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?

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4 Responses

  1. “The rage of the disaffected white male” — this is patently false. Inceldom isn’t an exclusively “white” issue, it actually pretty common in minority communities too. Whites make up 65-70% of incels, which is reflective of U.S. demographics. Minorities are just as proportionately affected by the inability to form meaningful, loving relationships.

  2. I know it doesn’t fit into the narrative, but being an incel has less to do with being white. That’s racist in both directions: On the one hand, “white male” is in some circles uttered with a negative connotation as such. On the other hand, associating the two denies blacks/asians/etc. their expression under the incel umbrella.
    When in the 90’s, Beck would sing “I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me?”, this is the same ground mentality you find in those guys today. In that sense it’s nothing new, except this post 2010 online scene ends up charging each other and it is also highly correlated with that of mean spirited troll commenters.
    The self-describing term incel was then picked up in that infamous 2018 tweet “CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?” and was since used, by this group of the web, to denote guys who expose toxic masculinity. In this use of the term, it’s then also lumped together with the “white male”, the identity that can be antagonized without repercussions within their logic.
    If you go on youtube or reddit, you’ll find plenty of self-describing incels who are black, hapas or hispanic. Be aware that if you tie incels here with “disaffected young white men,” you’re picking up coopted language and signal a side in that culture war.

    In any case, thanks for the review. I just saw an interview with the director but it seems the movie not gonna be screened anytime soon, due to the Corona virus.

  3. I feel like the incel concept has spiraled out of control online. Having been a part of that demographic throughout my entire adult life until the age of 24 or 25 I can say that the feeling of remaining perpetually unable to date and experience affection, through school and beyond, definitely takes its mental toll. I cant count how many nights I cried myself to sleep, wondering if I was going to die that way. Wondering how many years of life without companionship I was going to endure before the end. The worst was when family or coworkers would ask the “do you have a girlfriend yet” type questions…yeah, thanks for rubbing it in. On top of loneliness, if you have any sort of social circle, you very quickly become a pariah when you are perpetually dateless and an easy object of jokes.

    Normal people are very quick to criticize ‘incels’, but very few of them can actually fathom what its like to go all of your school life without even once going on a date, and then experiencing enduring, endless loneliness that eventually starts to manifest as physical pain and despair.

    Does that excuse the behaviors of whats now branded the ‘incel’ community? No. But people should have the decency to at least acknowledge that this is a problem for a portion of young men who cannot figure out why this is happening to them and would desperately like to escape it.

    I havent been in that community for years…I found one girl on the fringe of my social circle who I started hanging out with. We clicked…the only time in my life its ever happened, and we got married. But when I was, we had our own little web forum for lonely people and there was a pretty diverse collective there of people ranging from those who just didn’t have luck with relationships (both men and women), to those who had to be talked off the edge because they couldnt handle it anymore. There was no malice for the most part beyond the frustrating eternal question: ‘why wont just one person even give me a chance?’

    We had lots of words for ourselves. Lonely. Isolated. Involuntary celibate. Love shy got used a lot. But now I cant figure out how its morphed in to ‘this’. I have to assume the ‘other’ type of lonely young person, quietly despairing in their appartment, still exists. If they do, it is unfair to lump them in with troll culture, and they are in desperate need of understanding and help.

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