Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,
Canadian director Matt Johnson got his start online all the way back in 2007, as the co-creator/star/director of the cult web-series Nirvana The Band. Eventually picked up by a short-lived offshoot of VICE and turned into a full two-season television series in 2017, Johnson’s star has been on the rise ever since distributor NEON released Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earlier this year to overwhelming success. A direct continuation of the show, the film’s ecstatic reception seemed to prove that once-niche creatives who made their home online are soon to break out into the mainstream.
Johnson’s is hardly an isolated case. This has been a strange summer for cinema: most of the classic IP fare has bombed hard while low-budget films from internet creators become the season’s real success stories. Backrooms, the debut film from 20-year-old director Kane Parsons, based on his viral YouTube series made $400 Million off its meager budget, and ignited a mini-revolution in Hollywood. No longer ashamed of the Internet (or at least finally realizing how to milk it), studios are lining up to fund projects from online creators at a breakneck pace. Aware of shifting tastes, Hollywood has thrown up a smoke signal and is attempting to evolve.
Complementing Backrooms’ success was Obsession, another horror film from an internet creator, this time YouTuber Curry Barker. While thinking about Obsession for more than ten minutes makes me want to jump into moving traffic, ignoring its (seemingly) organic success would be a mistake. Made on a $750,000 budget, Obsession has since cleared north of $425 Million. The less-than-discerning taste of American audiences notwithstanding, there is clearly a shift in what gets “butts in seats.” Led by a cinephilic renaissance among audiences under 35, this ever increasing group of audience members loudly rejects so-called “corporate slop” in exchange for smaller, auteur-driven work.
In theory, all of this should be good for a healthy film culture: increasingly boring blockbusters and their company-man directors are going the way of the western, to be replaced with a more diverse, younger, and hopefully authentic crop of filmmakers. But taking a serious look at what’s coming out of this “Creation Revolution,” it becomes clear that the voices being elevated are not exactly unique. Curry Barker, whose agent still allows him to do interviews for reasons passing understanding, frequently cites The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as his biggest influence — every horror director since 1974 has had the same influence, how exactly is Barker’s voice different than those who came before him? Obsession is a fairly ugly film that relies on an unoriginal story (Barker said he got it from a Simpsons episode) and a thematically confused ending. Or, to put it more simply: normal Hollywood genre-fare.
Which brings us back to Johnson, whose skills behind the camera far outclass those of Barker, making his latest misfire all the more infuriating. His newest film, Tony, which releases nationwide on August 21st, is a paint-by-numbers Anthony Bourdain biopic set during a pivotal summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Based off the first two chapters of Bourdain’s autobiography Kitchen Confidential, Tony follows the misadventures of its eponymous chef (Dominic Sessa) after he stalks a girl whom he harassed in a bar across state lines, eventually finding himself rejected, stuck in P-Town with no money, and caught up in a lie about a writing fellowship he did not get. Tony is forced to work for a brass-yet-fatherly local chef (Antonio Banderas) who teaches him a thing or two about cooking, and of course, life.
If you know anything about the setting, the first thing you’ll notice about the film is a distinct lack of gay people, despite taking place in 1970s P-Town, one of the gayest places in world history. A third-act reveal of a waitress’s lesbian relationship is played off as a moment of growth for Tony, and a few crowd shots show gay couples reduced to nothing more than set dressing. It would be fair to say that Bourdain’s book doesn’t concern itself much with queer love, but wouldn’t a more interesting filmmaker make sure the setting of his story was truly captured? Meanwhile, Johnson’s treatment of Tony’s love interest, played wonderfully by Emilia Jones, is quite basically sexist. She exists solely to move Tony’s character forward, and her complete lack of agency is so intense that it is honestly shocking — have we not moved past this type of storytelling? I understand that Johnson is a member of the internet’s Chud Protection Service, but that shouldn’t give him carte blanche to make a film so limited in perspective.
I won’t deny that it is inherently impressive Johnson was able to make such a competent film with his hand halfway down his pants, but I must question why exactly a film like Tony even exists. Bourdain’s entire mythos was built on an abrasive, counter-cultural, anti-establishment ethos. Flattening his early life into a safe, early-2000s-coded prestige crowd-pleaser is an insulting choice. After 15 years of scrappy filmmaking and guerrilla chaos,Johnson isn’t just a victim of studio sanitization here, he actively chose to make a generic, middle-of-the-road movie. Sick of spending years in relative obscurity and teaching at the University of Toronto just to get by, Johnson clearly reached for the easy A24 paycheck and delivered a safe crowd-pleaser that completely abandons the rule-breaking edge that made his name in the first place, and erases fans who powered his rise.
The fact is, like most online creators, Johnson’s biggest fanbase is either queer or female. There are of course straight men who like his work, and it is obvious they are his target audience, but spend even one minute in the Tumblr-esque fan groups he inspires, and it’ll be clear who keeps the lights on. Johnson does not have a responsibility to cater to this audience, but it is somewhat insulting how tone-deaf and lazy Tony feels. The second Johnson was given a larger budget, he actively erased queer history and made no effort to present a legible female character. By choosing to make something this aggressively normal, Johnson proves that when internet auteurs get elevated by studios, they aren’t necessarily changing Hollywood, but rather making it easier to sell us back the same crap. And the fans who got these creators where they are now? Well, Hollywood isn’t exactly knocking down doors to court them.
Look at The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, released a few weeks after Backrooms, by the primarily YouTube based Glitch Productions. A feature-length finale to their wildly popular web-series of the same name, The Last Act sold out so fast that its initial one-weekend run was extended, and hundreds of additional theaters were added. All in, The Last Act made close to $50 Million in its short two-week run, with no marketing or backing from any established industry creative to speak of. Directed by trans filmmaker Gooseworx, The Last Act did not receive the same weeks of credulous reporting about being the future of Hollywood that Obsession did, despite proving the same theory, and Gooseworx has not been swept up into the A24 machine like Johnson.
A recentVariety profile by Matt Minton highlighted trans and non-binary directors like Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Louise Weard (Castration Movie), and Avalon Fast (CAMP). As the article details, these filmmakers aren’t waiting around for A24 or NEON to call, because they know those companies aren’t interested. Instead, trans filmmakers are explicitly building a new, parallel industry outside the studio system, and recognizing that traditional Hollywood will never accommodate their radical art.
Meanwhile, the Internet’s favorite special little boy is busy making biopics. I wish him good luck with his mid-career turn towards prestige, but am sorry to say: I’m not buying it. Hopefully, audiences won’t either.
Signing off,
Max Bolen
Never quite understood the attraction for Matt Johnson but would ruin their life for a shot with Jay McCarroll
Not sure what the writer's problem with Obsession is to warrant suicide