Newman

Even before I knew anything about Hilma Af Klint and the context of her works, I was captivated by The Ten Largest: expansive compositions of geometric swirls and buoyant circles depicted in dusty pastels with some deep shades of blue. The works famously contain unclear lettering such as the “W” and I became curious to find out why.  As I learned more about Af Klint’s life and role in art history, I discovered her less exhibited works. In fact, most of Af Klint’s works haven’t been exhibited, but she is just now starting to gain the attention she deserves. 

Art historians ignored Hilma Af Klint despite her abstract works preceding revolutionary abstractionists like Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich in the 20th century. As an unmarried woman and a theosophist, her status as a professionally trained artist wasn’t recognized during her time or much after. Af Klint knew her work wasn't well received. This likely liberated her from public scrutiny and made her free to create as she pleased. She prohibited any of her works from being exhibited up to 20 years after her death. She died in 1944. However, it was 42 years later that Af Klint’s work was first exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Hilma Af Klint was part of a group of women who engaged in seances and spiritualism known as “The Five.” She involved herself with thinkers of religion and philosophy, most notably with Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Af Klint gifted Steiner the series of watercolor prints Tree of Knowledge. 

Most recently, the Tree of Knowledge (the series of eight works that was gifted to Steiner) has been exhibited at David Zwirner’s 69th street gallery from November 2021 to January 2022.

The unique opportunity to see the Tree of Knowledge required an appointment at Zwirner’s. On a Saturday afternoon, I visited the gallery’s 2nd floor where the exhibition room was painted a muted dark gray. The room was populated with a single bench in the center and a fireplace on the opposite-facing wall of the artworks. Lined in a straight row, the eight watercolor works were individually illuminated by overhead lights.  

Hilma Af Klint. Tree of Knowledge. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper in 8 parts.

I was not expecting to only see eight works. However, these eight works were a lot to digest. The content was very detailed: consisting of nursery pastels and miniscule brushwork. I tried to take my time, but felt pressure to move down the line of works as people kept filing into the gallery room. I took a step back and waited for there to be a break in the groups of people. I watched at least 3-time slot appointment groups come and go, finding brief moments to take a step forward, zoom in and take it all in. 

I watched the lifespan of those three viewing groups, coming in and out, almost rhythmically timed. Lifespan and movement are major themes for Hilma, and I immediately picked up on the movement of my own viewing experience. Not only was I in motion: taking a step back, squinting my eyes, and coming up close, but so were the artworks. This movement within the works manifested as the collective progression of the eight works from left to right. To me, I interpreted this movement as a transition between the works, in groupings of two. For example, the first two works are one grouping in which the second print is the evolved version of the first work. For the third grouping, the fifth and sixth prints in the series, this layered transition takes the form of a magnification.

(Left) Hilma Af Klint. Tree of Knowledge, No. 5, 1913-1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper. 18 x 11 ⅝ inches 

(Right) Hilma Af Klint. Tree of Knowledge, No. 6, 1913-1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper. 18 x 11 ⅝ inches

It reminded me of the movement of a camera lens: it moves in a spiral as it zooms and reveals a more detailed image. This aspect in which the works progressively evolve into new images is what I understand to be Hilma Af Klint depicting a human lifespan where one stage evolves into another. Evolution is a consistent theme in Af Klint’s oeuvre. According to Birnbaum & Enderby in Painting the Unseen, “logarithmic spirals and tendrils represent evolution”, which also speaks to my impression of the camera lens magnifying in the shape of a spiral. 

Af Klint intended for her paintings to only be revealed in the far future as she believed her works were truths she gained through her seances. 

