SXSW FILM REVIEW: ‘TFW No GF’ Looks Inside Incels and Troll Culture

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Your choices when watching TFW No GF are, essentially, sadness or fear. Director Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary on the culture surrounding incels doesn’t really allow you the chance to do much else with the information given.

“Incel” itself is a strange word that many might not be familiar with. A portmanteau of “involuntary celibate,” it is a group that exists primarily online, where disaffected young white men can vent their frustrations on the modern world (which often includes their lack of romantic interests) in the form of nihilistic, violent memes and Twitter posts. It is a curious rabbit hole down which to fall. The rage of the disaffected white male has sparked concerns around the country (and world) thanks to incidents of violence and online threats leading to arrests. What is behind this bizarre radicalization?

Moyer lets the young men within the community tell the story themselves. While the lack of outside opinion is, at first, somewhat frustrating, over the course of her film, which takes its name from a popular meme that originated on 4Chan, TFW No GF (“that feel when no girlfriend”) morphs into a scarily fascinating, verité look at the darker corners of online existence.

Moyer follows a group of four young men who each tell variations of the same story. They grew up isolated, they couldn’t make connections with other people, they dropped out of school, their prospects are few, they are crushed under the weight of small town mediocrity. It’s not exactly a new phenomenon, of course. These are the conditions that have led to the development of a counter culture for time immemorial.

In the modern era, however, there’s a distinct dystopic feel to the growing rage that would have, just a few decades ago, formerly led to the rise of punk rock and metal scenes. Exacerbating these conditions today is the disconnect of modern living. Instead of clubs where the disaffected can meet and vent to the cacophonous sounds of whatever their local punk scene had to offer, they gather online, under a cloak of anonymity, pushing themselves and each other to be more and more incendiary just because they can.

What grows throughout Moyer’s look inside this subculture is the idea that something is implicitly wrong. For the men she follows, we can lay much of the blame on them. They drink too much, they don’t go outside and spend their whole lives online, they push themselves out of bounds of normal society. But the question lingers: why did they do this?

Something along the way failed them, even if they themselves play a part in their downfall. Industries that once supported their families collapsed; the housing market put the American Dream too far out of reach; the education system wasn’t built to sustain or support them. These are a group of young men who watched as the promises of their youth evaporated into mist, leaving them without much to grab onto.

The same can be said for many of us, of course, and for many who watch Moyer’s film it will be a moment of “there but for the grace of God.” In that regard, TFW No GF offers an interesting sociological study on the rise of the disaffected male in modern society. In another, it shows us how the collapse of traditional social structures and safety nets have created conditions ripe for despair.

Which accounts for the sadness you might feel. And leads to the fear. One of Moyer’s subjects finds themselves in trouble with the law when we tweeted a photo of himself with guns and the caption, “One ticket to Joker.” You might have read about this case last year. For these men, there’s a stark disconnect between the roles they play online and the reality of the world they live in. It’s easy for them to excuse their behavior as “just a joke,” but is it really?

Cases of incels resorting to acts of extreme violence have been on the rise in recent years, so how serious should we take their jokes or their claims that they meant nothing by it? How far is too far?

While Moyer ultimately offers no conclusions, the insights we gain and seeing the men behind the anonymous posting are stunning and stark. These men are sad and these men can be scary; the two aren’t mutually exclusive. What we’re left with at the end is the question of whether or not this cycle can be broken and, if it can’t, what happens then?