Andrew Neel’s “King Kelly” is a scorching, entertaining portrait of the YouTube generation.
This debut narrative feature is scathingly insightful, downright disturbing, and reprehensibly entertaining, all packaged in a uniquely executed found-footage format.
Neel is better known for his documentary work, such as 2006’s “Darkon,” which explored LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) culture. With “King Kelly,” the writer/director demonstrated his cinematic talents aren’t constrained to documenting reality. Given the chance to roam free, unburdened by the need to convey absolute factual truth, his social commentary has been refined to a razor’s edge, this time taking the decadent and depraved culture of the Millennial “YouTube” generation as its subject for dissection.
Premiering at South by Southwest this year, the film provoked thoughtful, engaging discussions that extended beyond the post-screening Q&A, bleeding out into the lobby as Neel hung around conversing with intrigued audience members.
“King Kelly” follows Louisa Krause (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) as Kelly, a young, attractive, middle class girl living with her parents in American suburbia. Unbeknownst to most of her family and friends, she has funneled the American entrepreneurial spirit into generating a fan base of thousands online who pay for live webcam sex shows and homemade amateur porn from her alternate digital persona, King Kelly. On the Fourth of July, as she plots to launch a new website and dreams of life once she has “blown up” as a professional Internet pornstar, Kelly loses a shipment of drugs she had been paid to mule to a party when an ex-boyfriend repossesses the car he bought for her. So Kelly, her poly-drug-indulging BFFL Jordan (Libby Woodbridge), and an unstable state trooper (Roderick Hill) that is King Kelly’s self-professed number one fan under the online name “Poo Bare,” set out to reclaim the delivery by any means necessary. And to add yet another nuance to the story, the entire film is presented as found footage, ostensibly from iPhone video recordings shot by the main characters themselves.
While in truth the entire film was not shot solely using iPhones, the reality is no less impressive. The other hardware Neel and company used was a custom-made rig pairing a consumer point-and-shoot Canon ELPH with an iPhone, so that the actors could record themselves with the ELPH, but see it played back live on the iPhone. The sense of fidelity to reality this style of filmmaking imbues “King Kelly” with amply demonstrates just how far the found-footage style has come since the days of “The Blair Witch Project.”
There was noir, then neo-noir. Last year Nicolas Winding Refn even gave us a unique aesthetic take on the genre with his sunshine noir “Drive.” But “King Kelly” represents the demarcation of a new facet to the genre—Internet noir. Even leaving aside matters of social commentary for a moment, “King Kelly” is a thoroughly entertaining cinematic story. The hand-held first-person camera work by the actors collapses the narrative distance between the viewer and the characters, luring you into their footsteps.
As Kelly’s Fourth of July escapade escalates from self-indulgent adolescent hijinks to a dark, self-destructive ride into reckless abandon, you can’t help but find your attention entirely encapsulated by the events unfolding on screen. The story is deftly plotted, with a tight script that meanders only when that’s exactly the intent. The thing about this movie is that its entertaining nature feels outright reprehensible, because engrained throughout the thrilling noir-ish tale is a disturbingly acute critique of the values of the YouTube generation, leaving the viewer in a constant limbo between entertainment and revulsion.
Neel uses Kelly to explore a new generation’s fixation with technology and that technology’s effects on our culture. She records everything she does in order to repost it online to garner further attention and gratification from her peers. Feeding off the incessant ego-boost from seeing herself and her antics fawned over and immortalized online, Kelly allows her invented Internet-self “King Kelly” to supplant her real-world personality, as every person in her life, from her parents to her friends, become nothing more than sources of attention and validation, throwing further fuel on the blinding, rampant, all-consuming fire that is King Kelly.
“King Kelly” is a thesis statement about how, if we’re not careful, the Internet can cut us off from the real world and deprive us of empathy for our fellow human beings, despite seemingly connecting us to everyone around the world, instantly. Kelly carves out her own universe online at which she is the center, providing her with a perpetual source of indulgent self-importance, shaping her into a vapid, self-obsessed narcissist.
Kelly may be an extreme case of the ideas Neel is getting at, but even at much smaller scales they are still relevant. By giving everyone a voice, does the Internet lead us all into believing we deserve to be heard? Is it making our culture inherently more self-involved? Is it bringing us together, only to drive us further apart? What separates our digital self from our physical self? More existentially, is something real anymore if it isn’t documented online? As one Internet meme famously put it: Pics or it didn’t happen.
The questions Neel asks in “King Kelly” seem to be core issues of our culture at this moment in time—questions not enough other filmmakers are asking, but they certainly should be.
Do you have something to say about the web fame of America’s “YouTube generation”? Share your insights and concerns with David at dcottrell@wisc.edu.