In Af Klint’s work, she has created symbolic language through colors and recurring images. Noting it all down in her notebooks, the artistic language is still complex and undecipherable to an extent. However, according to Birnbaum & Enderby in Painting the Unseen, art historians have been able to detect connections such as “the color yellow and roses stand for masculinity; color blue and lilies denote femininity.” Af Klint’s ideas on gender roles challenge the heterosexual matrix, allowing the overlapping and intersection of masculinity and femininity. She further expanded on this through the incorporation of the letter W as a subtle critique of an influential scholar at the time. Austrian philosopher, Otto Weininger assigned the female to the letter W in his works that attempt to theorize women as inferior and unable to produce anything of importance, Hilma incorporated the letter “W” in her works, assigning it a new definition. According to Birnbaum & Enderby, functioning as a criticism of Weininger, Af Klint journaled that “The letter U stands for the spiritual world, opposing W for matter; the ancient vesica piscis (the intersection of two overlapping discs) signifies its traditional theme of unity, creation, and inviolability of geometry.”

From the comparably small amount of research dedicated to Hilma, there is a tendency to summarize and dismiss her as a sort of hermit witch lady. However, from just my brief time contemplating her work and life, I am astounded at how potential there is in art criticism and history to unpack and discover more about Hilma Af Klint’s world. It is just a fact that there is not enough attention devoted to her. As an artist who was censured by society and secluded herself in order to dedicate her life to creating artworks that transmitted spiritual messages, it is necessary that we direct more attention to the study of her works. It's hard to believe that Hilma Af Klint’s works were made over 100 years ago, she really did paint for the people of the 21st century. 

The series Tree of Knowledge has been acquired by Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland.  

References

Birnbaum, Daniel, and Enderby, Emma. “Painting the Unseen” Painting the Unseen. Serpentine Galleries Koenig Books. 2016

Higgie, Jennifer. “Longing for Light: The Art of Hilma Af Klint” Painting the Unseen. Serpentine Galleries Koenig Books. 2016

Voss, Julia. “Hilma Af Klint and the Evolution of Art” Painting the Unseen. Serpentine Galleries Koenig Books. 2016

Pretty Little Liars into Big Little Lies: Storytelling’s Adaptation to the Streaming Era

Written by Will Lyman

After the daylights were saved and the sun started to set at 5pm, I found myself spending a lot of time searching for joy in the afternoon. There is a great argument to be made that the sun could be replaced by exercise, quality time with friends, or something mindful. Yet, I made rewatching ABC Family’s teen crime/drama, Pretty Little Liars, the central purpose of my time. 

The show was extremely popular after its premiere in 2010, running for seven seasons and garnering a passionate, slightly-obsessive fanbase that I was a part of. Yet, it struggled to retain its audience into the later seasons as the show became more convoluted. A success story of the pre-streaming era, the episodic format of the show ultimately led to its downfall. 

Pretty Little Liars (PLL for short) has an undeniable appeal: the queen bee of a small town in Pennsylvania goes missing and her former clique starts receiving anonymous texts threatening to reveal the secrets only she knew. The premise alone had me throwing Emmys at the creator, Marlene King. Nothing could compare to the intensity of seeing a taunting “A” text pop up on screen––an occasion I always wished would happen to me. 

My brief but intense love affair with the show had ended in early 2015, once I lost the ability to keep up with the ever-expanding plot lines. Rewatching the show was surprisingly refreshing, given the years since I’d first seen it. An intense nostalgia came over me at the sight of ruffled blouses, ankle boots, skinny jeans, big sunglasses, and chunky jewelry. It grounded me with a reminder of the cultural renaissance of the early 2010s––a time period that raised our generation. Beyond this, I was struck by the ingenuity of the early plotlines––ones that made the everyday lives of the characters just as gripping as the murder scandal that loomed in the background. 

