In The Dirties, Matt and Owen’s filmmaking journey ends in a truly dark place. The two high school best friends, having argued the last time they spoke, find themselves reunited in a classroom – one in the midst of carrying out a school shooting, the other understandably terrified. Despite the numerous warning signs of Matt’s deteriorating mental state, the act is also still legitimately a shock to Owen.
It all starts, like so many things do, as a joke. Matt, in particular, is victim to and obsessed with a collection of bullies he refers to as the “Dirties,” and he and Owen use a high school video project as an opportunity to get back at these bullies by portraying them as the villains in a buddy cop pastiche. Pretending to be undercover agents at their high school a la 21 Jump Street, they reenact a number of action movie tropes from films such as The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, and many more. Some fit the context: the cliché “give me your badge and your gun” dispute with the top brass, the drug deal gone wrong, the obligatory trip to a strip club, etc. Other references, such as Matt’s impersonation of Heath Ledger’s Joker in their film’s opening credits, serve no narrative purpose. This line of referential humor exists in their project but also in every minute of their waking lives. Every moment is an opportunity to allude to or channel something from this alternate reality, to further their inside jokes, to recontextualize their lower-rung high school social status within the archetypes of their celluloid heroes.
Matt and Owen premiere their movie to the class, they get a few mixed reactions, and that should be the end of it. But then Matt decides on a new twist for the joke: “Wouldn’t it be funny if we ACTUALLY shot the bullies?!” Now Matt’s getting the school blueprints from the town hall, because isn’t that funny? And isn’t it funny how easy the blueprints were to get? Even though the project is over, the camera is still filming and Matt is always performing, workshopping ideas for this abstract next phase. Owen is clearly worried about Matt to some degree, and things eventually do come to a head in a heated argument. But if Owen is internally grappling with the question of whether Matt will actually hurt anyone or not, he never says it aloud. Then Matt’s bringing a duffel bag of guns into the school and it’s no longer abstract, and certainly not a joke.
Presented in mockumentary format, The Dirties starts off with a strong focus on the film-within-the-film version of “The Dirties” that Matt and Owen are creating. As The Dirties progresses, that focus becomes weaker and we start seeing more of Owen and Matt’s regular lives outside of their attempts to make their film. This is common in mockumentary or found-footage films, where the framing device is more rigid in the beginning to establish context and believability, and then is allowed to loosen over time to better facilitate dramatic storytelling. But in The Dirties, the camera starts to become more of a focus again later in the story as the divide starts to grow between Matt and Owen. When Owen accuses Matt of always performing, it draws attention to why whatever scene we’re watching is being filmed in the first place. Scenes you might have previously assumed weren’t meant to be diegetic “footage” are later revealed to truly exist as footage in Matt’s possession. The lack of context regarding the identity of the third person holding the camera is explicitly questioned when Owen yells that he is Matt’s only friend. The movie goes out of its way to prod at this issue, to highlight the fact that neither diegetic nor non-diegetic explanations fit. Things are downright surreal by the end, as this unexplained cameraman documents Matt’s violence.
Maybe many viewers of The Dirties see where Matt’s journey is taking him ahead of time. Maybe this aspect of the movie was revealed to them before viewing, or perhaps the warning signs Matt displays are sufficient. I became interested in this movie after seeing the Criterion Collection-ripoff cover art of the Blu-ray and hearing a few good words about it, so I did not have advance knowledge of this eventuality. Maybe as someone who could really relate to a lot of what Matt and Owen were going through, I was predisposed to not assume the worst about them and instead assume the best. There’s certainly a moment where real dread hit me, but it wasn’t early. I was past the high school blueprint scene and still viewing Matt’s behavior as understandable, funny even.
The smallest things in The Dirties go the farthest in creating authenticity. The terror of presenting anything personal to a class and the desire to present your authentic self while knowing the potential ridicule this exposes you to. The long aimless nights under the light of suburban street lamps, just walking or riding bikes, covering distance but not going anywhere. The allure of the shocking and the absurd, and the thrill of pushing the limits in that space between deniability and culpability. I’ve been in all of those situations. I know those feelings intimately.
