There is an assumption of pitiable artifice in virtual reality living: people, unable to endure dissatisfaction with their material lives, retreat into a high-polygon fantasy of anime-eyed masquerade, their companions in cyberspace thankfully ignorant of their real-world identities. Perhaps one can blame The Matrix: donning a headset like “plugging in,” any and all worlds beyond this tactile one have been tainted with judgment as smoke and mirrors. If one is to follow Neo’s teachings, the organic world may be worse than the virtual, but at least it’s real.
Joe Hunting’s freshman effort, We Met in Virtual Reality, begs to differ. Shot entirely in the world of online virtual reality platform VRChat, the film’s very production breathes novelty. Unconventional as it may be, however, its form does not preclude it from asserting the “reality” portion of the term. By depicting the social relationships of its leads with a surprising familiarity, Hunting presents the technology as a tool, less for accessing the otherworldly than for permitting a liberating second chance at real life.
Stylistically, We Met in Virtual Reality is closest to something like The Real World, a recognizable structure that follows individuals, collage-style, as guides in and symptoms of a larger social universe. Like The Real World, the film’s leads — Jenny, Toaster, DustBunny, DragonHeart, and IsYourBoi — are young people. And like all young people, they party, attend class, and go on dates, replicating in all ways but physical the emotional and relational rituals of adolescence. At a VR house party, kids in pulsing, multi-colored tails and curling horns may clip through one another to form eldritch collections of planar limbs, but on the couch two teens drunkenly make out while another gives a tender acoustic rendition of Vance Joy’s “Riptide,” hallmarks of a high school soirée par excellence. Though the aesthetic and mechanical rules of this existence may differ, the social organization is endearingly conventional.
Perhaps even mundane: sequences abound of Jenny teaching an ASL course, IsYourBoi performs a lap dance in celebration of her anniversary with DragonHeart, there’s a marriage proposal — and then a wedding. While they may look out-of-this-world, nothing the film’s leads do is far from the ordinarily human; in this way, We Met in Virtual Reality presents VR as a mere extension of real world living, one whose everyday experiences never tread beyond, well, the everyday. This established, the film’s characters present themselves rather earnestly (no catfishing or trolls behind keyboards here); “you’re free to be yourself,” Jenny says in a classic, talking-head style interview. Far from artificial, these identities are granted an infinitely expansive set of new aesthetic tools for expression, VR becoming less a zone of fantasy than self-actualization where starting over is as simple as donning a new skin. The desire, it would appear, is not to escape the social conventions of the real world — which are, as the house party suggests, effortlessly replicated online — but simply to try being oneself again.
It is here where Hunting affirms the “reality” of the VR space. We Met in Virtual Reality is, at its core, a film about young people learning how to be themselves, the now age-old documentary bildungsroman of MTV. It just looks different. In addition to new opportunities for trans identity in the avatar-swapping expression of multiple, even seemingly conflicted elements of one’s personality — the subject, for certain, of an entire essay in itself — We Met in Virtual Reality celebrates the solace of understanding that one’s experience of this and other lives is never immutable. And like in real life, love, friendship, and heartbreak follow wherever human beings go; when DustBunny lays her head in Toaster’s lap, dreaming out loud about the day they can be together again IRL, though her abdomen clips through his legs and their fingers curl awkwardly around and into each other, the smiles on their faces are all too real.