My amusement slowly faded as I got into the later seasons of the show, an expected theme in these long-running media juggernauts of the 2010s. Lost, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones come to mind as similar cult favorites that notoriously “flopped” in their later years. After season four, PLL becomes confused, reliant on gimmicks, and obsessed with trying to out-smart the viewer rather than crafting cohesive plotlines. It almost becomes comical. Some of the most memorable plot developments of the later seasons include the two separate sets of evil twins; their trip to a supernatural “Ravenswood” where it is suggested that a character actually died in 1917, a character being killed by falling three feet off a theater stage, “A” implanting a note in protagonist Hannah’s tooth while she is at the dentist, and “A” stealing Emily’s embryos and impregnating another character. I began to miss the days when an “A” text simply meant an ominous joke. I had to force myself to appreciate the show as an act of camp, one dedicated to preserving the sense of mystery rather than supplying one. 

The downfall of Pretty Little Liars comes when you examine its limiting episodic structure. The show premiered during the golden era of weekly TV, where the industry standard was a twenty-something episode season, renewed annually, with special mid-season finales, holiday episodes, and musical specials. For this reason, the intriguing mystery at the heart of the show is diluted and muddled by the writers’ attempts to prolong the episode count. PLL was a product of its time, an era before streaming services dominated the industry. The show increasingly chose quick gags and cheap cop-outs to extend the runtime of the show over effective storytelling. It gave the illusion of an endgame meticulously planned since the first episode, when in reality, the plot was improvised on a season-to-season basis. By the time the show ended, almost nine different people had been the anonymous “A” at some point, an obvious cop-out rather than a planned narrative arc.

What seems like a simple mystery in the early episodes––wondering who killed Alison and who is sending them anonymous threats––becomes a conversation of who didn’t kill Alison. On the night of her death, Alison is mistakenly bludgeoned, buried alive, dug out of the ground, and later replaced by an identical blonde girl in a similar yellow top who was also bludgeoned and buried in the exact same location. Six different people are somehow involved in her death, and Alison interacts with over fifteen different characters on the night of her disappearance, each with their own season-long arcs dedicated to exploring their involvement. It was clear that the writers had no direction for the narrative arc of the show. While this formula worked for years, the pressure to wrap up the central mystery quickly devolved into chaos.

The crime drama series simply doesn’t fit this mold. Since Pretty Little Liars rose to prominence, popular media has increasingly embraced the true crime genre. Netflix documentaries and podcast sensations like Serial have seen incredible success. Yet, the most successful ones did so within a specific formula––the limited series. Limited or anthology series are capped at 6-10 episodes, aimed to ride a two-to-three month trend wave without the pressure to repeat this success in future iterations. The plot has a proper beginning, middle, and end, and everything is intentional. This format adapts to the oversaturated landscape we live in today, one where attention spans are shorter, viewership is never guaranteed, and the tide of public opinion is fast-moving and unpredictable. In many ways, this is a perfect format for television in 2021. The limited series provides an option for stories that are too long to capture in a two-hour film, yet don’t have the potential to be stretched into multiple-season runs.

The boom of the limited series came just after the premiere of Pretty Little Liars, most notably brought to public attention by Ryan Murphy & Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story. In recent years, Netflix has put out incredibly successful limited series including Tiger King, Ratched, and The Haunting of Hill House. HBO has also produced some of the most successful uses of this format in The Undoing, The White Lotus, and Sharp Objects. Almost all of these productions focus on a central murder mystery in a unique community, having the same storytelling potential as Pretty Little Liars but in a drastically condensed format. 

What stands as the most acclaimed use of the limited series is HBO’s Big Little Lies. Similarities in name aside, the show almost acts as the modern foil of Pretty Little Liars after the streaming era boom and the emphasis on creating “bingeable” content. HBO’s show focuses on the lives of a group of women in a small town with a murder mystery looming in the background. At face value, it’s almost identical in setup. Big Little Lies is acclaimed not only for its incredible cast––which features some of the most iconic women in Hollywood––but for never overstaying its welcome. The show is compact, effective, and never tries to extend itself beyond its limits. It is made infinitely better by this insistence on concise storytelling.