Since 2016, I’ve been on a journey of my own, attempting to reconcile some of my past behavior with my current worldview. The election of Donald Trump should be enough to make us all do some soul searching, but what struck me on a personal level was the intersection of right-wing politics and what I usually refer to as ‘edgelord’ behavior: edgy humor and the celebration of violence and sexualization in media. Consider GamerGate, ComicsGate, the backlash to films like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the various other media-based culture war battlegrounds; there’s a common thread between them that is, ostensibly, anti-censorship and anti-political correctness. That message clearly plays exceptionally well with young men, and I should know. I was a teenage edgelord.
There are the surface-level, cliché things I can say about my youth. Yes, I snuck into R-rated movies. I loved violent video games and heavy metal. I was angry about the prospect of government censorship – I strongly remember the constant presence of Jack Thompson and his eternal quest to ban violent video games. I also remember the jokes at his expense made by popular figures in the video game community, such as Penny Arcade. But it was much more specific than that. I was a long-term member of SomethingAwful.com, which would eventually spawn 4chan and 8chan, sites that now have well-deserved reputations as breeding grounds for extremism. I reveled in edgy humor and campaigns that blurred the lines between the Internet and real life. I joked about school shootings.
I legitimately worry about revealing that about myself. I don’t have a platform, so I don’t worry about getting “canceled,” but the idea that this could bleed into my professional life in some manner has crossed my mind. But yes, as a high school edgelord, I joked about school shootings. I joked about making a Counter-Strike video game level modeled off of my school. I never did, but more because of the work-to-reward ratio than any moral or ethical quandary. Our class visited New York City pre-9/11 and my best friend loudly “whispered” that the World Trade Center’s metal detector had missed his plastic bomb. A teacher overheard and we received some type of talking to, but there were no consequences past that. The trip went on. What was the ‘joke’ in any of these cases? The shock value, I suppose. I can’t think of any real alternative answer. But when I watched Matt get a printout of his high school’s blueprints in The Dirties “as a joke,” I believed him.
I never planned or committed violence. It was always a joke. There was a strong, ever-present idea in my mind that jokes were just jokes, and words just words. Today, I better understand the power of words and see examples every day of the harm they do – harm by themselves, and as part of an escalation to worse harm. I also see the weaponization of this edgelord persona – how easy it is to trick young men worried about movie and video game censorship into becoming ideological partners to fascists and supremacists and how that youthful brand of shitposting and meme-ing has contributed to Trump and our nation’s current dalliance with mainstream white nationalism. If my youth was timeshifted 20 years, would I have been an easy mark for this? Did I contribute, in whatever small way, to planting the seeds that have yielded such vile results?
Many of the alt-right forces that are currently weaponizing this anti-political correctness backlash don’t really care about movies and video games; they care about exploiting any possible foothold that helps them get people riled up against “the left.” This is just another battleground added to the list alongside abortion, LGBT rights, socialism, and gun control. That’s a whole separate can of worms that explodes past the scope of this essay. These ideas about films and video games are hardly exclusive to this current right-wing dynamic – it used to be more the left making this argument, and there’s certainly good-faith versions of the argument out there, removed from political posturing. So what is at the core of this argument?
Our society is often willfully ignorant about how media functions and the role it plays in our cultural norms. This is especially impactful for the youth, for whom media is one of the few battlegrounds they already feel like they have a personal stake in. The type of media that young men frequently enjoy makes it all too easy to weaponize their grievance. “Women are invading male spaces!” “Political correctness will intrude and warp your favorite franchises!” “Left-wing regressives want to ban sex and violence in media, even though we all know it’s just pretend!” Part of it is classic ‘othering’ – the belief that this other group that doesn’t think like you will supplant you, and then all media will be made to their tastes. But a large part of it rests on the correlated ideas that art doesn’t really mean anything and that criticism is a bad-faith attempt at censorship. These work in concert to discourage any attempt to truly consider the role media plays in our lives.
