A Bunch of Goo Goo Muck(s): 'Baby Invasion'
The visage of online gamer culture and screen-life. The horror.
Dear Moviegoers,
And now, here we are. Have we reached the end of cinema as we know it? AI and VR evangelists have constantly poked around in filmmaking, and vice versa (like the works of Lynn Hershman Leeson). The concepts of collaboration between these two very young mediums are stunningly interesting and alarmingly awful all at once. Is it art if it was derived from a robot? The machine had to learn like the rest of us, potentially getting “ideas” from other more human pieces–legally or criminally. By “like the rest of us,” I mean exactly that. Inspiration is ok, influence is more than alright, and adaptation is acceptable. Just not from bots?
Perhaps video games are the bridge between the machine’s head and the human’s hand. Director Harmony Korine, always the provocateur (from Dogme 95 to James Franco), has released unto the world Baby Invasion, a vile and inexplicable presentation that is also a gaming experience unlike anything else in history. It’s all thinly wrapped around an incredibly short testimony from a female tech developer who, while wearing a headset/goggles combo, explains her disappointment and devastation in how an incomplete game of hers got leaked online and is now being used for malicious means, real and unreal. From there, the video frame rate speeds up, the senses get heightened, and off we go into over an hour of nightmare visions.
Visions, yes. It’s nearly impossible to lock down on the main perspective or protagonist of this film, as we shift from FPS (first-person shooter) to masked webcam viewers to live chatroom commentary to God himself. I’ve concluded that the true perspective comes from the real-world audience or, rather, witnesses, who see what was once considered an overload of information. We’re past the MTV Generation, folks. Windows and windows of video and play are absorbed and understood side-by-side, all the while handling multi-tasking like typing and drinking Mountain Dew at nearly the same time, only to then continue the hunt for something new to discover.
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“Dystopian TikTok” is written by a “user” in the chat portion of the main screen of the “film.” How true. If Baby Invasion alludes to the young art of cinema, the young technology of AI and VR, and the users caught up in it all (which I believe it does), then short form films and mini-interaction with them is the new theater. Within a given app, your eyes can consume quickly, and your fingers can respond quicker. Swipe and move on. But Baby Invasion, interestingly enough, removes these sensations and actions in favor of forced viewership. There is only one screen, and you can’t manipulate it with your digits. You just have to sit and watch. You must sit and watch.
By being neither a movie in the traditional sense, a video that can be moved around, or a game that can be played, Baby Invasion is both a contradiction and a subversion. And you know what? I love it. I want more of it. It trades in audible dialogue for running chat commentary and occasional in-game text boxes. It uses computer graphics, AI filters, point-and-click exploration, roaming machine guns, and windows galore in place of cinematography and editing. An almost entirely post-pro (post-production) movie, where effects might be hallucinations, where dreams are reality, and glitches are welcome.
At its end, I immediately thought about silent film directors Georges Melies and Carl Dreyer, and how they worked magic and passion into their movies. The illusions of movement, the hand-painted colors, the tricks and treats, the drama and the angelic. Harmony Korine has achieved all of that in this ultra-modern flick. It is definitely a classic type of silent film, only its score is one of noise and beats, its intertitles come from chatroom users, and some of them say “on that no wipe grind.” King Vidor territory, I say. The Crowd, it is.
As it provocatively pokes thoughts out of our collective heads, this is a movie whose hypnotic trance can be frustrating and tedious to watch but entertaining all the same. Stimulating. Has humanity reached its artistic peak? The machine is just waking up, the cinema has only just been born, and video games are how we navigate the two. Harmony gets this harmony, and Baby Invasion is so much of that.
If there is a God, may they help us sort this out. 4/5
Baby Invasion is available for digital purchase on edglrd.com and rent/purchase on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Sincerely Yours in Moviegoing,
⚜️🍿
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