While I admire the ability of television to adapt to the modern era, I will always remain loyal to the shows that got us there. Despite its faults, Pretty Little Liars was the blueprint for teen dramas in the 2010s. One can easily trace plot elements of the massively successful dumpster-fire in Riverdale, Teen Wolf or 13 Reasons Why, to the Pretty Little Liars formula––a central mystery in a small town and an omnipresent taunting force of a deceased protagonist combined with everyday teen life. Pretty Little Liars was the perfect show to capture young audiences, predating the biggest television trends of the modern industry––true crime, comedy, and drama. 

I don’t doubt that the creators of shows like Big Little Lies could’ve made an incredible anthology out of the show, complete with the closure and intentionality fans have always wanted from the franchise. Yet, this would’ve robbed us of campy moments like the random one-off film noir episode in the show’s fourth season or actress Troian Bellisario’s battle with a British accent when playing her evil twin “Alex.” Pretty Little Liars is just as much a hero of its era as it is a victim, and it stands as a shining example of the massive changes in how media has been consumed and enjoyed over the past decade.

Existential Recovery, Vacancy, and Striving in Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook

Written by Sophia Ricaurte

I first encountered the pages of H of H Playbook on an indigo-pillowed chair in Book Culture. I expected only to flip through Anne Carson’s newest work but instead read it in one sitting. Her own sketches appear with the text on almost every other page; the multimedia format is what suspended me in her artistic web—illustration and language becoming one continuous object. As I read, the surrounding store seemed to shrink, as if space were reacting to my entrancement. My barely audible sighs and bodily shifts meant to pollute the silence I became so steeply conscious of, wanting to reach for something as large as noise. 

H of H Playbook, a translation of a Euripidean play that centers upon the tragic hero Herakles, was published on October 26, 2021. Carson’s earlier works Autobiography of Red and Red Doc> are similarly occupied by the fraught character. The title page is half-handwritten and half-typed on torn fragments of pasted white paper so that the letter “H”s are towering and humanly unsteady amidst the fonted “of” and “Playbook.” The display of her title resembles two deconstructed rungs of a ladder, waiting to be parsed side by side. The image contemplates disrupting linearity as a cause and effect of myth. This can be seen in the work’s form, be it through the subversion of text through her peppered illustrations or her disruption of Euripedes’ original diction. The poet delivers the story wholly anew in her modern, two-millennia-aged voice.

In their glory, some of the lines read like a high schooler decided to translate Greek drama in the five minutes before class started: showcasing the monosyllabic rhyme and unpalatably direct. This satirical register magnifies the work’s brilliance; the inherent congruence and pleasure from rhyme accentuate the absurdity of its prevalence in such a brutal myth. Essentially, the plot is that Herakles has gone off to accomplish twelve divinely requested and cruel labors and is at last on the final one. Meanwhile, Lykos has seized Herakles’ throne, looking to kill Herakles’ father, wife, and children. The two narratives must converge; Herakles must save his world. 

The drawings enhance the idiom, picking up where the frustration of words leaves off. Her trembling visuals subvert the frankness of the diction and escape the harshness of clarity; the result is a staggering comic tragedy. Her carving of modernity (from syntax to industrialism) conveys the tension between art as a means of preservation and an ode to that which is vulnerable in us. Herakles is no stranger to what it means to be assailable, each of his labors somehow as dangerous as the last, and in this way, Carson makes his persona feel familiar. She bends the distance between hero and audience into something nearly traversable. 

Her words frolic and dive without page numbers to cite. We only have quotes floating in a qualitative chronology: toward the beginning, “What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall held by the burning straps of mortal shortfall?” Her words arrive like citrus, with an edge and an aftermath, their point-blank wisdom often unmanageable. On most pages, only a small portion is inhabited by the art (script and otherwise). The rest is blank. Perhaps there is something to be said about loss and its paradoxical mystery of excess. After reading, it seems like Herakles' most cultivated life skill is inflicting loss. The lack of page numbers feels related to emptiness as unquantifiable.