This idea that art is meaningless works in multiple ways. It’s a defense that violent, sexualized, or just ideologically ugly material is harmless, because how can some meaningless fantasy that every sane person recognizes as fiction cause any damage? It’s also an attack on well-meaning progressive media that attempts to be inclusive or present a positive message. In this view, that’s just cynical virtue-signaling, a valueless PR attempt to separate other virtue-signaling phonies from their money. Any attempt at thoughtful criticism falls on deaf ears because art criticism, well, that’s just another scam. It’s an attempt to shame or censor certain works or more phony PR for things on the other side of the aisle. The end result is America’s favorite thing – the absence of culpability. Freedom from criticism, freedom from consequence, and freedom from self-awareness.
The disconnect is that, while fiction does not attempt to portray fact-based truths, it certainly does attempt to portray emotional truths. The common defense of “I can separate fiction from reality” ignores this distinction and presents an argument in which emotion is not even on the table – as if facts are the only thing that drives people’s worldviews. But believing the emotional truth of art is a core reason why people are so attracted to it. In fiction, the fact that the details are entirely at the author’s discretion allows for the crafting of perfect scenarios through which to present some emotional argument. We see the flipside of this in the political sphere all the time. Even when caught in a lie or mistake, there will be those who insist that the lie still serves some “deeper truth.” In fiction, there is only that “deeper truth.”
Consider the entire genre of vigilante justice films. The protagonist, and thus the audience, is sure of the identity of the wrongdoers and the innocence of the victims. The system has been shown to have failed so of course the protagonist has no other recourse than to take matters into his own hands. And the protagonist can enact his righteous revenge without error, without collateral damage, if the author only wills it. These works present the emotional argument that vigilante justice is both correct and attainable. No one thinks that Death Wish is a documentary of a real-life event, but some do agree with its protagonist and thus its emotional argument. In The Dirties, Matt’s idea to wear shirts that say “We’re Just Here For The Bad Guys” while conducting the school shooting relates to this idea of the unassailable righteousness of the main character in a work of fiction. In his head, his judgment is so obvious and correct that innocent bystanders would read his shirt and be comforted, safe in the knowledge that he is only going to kill the “bad guys,” a categorization they can all agree on.
I believe a root cause of this unwillingness to consider the effects of art is that no one wants to believe that they are susceptible to influence. Ask someone if they believe that advertisements affect them and you’ll likely get some variant of “of course not.” Yet corporations spend billions on advertising every year. Not just commercials for new products that you might not otherwise know existed – the benefit of, say, a movie trailer is very tangible – but existing products as well. Coca Cola ads aren’t informing you about a new product – they are attempting to influence your emotions about Coca Cola. Isn’t Coca Cola so delicious, so refreshing, so uniquely American? Isn’t Coca Cola an important part of your life? There’s no deterministic result of watching such an ad; you don’t suddenly feel the exact message that was being expressed. But maybe it’s in the back of your head now. Maybe you’re just ever so slightly more likely to buy it over a competitor the next time you’re browsing the aisles. It’s tough to quantify such a change in an individual person – how much did they already like Coke? Would they have purchased it anyway? But when considered statistically, when utilizing test and control groups, the effect is much clearer, obvious even. Advertisement works.
The same is true for propaganda. You might hear about how other people are susceptible to propaganda, but there’s intense resistance to the idea that one is susceptible to it themselves. Yet propaganda also clearly works. Propaganda can push the political temperature slightly higher for large numbers of people, netting a large overall effect. Some people are pushed from apathy to caring enough to vote; others are pushed in the opposite direction. And some are pushed from frothing-at-the-mouth passionate right over the edge into political violence.
Advertisements, propaganda, and art utilize many of the same techniques in the service of their arguments – point-of-view, relatable characters, and audio and visual techniques that create emotion and empathy. Two of the most famous propaganda films, The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will, pioneered filmmaking techniques that have since been incorporated as standard tools of general filmmaking. These techniques don’t suddenly become toothless just because the author’s aim is no longer political propaganda. The goals of propaganda and general art are frequently far more similar in effect than not – only the targets are different. Technique transfer from general art to propaganda is also common. For example, techniques from found-footage horror films (cropped edges signifying the hidden nature of the camera, fake GUI overlay showing things such as a phone’s low battery, artificial distortion) are now commonly used in political ads and “undercover journalism” from the likes of Project Veritas in an attempt to up the scare factor.
