Directed by: Gia Coppola
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Maya Hawke, Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman
Rated R, 94 minutes
Whether we’re ready for it or not, the 21st century is playing out in online spaces. In the last month alone, cyberattacks have shut down a major hospital in San Diego, the Alaskan state court records system, and an oil pipeline along the east coast. Meanwhile, our phones and tablets listen to our conversations in order to feed us targeted ads. And in the world of online content creation, streamers make a living broadcasting their lives to strangers all over the world, often becoming rich and famous without having to leave their homes.
With the internet forming such a central part of the fabric of daily life, cinema has struggled to stay relevant. What are movies, if not simply another commodity within the online market of everything? The past year has demonstrated this more clearly than even the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime did in the pre-pandemic years. When the world shut down, it was the internet that kept running, that made “gatherings” possible from a distance, that allowed us to work from home, that kept us connected and informed and, of course, entertained.
A rich landscape of ideas, from the psychological effects of anonymous interactions to a redefining of security in an age when attackers can do real harm without ever laying a finger on their targets, lies waiting to be explored and understood. With all that in mind, “Mainstream” is disappointingly shortsighted. A drama about young content creators trying to make a lasting impact in an industry where things are made to go viral and then disappear, “Mainstream” wants desperately to have the chilling effect of a soothsayer. Instead of chills, it mostly inspires groans and sighs.
On the surface, the story is a conventional rags-to-riches tale. Small-time videographer Frankie (Maya Hawke, “Stranger Things”) meets the irreverent Link (Andrew Garfield, “The Social Network”) and, together with Frankie’s friend Jake (Nat Wolff, “Paper Towns”), they start making YouTube videos satirizing the excess and vacuous personalities of celebrity influencers. Link, an unpredictable showman, quickly becomes an online sensation, bringing all three into a world of money and fame and moral depravity. Jake loves Frankie; she loves Link, inexplicably; Link’s theatrics get them all in hot water.
Link, we are supposed to believe, is something of a modern-day prophet (if a false one). When he gets in front of Frankie’s camera, his lighthearted ramblings turn quickly into polemics, criticizing the average consumer—the viewers of their videos, in other words—for abandoning the tangible world for the digital one. He rails against internet culture for making people doubt their own worth as humans. He adopts the stage name No One Special, as if to emphasize that fame poisons celebrities and their fans alike.
In the movie’s most incisive arc, Link humiliates a young woman in a video, later doubling down on his actions on a talk show. The young woman eventually commits suicide, leading all the main characters to reckon with the part they’ve played in driving this woman to her death. “Mainstream” is primarily concerned with the toxicity and inhumanity that online anonymity affords us; the death of the young woman is presented not as a final condemnation of Link or anyone else, but rather as a sobering reminder that the online world and the “real world” are more closely connected than we think.
Unfortunately, any further exploration of this idea and the questions it raises—the moral responsibility we have to each other in online interactions, the bifurcation of people into their flesh-and-blood and virtual selves—is missing. “All of you killed her,” Link berates a live audience in an expletive-filled rant, before shouting, “I’m trying to wake you up!” By the end of his tirade, the crowd is cheering and chanting his name. Too often, “Mainstream” clouds its own commentary with self-righteous and wrongheaded preaching, asserting that our dependency on the internet is a sign of moral and spiritual rot, rather than the logical conclusion of decades of rapid technological advances that have reshaped the world as we know it. I can’t fault “Mainstream” for attempting to make sense of online life, but with its flimsy premise and hotheaded angst, it fails to treat its own subject with the nuance it requires. Movies about the internet are inherently going to date themselves quickly, but “Mainstream” already feels stale upon arrival.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/14/21.