This uncertainty is then granted a formal dignity, not only through the space unfilled, but through the actual drawings as well. Her eraser marks convey time and dissatisfaction, the process of revision, in a way that the printed ink does not. The illustrations offer accessibility in their faded lines, whereas the first drafts of language dissolve after the edits. We see proof of how the hand returns to the same areas it once approached to fill the borders it has made. Language alone exhibits no such transparency.

However, Carson does not color tidily inside her own contours, rejecting borders and implicitly asking: what do we lose in containment? The gold and orange, their vitality, makes the lion above one of the most memorable visuals in the work. The blueness of Herakles’ traumatic stress and permeating violence is the invisible narrative backdrop to the image. An implied polarity of color acts as a visual translation of Greek-born dramatic irony. The angle at which we perceive the lion seems to be from the ground, a position of deference—the form granting a dignity to the animal, one that Herakles labors to own in the content of the play.

Herakles is murderous and painfully ordinary; he feels young. Carson angles the mirror, her language and illustrations, insofar that the reader-viewer sees the blood behind their own eyes. The experience is solitary, the effect: ongoing. In the case of Herakles and ourselves, how to mark the line between responsibility and forgiveness?

Indulging in Violence and Gore: Squid Game and Francis De Valle’s Sphinx

Written by Cathleen Luo

Courtesy of Netflix’s Squid Game

A massive doll sings and shoots people down as they play Red Light, Green Light. Alliances form and break. Revenge and paranoia run rampant as the reward money increases with every meaningless death. 

Squid Game, the new South Korean Netflix series, numbed my senses for the three days I spent binging it. The show embraces the darkest side of humanity, picking people off like lint on a sweater. The nine-episode season broke my brain, with scene after scene of massacre. The gore of Squid Game made the show both horribe yet alluring and I was disturbed by my own apathy after finishing the show. I have never liked slasher films or horror movies, but the balance of indulging on-screen violence and critiquing its inhumanity kept me thinking for days after. The grim atmosphere bled into my life and clouded my mind as I headed to the Metropolitan Museum for a school assignment.

Courtesy of Netflix’s Squid Game

The Met’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders'' exhibit is currently on show (October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022) and as a lover of Salvador Dali, De Chirico, Gertrude Abercrombie and all those other dreamy, haunted painters, I headed there, the gory ghost of Squid Game istll lingering in the back of my mind. I got lost in Gallery 889 for the remainder of my visit.

History has always leaned towards celebrating men, and when it came to surrealists unleashing their subconsciousness onto the canvas, most were men depictinig their unhinged sexual fantasies and lamented mommy issues. I hung on dearly to the paintings made by women, praying for motifs outside of allegorical flowers as vaginas, phalluses as power, and sex as antidote. 

Frances Del Valle’s Guerrero y Esfinge, oil on canvas, ca. 1957

Frances Del Valle’s Guerrero y Esfinge, or “Warrior and Sphinx” immediately caught my eye when I walked into the non-Western surrealist section. Clearly, it was made by a woman, and a woman who had looked deep within herself and found something dark, and a little smug. The oil painting depicts a Sphinx, a symbol of an all-powerful, terrifying female figure, with caricatured features: huge breasts, backside, and a tapering waist. The oil painting depicts two figures, one sitting coyly and the other twisted on the ground before her. She sits cat-like, her legs tucked under her as if she is kneeling. Her alien-esque face has a large forehead, no hair, a pointed chin, and a green-ish white oval of an eye on a ghastly purple face. 

The brutality in the piece comes from the Sphinx’s manipulation of the figure beneath her: a bowing, bloodied warrior, the assumed male figure. This overt gender violence is gory; her hands control unassuming gold threads of fate that force the warrior’s head into a meat-grinder type contraption. 