That same defensiveness regarding the potential emotional effect of media was on full display with the release of 2019’s Joker. From early reads of the script and then festival screenings of the finished movie, there was a bit of unease from some film journalists, an idea that this movie was perhaps too provocative. The backlash to that suggestion was immense. “It’s just a movie, how could that possibly be dangerous?” “People know the difference between fantasy and reality!” “The media WANTS there to be violence!” In hindsight, I do think the provocativeness of the movie was overplayed – Joker is most notable for Joaquin Phoenix’s dramatic physical performance, and the rest of the film is, in the parlance of the realm, all set-up, no punchline. It broaches issues such as class inequality and mental health but has nothing to say about them; they’re mostly just potential excuses for why the Joker does what he does, without any real commitment to any of them. Given the obvious context that movies exponentially more extreme than Joker are released every year, I think the particular fear with this movie was how extreme those early viewers perceived it to be in combination with how wide its cultural reach would be. An extreme, antagonistic movie like A Serbian Film will be seen by a small subculture already immersed in that type of content. Joker potentially represented a shift towards something edgier for an exponentially larger, mainstream group of the population.
The big piece of nuance that’s missing from these conversations about individual movies, however, is that the effects people are concerned about are typically not caused by individual movies. It’s not that a well-adjusted person watches a certain movie and then, presto-chango, they go do a murder. No, it’s about small shifts in the Overton window, or a comparable emotional window, over time. The real question is: on your worst day, at your most emotional, how are you likely to act? How will your subconscious templates for “hero” and “bravery” and “justice,” formed over a lifetime of watching and absorbing media where violence is typically the solution, influence you at some critical junction should you ever encounter one? And what kind of society have we created if a large number of people have been tweaked in this way, with some percentage of them statistically likely to encounter such a critical junction?
The idea that Reservoir Dogs, Fight Club, and The Dark Knight have had no effect on male power fantasies is just unfathomable to me. The same applies to Dirty Harry and Death Wish supposedly not contributing to a culture where vigilante justice is venerated, or for more movies than I could ever possibly list supposedly not contributing to a culture that values women primarily for their physical appearance and sexual availability. Was the real-life occurrence of people starting fight clubs an example of the supposed barrier people are so good at maintaining between fiction and reality? Is the obscene prevalence of cops putting the Punisher skull logo on their vehicles such an example? Or how about the meme-ers who edited Trump’s head and the heads and logos of various political enemies into the church shootout scene from Kingsman: The Secret Service? Or the fucks cosplaying as Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker during the George Floyd-inspired riots, filming themselves performing the now-famous stairway dance routine while surrounded by others in the midst of true grief?
With the millions of cultural forces at play, you sometimes end up with some pretty unpredictable results. Take The Matrix, with its long tail of red pill/blue pill appropriation and misappropriation. It isn’t that the concept of the “red pill” is so novel, so philosophically rigorous, that it begs for real-life application. It’s that the movie is cool and that its iconography has implanted itself in a generation of people and is now ripe for exploitation by various bad-faith propagandists. Or take Fight Club, the authorial intent of which is a denouncement of toxic masculinity. Tyler Durden, the man from whose head all of the fight clubs and neo-masculine ideology are spun, is revealed to be a parasite of the narrator, and only after Durden is “killed” can the narrator contextualize his place in the world and have a non-toxic relationship with the only woman in the movie. Yet Durden’s alluring rants have become cultural staples – his annunciation of a perceived problem in society, the disappearance of core aspects of the traditional male gender role, is more evocative and more resonant than his eventual defeat, so his worldview is empathized with even though the solutions he offers are equally or more destructive. His parasitic persona has latched onto a portion of the film’s audience, and they have no intention of killing it. I can’t imagine author Chuck Palahniuk ever expected to be hearing his creation’s “snowflake” line used as a mainstream pejorative against liberals, yet that is what the chaos of our cultural black box has delivered.
