Spoilers will follow for Red Rooms, which you should see before or after reading this.

Has Pascal Plante seen The Scary of Sixty-First? That was my first question after finishing his great Red Rooms. This isn’t to diminish his achievement, his depiction of a shadowy, tapped-in Montreal that tells itself it is Neuromancer but is closer to a 4chan thread sharing nudes of a teen’s ex.

It’s more a reminder of why somebody likes me, podcast ambivalent as I am, comes to watch a podcaster’s movie. In truth, I thought it had a shot of being good. The Epstein case has so many odd rabbit holes to fall down and radiates a sickening, ambient evil, and it’s ostensibly a horror movie. Lo and behold: 120 minutes of Polanski aping and Dasha effectively  saying “RIP to the girls on Little St. James but I’m built different.” The Scary of Sixty-First is actually scared of two things : that you might get human trafficked as a Brooklyn person who says the r-word and you might be cringe about it. By the end it reminded me of a worse Manos: Hands of Fate, which at least has an oil paint black atmosphere full of silent menace stumbled upon by a fertilizer salesman. This may sound like an epic dig from the early 2010s, but I am being dead serious: I genuinely think there’s more artistic value in Manos: Hands of Fate than Dasha’s debut offering, because her film winds up rhyming with it in a way she didn’t expect. It’s exploitation film as pose.

To return to a better movie: in Red Rooms, there is a murder trial going based around a series of child murders streamed live on a video chat-room, better known as a “Red Room”. The man accused, Ludovic Chevalier, is quiet, shy, pathetic, leading some to believe he is being accused unjustly, despite a pile of evidence to the contrary. These fans are obsessive in a way that reminds you of the parts of Tumblr where girls repost gore and Charles Manson, with the socially awkward Clementine acting as a key voice for the charm based defense of Ludovic Chevalier. Kelly-Anne, who has been going to the trials, begins a friendship with Clementine, inviting her to move into her nigh-cyberpunk apartment, complete with grand battle-station computer set-up where Kelly-Anne supplements her income by playing high stakes poker with Bitcoin and an AI assistant she’s programmed named Guinevere. It’s Kelly-Anne’s role in the film that’s the most interesting. She is expertly played by Juliette Gariepy (another thing this movie has on The Scary of Sixty-First), who never allows us into her interiority, because there may not be one. 

Why is she fascinated with the case? She can’t even tell Clementine in the middle of the film. This is after the courts are closed only for the victim’s families to see the videos themselves. Clementine is upset. She wants to see, to prove there’s a doubt it might be Chevalier. Kelly-Anne, on the other hand, has seen the films. She has them, and can show them to Clementine. She doesn’t know why she has the films, but she does. Rather than coming across as vague or undercooked, it’s a troubling ambiguity, an ambiguity that we could understand as a commentary on true crime fandom.

As annoying as true crime fandom can be, I think seeing the film as a DEVASTATING TAKEDOWN of true crime is misguided. This could be considered a bit biased, as I do find the questions true crime asks about what creates a human predator interesting. Plenty of people put on true crime podcasts, fall asleep, wake up the next day, and buy novelty coffee mugs with bad words on them and never even think about wanting to watch a murder happen. A movie of this caliber pointed entirely at TikTok true crime fandom is like constructing a comedic masterpiece about ugg women in pumpkin spice boot lattes, and in general, the idea of entire narrative constructs being able to be forged into diss records is wildly overstated. 

But there does happen to be a movie by a fashionable ingenue who is fascinated with a disturbing crime, and that movie is large in part about her. It’s fitting the one remaining girl at the end of The Scary of Sixty-First is the bad-ass investigator played by Dasha, the one girl cool enough to not be cringe in the face of terror (still scared of the subway and a slightly liberal pope, though). She sees another set of baddies disappeared taken out by the satanic murder pedos and she presses onward. It’s here, where Kelly-Anne’s blank interiority acts on a broader commentary of an archetype, taken to its extremity to better dissect it. 

Kelly-Anne’s role is not that different from Dasha’s in The Scary of Sixty-First, as  slightly improbable badass online investigator, but with a twist. Kelly-Anne isn’t so much an investigator as she is a voyeur. Kelly-Anne is closer to the new age tormentors of Kiwi Farms. She is adept enough at using the internet to getting video of a child murder, which she is able to show Clementine, “red pilling” Clementine to the brutal realities of the crime she thinks Chevalier is innocent of. She manages to hack into the third victim’s home to get the door code. Again, the Chans would be proud. 

