Media Circus: CONTENT: The Lo-Fi Man
Within the span of 15 minutes, CONTENT: The Lo-Fi Man, an outrageously funny satirical short by Brian Lonano and Blake Myers, slides through the genres of nerdy film documentary to viral YouTube channel to sci-fi dystopia and body-horror, with a Japanese-style monster movie ending. While the film is unflaggingly entertaining with its witty script and brilliantly inventive low-budget visual design, Lonano and Myers use their genre satires to investigate the absurdity of our particular moment in the history of the uneasy relationship between artists and capital. Internet video emerged almost two decades ago, with its promise that everyone in the world would soon have the means to star in their own hit TV show. The Lo-Fi Man turns its laser beam eyes on the current media ecosystem, where the money people, both media giants and scrappy internet startups, are sharks swimming around in the media waters, looking for authentic-feeling, grass-rootsy “content” to chew up and turn into profit, while artists struggle between their desperate need for “exposure” and their commitment to the integrity of their work.
We begin with Lonano playing a nerdy video podcaster, talking about his love for Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a DIY film which serves as a kind of guiding spirit for the similarly named Content: The Lo-Fi Man. Podcaster Lonano is receiving some kind of sponsorship from a platform branded as “Film Bro Player.” Note the marketing of this channel to an audience of internet-addicted young males, which is an important layer in the gender dynamics at play. His media keepers are quite displeased with Lonano’s quasi-academic nerdy style, and through a series of mind-control techniques which apparently include electric shock aversion conditioning, they forcefully rebrand the show as a contemporary YouTube show, featuring a sexier, hipper version of Lonano (perfectly embodied by Clarke Williams) rapping vapidly about how cool Tetsuo is, embedded in an incredible, over-the-top version of the jump cuts, cheesy sound effects, and dumb dick-joke humor which plague contemporary internet video, all the while making sure to continually plug his sponsors.
The worst electric shocks are reserved for an effort on the part of the handlers to force Lonano to replace the words “film” and “video” with the more commodified “content,” as if the only thing that matters about a film is whether or not it can generate money. Lonano and Myers are right to zero in on this semantic change as emblematic of a paradigm shift that is being engineered through the use of this dismissive term, which implies that all the “content” is interchangeable, simply market goods. The “suits” upstairs don’t care, in a human sense, about what is being communicated in any of the films; they only care about the bottom line.
Without revealing every twist and turn of the film’s journey to sci-fi dystopia and body horror film, I’ll say that Lonano and Myers operate in the inventive, resourceful spirit of Tetsuo, as they create stunning visual details, seemingly out of cast-off junk and a bare-bones budget. These details, such as they grey glop which slaves are forced to eat in the media GloboCorp prison, are all effectively pointed additions to the satiric points being made. (The corporate slogan, “Be Content with Content,” is very clever, but will present a challenge to translators if the film is subtitled in another language.)
During Lonano’s dramatic escape from prison, he runs into a trio of “underground, guerrilla filmmakers” who are all women with the requisite dyed hair, leather, and piercings. In contrast to the literary world, where apparently women have staged a successful takeover of the industry, the film world is still predominantly a boys club, and many women are positioning themselves as the principled outsiders, media warriors, fighting the good fight to defend the art of cinema. It’s part of the sophisticated perspective of this film that its satiric zingers land equally on the outsiders and the insiders. As an outsider filmmaker myself, I appreciated their depiction of the absurdity of people like me, showing my experimental films to a handful of people in a basement in Bushwick, and quixotically hoping to stick it to the man with my transgressive masterpiece.
Lonano joins their fight against the “content seekers,” robots which the GloboCorp sends out to mop up sellable “content,” mainly by seducing artists with offers of “exposure” and possible “experience.” The women’s super-8 cameras prove to be poor weapons against the robot, who soon mangles them and turns them into TikTok producing robots. One of them starts hawking a channel aimed at women, called “Film Gal.” The robots are another effectively ironic touch, considering that many of these companies do, in fact, use AI robots to acquire “content,” although hopefully they aren’t killer robots.
The film wraps up with a stunning comeback triumph for the art of cinema, fully worthy of Tsukamoto, courtesy of a VHS tape of Tetsuo which Lonano finds in the trash. (Also as in Tetsuo, the women are quickly side-lined from the story.)
The context of Lonano and Myers’ marketing of the film gives the final twist of irony: after the successful film festival run, they’re presenting it on a streaming platform much like the one depicted in the film, owned by a large e-commerce firm. It’s particularly ironic that The Lo-Fi Man depicts the giant media corporation as running a slave labor prison camp, since the platform Lonano shows his work on (and the parent company) prominently display a “Modern Slavery Statement” on their website, reaffirming their commitment to combat the horrors of slavery. Do they even know what Lonano and Myers’ film is saying about them? If not, it only confirms the film’s thesis: that to the overlords, it’s all just interchangeable “content,” as long as it keeps eyeballs on the screen. As Neil Young said so many years ago, it’s all “for the turnstiles.”
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