I don’t think The Dirties is trying to draw a straight line between violent media and violent actions. Bullying and other aspects of Matt’s life are clearly enormously consequential to his actions. His case is an extreme one – school shootings are nowhere near a typical result of the dynamics explored in the film. But the idea that his obsession with violent movies is completely unrelated seems willfully obtuse. Matt has consistently framed his conflict with the Dirties using movie tropes, so his use of movie solutions to this real-life problem has a certain twisted logic to it. This extreme, dramatic scenario expresses a less dramatic but more common emotional truth.
Yes, there are so many other violent aspects of our culture, and violence existed long before violent media. It’s not that violent media is some special class of cultural artifact with unique powers – but it’s also not a special class with zero power. It is part of our continuous societal exchange of ideas. We’ve become less violent in some ways as the standard of living has gone up and our society has become more inclusive of a wider variety of worldviews. But we remain a violent society in numerous other ways. Media plays some role in that dynamic – not as a point of origin, but as a means of culture-wide broadcast and adoption of such ideas, as one pulpit among many.
Regardless of who’s doing it, I don’t think censorship is the answer, save for truly beyond-the-pale scenarios. Making something taboo and pushing it underground doesn’t really stop it – it removes the ability to explore certain concepts in the safer environment of fictional media, and in some ways, making something taboo gives it more power. The most useful thing is to face these issues head-on. Modern education leaves a lot to be desired, lacking a focus on critically important skills such as “judging whether sources of information are trustworthy” and “contextualizing historic events within cultural trends that exist to this day.” Another necessary intro-level course: Understanding Media. Ideally, giving people the tools to analyze the emotional appeals of media would help foster greater self-awareness of how their own emotions and biases can be affected and how different ideas spread by media are processed both internally and externally.
I like violent movies. I don’t want them to go away. I liked Fight Club as an edgy teen, and since then I’ve learned a lot about toxic masculinity and now appreciate the movie on an intellectual level as the denouncement of that worldview that it was intended to be. But I also still find it really fucking cool. The assured camera movements; the precision editing; that unbelievable score by The Dust Brothers. It is a cool movie that excites me on a visceral level. I don’t think I’ll ever grow bored of the job-quitting scene. The same applies to the lobby shootout in The Matrix, the hammer and bullet scene from Drive, or pretty much the entirety of John Wick. As much as my politics have skewed towards pacifism, gun control, reduced military spending, and police reform, my passion for violent media has remained. I don’t really aim to change that part of myself; I’ve rationalized it away as something I’m capable of compartmentalizing, given my recognition of its effects and my active aim to analyze where it might be intruding into my real-world politics and actions. Is my belief in the power of media analysis education unrealistic at best, or a crutch at worst to excuse my lack of desire for broader change? Am I part of the problem in a deeper way than I’ve intellectually rationalized myself to be? These aren’t rhetorical questions – I truly don’t know, and the most honest thing I can do is to present them as real possibilities.
The nature of the cameraman in The Dirties is an element I think about a lot. By drawing attention to the physical presence of the cameraman but never explaining him, we’re encouraged to reflect on our own role as the audience to fill this gap. And when the cameraman seems to willingly cooperate with Matt’s school shooting, we as the audience are implicated as well. We can turn off the movie whenever we like, thus preventing Matt from ever arriving at his sad journey’s end. But no, we’d rather see. This is part of the inherent tension of modern civilization. We have millennia of philosophy espousing ideas of reason and dispassionate justice to inform what we colloquially call our “better angels.” But the reptilian sex-and-violence-driven parts of our brains remain and are inextricable from our personhood. It’s hard enough to isolate those portions from the decision-making process in venues like governance where it truly is a virtue, but it feels cold and wrong to even suggest that such centers of passion should also be excluded from our entertainment. We are so entertained by violence because there is a part of us that craves violence. We don’t need to judge or feel shame, but we do need to remember.
