What 7 Sundance 2020 films tell us about modern life

In 2020, “going viral” is hardly a new concept. We all know what it means, even your Luddite relatives. We’ve all seen it happen, and and have maybe even experienced it ourselves to varying degrees. 

And yet there remains an air of mystery to the very concept. What does it signify? What does it feel like? How does it happen? And why? 

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, several films attempted to grapple with precisely those questions, from a wide array of angles to equally diverse results. Perhaps the most explicit is Feels Good Man, a documentary about one of the most viral memes of all — Pepe the Frog.

Pepe becomes a force that cannot be stopped or contained, but that can be channeled for good or for evil.

Director Arthur Jones’ painstaking chronicle of Pepe’s journey from obscure comic strip character to nationally recognized hate symbol makes it possible to grasp both how exactly that transformation happened, and how unimaginable it must have seemed at first. Through Pepe, Jones illustrates how memes, far from a frivolous bit of amusement, can help construct the very culture we live in. 

In Pepe’s case, he becomes a seemingly innocuous package for dangerous ideas, and then a mascot for them. He becomes a force that cannot be stopped or contained, much to creator Matt Furie’s distress — but one that can be channeled for good or for evil. And if it should seem strange that so much is being pinned on a simple drawing, it’s actually nothing new. As one academic asks rhetorically, “What’s more worthless than a cartoon but what’s more powerful than Mickey Mouse?”

At least Pepe enjoys the luxury of being fictional. Virality takes on a more personal edge in  Lana Wilson’s Taylor Swift: Miss Americana. The subject is a woman who’s been memed and hashtagged endlessly throughout her career, and the movie revisits (among other things) one of her most viral moments of all — Kanye West’s interruption at the 2009 VMAs, and the decade-plus of fallout that ensued. 

Image: Sundance Institute

An intimate portrayal of Swift’s life, Miss Americana offers an inside perspective into what it feels like to go viral. The star’s account differs from the publicly accepted one not in fact but in feeling. “Do you know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you to make it a trending topic?” she asks, and just like that, it becomes possible to see #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty not as a funny game on the internet, but as the campaign of vitriol that Swift experienced it as. 

Swift stated at the time that she wanted to be “excluded from this narrative,” and that clearly hasn’t happened; the very fact that we’re still talking about it here is proof of that. But Miss Americana offers her, at least and at last, the chance to reframe that viral moment on her own terms, to have her say in a storyline that others refuse to let her escape.

A similar battle over narrative control unfolds in Zola, albeit in a totally different form. Janicza Bravo’s feature is famously based on Aziah Wells’ viral Twitter thread about her nightmarish trip to Tampa with a fellow stripper. Though the characters don’t spend much time tweeting onscreen, the story retains its internet roots in its aesthetic, which not-so-subtly frames the tale as one filtered through one woman’s perspective for the internet’s enjoyment.

About two-thirds of the way through, Zola drives that point home even further with a detour into an alternate version of the story called Stefani, from the point-of-view of the other stripper, based on a Reddit post by her real-life counterpart. In this overtly racist telling, Zola is the trashy lowlife who dragged sweet innocent Stefani down the depraved path to prostitution.

It’s funny because it’s so far from the Zola we’ve seen thus far, but it’s the kind of funny that sticks in your throat. It’s a pointed reminder that the Zola we’re enjoying is dependent entirely on King’s (or rather, King’s by way of Bravo’s) framing of it. By telling this story, Wells asserts her own agency and voice over it; by going viral, hers becomes the definitive version of it.

Image: Anna Kooris / Sundance Institute

Take the depth out of Zola’s tale, though, and you might find yourself in a nightmare akin to Spree. The premise — Kurt, a rideshare driver, is so desperate to go viral he’ll literally kill for it — is not as far-fetched as we might hope, and director Eugene Kotlyarenko (who also wrote the script with Gene McHugh) is shrewd enough to frame Kurt not as an aberration from our likes-obsessed culture, but the logical endpoint of it. 