There remains the third tape. Unable to be sourced by the authorities, it is one of the plausible deniabilities the Chevalier defense rests on. It’s sourcing this tape that leads to the film’s climax, a dark web auction of the tape, which Kelly-Anne is able to fund through winning a hand of high stakes online poker in order to get enough bitcoin to make the purchase. In the end she’s able to get this tape to the mother of Camille, the child in the final film, to prove finally that Chevalier was the murderer. 

How does she get this to her mother? She breaks into her house and leaves it on her night stand. After she delivers the evidence, she has to do one thing: take a selfie in the victim’s room, wearing a school girl uniform. She first wore this schoolgirl uniform to t on Chevalier’s birthday, where she dyed her hair and put in contacts and some prop braces, all the better to resemble the murdered Camille. Chevalier does a small, slight wave, like a princess in a convertible. Perhaps a trollish gesture, like chasing around Chrischan in a pickle costume, but to what end? All of her modeling gigs and her agency drops her as a client (even though they knew her brand was “edgy”) and the police begin watching her every move. Here we face the willingly perverse act, blood in the face of les bourgeois, and nobody sees it for brilliant provocation. They don’t know what it is. We don’t know what it is, and there is no access to Kelly-Anne to show us what might be there. 

What the New York New Right provocateurs see as transgression has revealed itself to be nothing more than a re-entrenchment of older beliefs resurrected and put on a zombie display. There is transgressive work out there. But, to speak of the dread “Dimes Square”, there is surprisingly less transgression and more a stuffy narrative conservatism, hipsterism tuned to the key of Ryan Schrieber’s A Clockwork Orange inspired Coltrane review, read in black face while cops murder men on subways. The most indelieble image of the film is Kelly-Ann, watching the final tape, bathed in the digital red glow, cold despite the color, a look of ecstasy on her face. Maybe the answer to Kelly-Anne is the same as the answer to all of our tiresome Marilyn Mansons: actually, she likes it.

 

As a postscript to this essay: I deactivated most of my social media (or logged out). If for some reason you wonder why I’m not online, there’s the reason. If I had to explain why I’m so frustrated, it would be very simple. I have seen four more dead children than I have ever needed to in the last few weeks. One was in an awful edgelord zine I had to look through at work, but it made me remember the first two. 

Child endangerment is probably one of my few traditional “triggers” (besides car accidents and crowds), to the point I have stopped a few works before that featured it. I’ve never finished Brian Azarello’s wonderful Stray Bullets for this reason. Without getting into my own reasons for this, needless to say the obscenities visited upon children were something I kept close to my mind, wondering if it was my own sickness that made me want to understand, when only through distance I could realize the sickness wasn’t mine but someone else’s visited upon me.

There is a great disconnect I see about Palestine compared to how we’ve traditionally treated police murders. It’s understood to be in bad taste to share the video of Alton Sterling being shot by police officers for selling mixtapes, as well as others all made victims of our berserker police. Yet the bodies of Palestinian children are fair game. Perhaps it’s to get it through some liberal’s head the Democratic Party has abetted a genocide.  But I cannot help but feel that these children are cudgels in death, not given a life to live, but puppets animated to play dead, and that the people who should see them have seen them and do not care, whispering the now tiresome proverb “fuck around and find out” under their breaths with the force of prayer. 

I have no real other way to talk about this: not every person sharing these photos has a pornographic impulse, but it’s there in the thought recognizing inhumanity might change someone’s minds, just as if you deliver pizza to the right woman she’ll invite you in for a roll in the hay. But where I’m encountering these photos are not exactly places where truth is being spoken to power. It’s on social media. CNN isn’t going to see a man holding his son’s severed head and change their minds because CNN knows and has decided it’s mere misfortune, and because CNN regards you, lefty, as a bug to be wiped off its windshield. If these children were Americans, we’d have infographics telling people not to share the photos. Even in our country’s evil we cannot recognize the full humanity of the foreigner, who has the unfortunate luck of not being American and thus existing as an abstraction. The use of a body for the purpose besides living its full life breeds the exploitation necessary for fantasy, titillation, and you can’t tell me on some level that the idea of rubbing the nose of a ghoul like Fetterman into a pile of his own sick titillates, but doesn’t consider that dogs eat their own vomit all the time. 

I view this destruction by flattening a life as part of social media’s mission, of how it functions. The dead child cannot be fully alive on social media even in the memoriam reminders that they once enjoyed spending time with cats and dogs and playing football but a dreary cliche reminder that children are precious. What we find life-affirming about children is potential that a dead one never can fulfill, and their lives wouldn’t be lived for us to win arguments. 

If there has been any reason I’m taking a break, it’s that social media reminds us that, bathed in blue light, viewing the indescribable, we are all Kelly-Anne. I would like to be Christopher Sloce instead for a few weeks, at least until I absolutely have to do promotion.