Detail of Frances Del Valle’s Guerrero y Esfinge

When I first saw this, I was mesmerized by the calm expression of the alien-femme in comparison to the apathetic decapitation of the other figure. The way Del Valle both aestheticizes and distorts their bodies emphasizes the tyrannical power the Sphinx holds. Yet her gruesome body is appealing in a twisted kind of way, the aesthetics of figuration not forgotten. Del Valle’s use of color and thick, chalky paint adds to its allure. Through all its horror, it was one of the most beautiful paintings of the Surrealism Without Borders exhibit. 

On another day, in a mind-frame untainted by Squid Game, I would’ve had reservations. Del Valle’s piece creates a grim scene, a monstrous representation of a woman forcing a warrior to mutilate himself, for what reason other than her own sadistic entertainment. The painting’s violence is disturbing, yet profound, referencing mythology and the role of gender in our realm as well as other possible ones we should aim to avoid. Del Valle both indulges us in a nightmare where feminicide is reversed while simultaneously warning us against it. Her freedom of expressing these dark fantasies reinforces the reason why this sort of reality must never come to fruition. 

In a similar strain, Squid Game shares a similar project. Like other horror movies, Squid Game thrills us with horrifying scenes of murder until the massive number of deaths is so overhwhleming, we cannot even process the sheer dehumanizatiotn we are witnessing. This fictional world transports us to a nightmare that we start to accept as the norm. It is scary to think of how many people enjoyed this show. Reveling in bloodlust in a fantasy world allows us to explore the limits of our humanity while warning us away from it. 

Squid Game and Guerrero y Esfinge are successful pieces of art because they are aware of the moral implications of the violence they portray and avoid glorifying these realities. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or TV shows like Netflx’s You tiptoe that line of glamourising lifestyles that are inherently toxic, and as mass-distributed media, should be more aware of their impact on viewers, and more importantly, what they add to the universal conversation of what it means to be a humane person. 

In the midst of all powerful man-murdering women and deadly children’s games, there is much to be learned from art and it’s unique way of teaching us how to be.

The Body is a Suggestion: Reflecting on LaJuné McMillian’s Black Movement Library Portrait Series at the Movement Lab, Barnard College

Written by Sophie Paquette

I sort-of-met LaJuné McMillian like I sort-of-met a lot of people during my sophomore year: on Z**m. They joined my Dance Composition: Form class as a guest artist to present their epic workshop “Understanding, Transforming in Digital Spaces,” which introduced us to motion capture and avatar creation as methods of exploring dance and movement. The workshop operated specifically through the context of their Black Movement Project, a digital archive of Black motion capture data and Black character base models. Because my first experience with LaJuné and their work was through my laptop screen, this encounter carried with it all of the experiments, opportunities, and problematic precedents endemic to digital space. Finally seeing LaJuné’s work in a physical installation at Barnard College’s Movement Lab on October 8th was 

When I enter the Movement Lab, I get to take off my shoes and sit on the floor, which still elicits a preschool-rug-adjacent excitement in me. I really have no formal dance background but I like to playact as someone whose art lives in their body. Moving image installations often ask that you locate yourself physically, finding a comfortable place to experience the art. For multiscreen installations like this one, this often means turning, calling on your peripheral vision, opening up your chest, leaning back. Recently I had the pleasure of visiting Wong Ping’s 4-channel animation installation at the New Museum, which offered its viewers a teal shag carpet and plush bean bags in the room’s center, with alternating screens such that the entire group would turn, together, at the end of one animation, moving as a unit to view the next.  Maybe I just like being on the ground. 

In the Lab, one wall played a film documenting LaJune’s recent installation at Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library. As videos of Movement Portraits from LaJuné’s students and collaborators projected on the library, live performers danced in mocap suits for the audience outside of the library. At times, the projected videos were interspersed with dialogues by the moving artists, reflecting on their relationship to the image, the camera, Blackness and the body. Allowing for dialogue here also expands what we might consider “movement”--talking can be movement, laughing can be movement, hugging, loving, all can be movement.