While Kurt is thirstier than most, he’s hardly the only character in Spree who can’t seem to put down his phone. Followers and likes are the currency on which his world runs — and not always to sinister ends; Kurt’s foil Jessie, for example, protects herself from a creep by posting his picture on her highly trafficked Instagram. But Spree makes plain how a social-media-warped mindset can lead to warped values. What Kurt prioritizes is not what is good but what is popular, not what is literally true but what reads as authentic.

Which, in a sense, means that he’s only doing exactly what social media has trained him to do. Jeff Orlowski’s doc The Social Dilemma makes the case that these platforms are not some passive mirror of our inner natures, but an active manipulator of them, and backs it up with confirmation directly from the tech-industry insiders who once worked behind the scenes to dial up our engagement and then sell it to the highest bidder.  

Throughout, the notion recurs that these companies never meant to spread fake news and conspiracy theories, to promote bigotry and incite violence, to eat away at teenagers’ self-esteem, to abet government surveillance and even genocide. Those behaviors are just the inevitable byproduct of a model aimed at grabbing attention by any means necessary. The Social Dilemma‘s target is that model, rather than any one individual corporation or executive.

Those concerns are echoed in Coded Bias, which digs even further into the dangers of letting our technology do all our thinking for us. Director Shalini Kantayya breaks down how algorithms, far from neutral calculations, reflect the biases and values of the people who program them — and even then can only do exactly as they’ve been told to do, with little room for ambiguity or empathy. 

As one interview subject puts it, “Computers cannot autonomously decide what is good.” We run into trouble when we assume they can, whether in allowing algorithms to determine who gets hired or housed, or in eating up whatever batshit YouTube conspiracy gets served to us.

Image: Sundance Institute

However, even as Coded Bias and The Social Dilemma help explain how we got to a world that could create someone like Kurt, crush someone like Swift, and corrupt something like Pepe, they’re willing to acknowledge that tech can have a positive side as well. If Zola showed the power of sharing and therefore owning one’s own story, Us Kids demonstrates how that force can be deployed on an even larger scale to bring about a better world.

Directed by Kim A. Snyder, the documentary follows a small group of Parkland students (including David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, and Sam Fuentes) in their efforts to evolve the American conversation on gun control through March for Our Lives, its accompanying summer tour, and other related campaigns. 

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can send it somewhere else.”

As the kids go about their work, Snyder shows us tweets of the Parkland teenagers sending messages of support to each other or to other activists, and of other people, including prominent celebrities, absorbing and boosting their message.  Social media may only be one component of MFOL’s strategy, but it’s an essential and organic one. Indeed, you probably don’t even need this movie to tell you that; if you were online in 2018, you probably saw it firsthand.

Us Kids is perhaps the most compelling example across these films of the ways in which viral clout can be mobilized for good — and not just in the online space, but to effect change offline as well. But it’s not alone in that argument. If all these films are united in one message, it’s that virality, far from being a purely virtual phenomenon, has consequences in every corner of the “real” world.

At one point in Feels Good Man, an academic dismisses Furie’s attempts to reclaim Pepe as his own. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he says, “but you can send it somewhere else.” In other words, memes and hashtags and likes and retweets aren’t going away anytime soon. The question that emerges, then, is what we’re going to do about them. The answers offered by these films are as different as the films themselves.

We can demand new laws around tech companies, as Coded Bias and The Social Dilemma advocate, or use social media itself to inspire cultural and political change in other arenas, as the kids of Us Kids do. We can hold ourselves accountable when we amplify bad men like Spree‘s Kurt, or take a minute to consider who’s in charge when narratives like the ones in Zola and Miss Americana take off.

We can take to heart the lesson of Feels Good Man, that we underestimate virality at our own risk. It’s a force to be reckoned with, one that can crush a creative spirit or inspire a malevolent one, set the record straight or twist it around again, leave us feeling inspired and uplifted or hopeless and despairing. Learn to harness that power, these films warn us, or you might get eaten alive by it.