Typical movement libraries might offer digital repositories of “anonymous” base models storing captured motions, able to be acquired and re-appended to any character. LaJuné’s movement portraits instead center the dancer--we see their face, their body, their spirit. Both during the live performance and in some of the projected portraits, dancers are often pictured wearing the motion capture suits, drawing attention to the embodied process that stores these movements. Process documentation is a form of memory, and LaJuné provides us with an archive. 

Another element of this film that struck me was the often visible audience. Rather than attempt to obfuscate the boundary between mover and witness--as movement libraries often do, allowing us to select and store captured moments without any knowledge of the body or person who engendered them--this piece draws attention to the relationship between performer and audience, honoring the movement as an embodied moment in time, experienced by all those occupying its space.

On the adjacent wall, two screens played LaJuné’s Black Movement Project, atmospheric and mesmerising videos using 3D animated avatars and motion capture. Unlike the Movement Portrait film, these videos abstract the body, depict a body continuous with its environment, and shatter the received hierarchy that typically delineates bone from muscle, muscle from skin, skin from space. Here, the body is a suggestion: there are moments when the body bleeds through the background, when it becomes the background; avatars whose skins are permeable, mustable mesh, whose arms can pass through their stomachs, whose stomachs can be their arms. 

In the Movement Portraits films, when describing Blackness and their identity, one of the performers says: “I think spirit, I think energy, I think love.” In this animated video, LaJuné extends the body into these metaphysical realms, exploring movement through dancers who look like water, who distort and expand, who leave trails of light in their paths. The bodies duplicate, reflect. The two screens show the same video, but flipped vertically, asking us to recontextualize space and orientation, focusing on the body as amorphous shape and lines rather than a received structure. 

In this space, the light from one projection casts a glow on another--the screens, somehow communicating. I turn to look at a separate screen, and when I return to the animation, a body will have become entirely shards of light. Duplication allows a form to dance with itself, almost in an embrace.

Documenting Yourself to Death: The Warped Reality of Social Media Fame in Spree, Mainstream, and The Nowhere Inn

Written by Sabrina Bohn

In Spree (2020), Mainstream (2020), and The Nowhere Inn (2021), the main character’s journeys center around social media, fame, and identity, and through their absurd–and sometimes violent–antics, each character faces the consequences of depending on external validation. These themes are more relevant than ever, and this piece explores what these movies can show us. Spoilers ahead! 

“If you’re not documenting yourself,” a greasy-haired boy says to his livestream with less than 5 viewers, “then you just don’t exist.” This line, spoken in Spree (2020), hauntingly foreshadows the rest of this movie as Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) goes to extreme lengths to not only document himself but also gain a following. 

If you have a phone, you most likely have felt the rush of adrenaline after hitting "Post” on Instagram or Twitter–watching the likes go up, seeing comment notifications, getting new followers. It’s a thrilling yet fleeting euphoria; racking up those likes only leaves you wanting more. In the past year, the dopamine chase of social media increased tenfold as we retreated from our normal lives into quarantine, isolation, and Zoom school, our social lives dependent fully on the Internet. 

Coincidentally (or not), three movies released within the past year–Spree (2020), Mainstream (2020), and The Nowhere Inn (2021)–address the pervasiveness of the Internet and social media. On the surface, these three films seem completely different: a thriller about a murderous Uber driver, a drama about an influencer’s descent into madness, and a mockumentary about a musician’s identity crisis. However, these films do share similar themes such as identity, fame, and social media, which are incredibly topical in our overly online society. While most people do not go on a killing rampage as Kurt does in Spree, the idea that if you do not document yourself, you do not exist becomes a real fear in a society centered around social media. In the end, these movies show how distorted our view of reality becomes when we begin to depend on social media for validation. 

In Spree, Kurt’s pursuit of fame through followers, likes, and subscribers forms the basis of the whole movie as his antics become more unhinged and violent. The beginning shows Kurt’s many unpopular YouTube videos over the years, from reviewing vape pens to vlogging about his boring life. Along with his abnormally greasy hair and awkward speech, we learn he has very few friends and a complicated and neglectful family. He is creepy, cringy, yet seemingly harmless; however, this changes as the audience is clued into his insidious plan to gain followers. As he livestreams during his rideshare job, the audience learns that Kurt injected poison in the water bottles he provides his passengers. Basically, Kurt plans to murder them to get more viewers. However, even after he kills multiple people on his livestream, he still does not gain many followers. This leads him to kill one of his only friends, Bobby (Josuha Ovalle), a much more popular influencer. Through this, he begins to gain more and more followers, yet he also comes closer and closer to getting caught. The absurd brutality and horror this movie depicts serves to show how much the desire for likes and followers can warp someone’s reality. 

Still from Spree (2020)

An obsession with stats is also a significant element in Mainstream. The main character, Link (Andrew Garfield), starts the movie in a similar position to Kurt, alone and searching for purpose. Frankie (Maya Hawke), an aspiring filmmaker, meets him and, seeing a charisma beneath his aloofness, proposes that they make videos together. With the help of Frankie’s friend Jake (Nat Wolff), they begin to make bizarre videos of Link using the stage name “No One Special.” Although at first hesitant about making videos with Frankie, as Link sees his number of subscribers tick up, he becomes obsessed with his growing fame and outlandish persona. As he becomes more and more popular, the stunts he pulls for his videos and subsequent game show become more extreme and harmful, showing his slow descent into mania. 

Still from Mainstream (2020)

In one instance, during a bizarre game show focused ironically around giving up social media, he bullies a girl (Alexa Demie) so severely that she dies by suicide. The ambiguity of Link’s feelings towards this situation only adds to his delusion as he continues to pursue fame. He ends up leaving Frankie and Jake behind, who he has grown close to, as they become uncomfortable with the way his influence has harmed people. His internet identity “No One Special” becomes so enmeshed with his real-life identity that it gets hard to tell when Link is performing and when he isn’t.

A similar enmeshment of identities occurs in The Nowhere Inn, as St. Vincent’s on-stage persona and real-life identity become progressively intertwined. The film begins with the introduction of best friends Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) and Carrie Brownstein (playing herself), who are excited to begin their music documentary on tour. However, the movie takes a turn as Carrie begins to doubt her ability to make an engaging movie about Annie Clark who, in her free time, plays Nintendo Switch for hours and rants about the uselessness of dressing salads when she wants to taste the earthiness of vegetables. After Carrie explains her inability to make this documentary due to the disparity between Annie’s on and off-stage persona, Annie decides that she will become St. Vincent–the ethereal, musical genius that her fans see. Unfortunately, becoming St. Vincent leaves no room for Annie to be an actual human; instead, she becomes a facade of coolness with a lack of empathy. The extreme narcissism of St. Vincent leads Annie to begin to neglect her relationships. She constantly brushes Carrie off and even breaks up with her girlfriend in an attempt to make the documentary more dramatic.  

Still from The Nowhere Inn (2021)

Despite the extreme differences in these movies, all three main characters end up in similar positions by the end of the movies: alone and completely altered by their pursuit of fame. They all start their stories with seemingly innocent intentions: Kurt wants to find the love and validation he lacks at home through the Internet. Link wants to become someone who can make a difference in the world by encouraging people to give up social media. St. Vincent wants to live up to her fans’ expectations and make an interesting and engaging documentary with her best friend. Although these characters begin with good intentions, the path they take to get there distorts their realities, making them believe that doing horrible things will get them what they desire. 

What social media and the desire for fame ultimately teach us is that if we are not good enough–not pretty enough, interesting enough, funny enough–we will not be loved. While these films offer extreme versions of what can happen when people buy into this idea, what they allude to is the potentially harmful nature of social media, which preys on the human need for validation.