The art of the incel

Let’s say you have a diagnosis of autism, depression or anxiety. You sleep too much or too little. You masturbate too often. You play computer games and don’t open the curtains. You have no money and you are often profoundly lonely and frequently bored. From this unedifying starting point, can you, let’s say, weightlift your way out of misery? Can you trick yourself into being sociable? Can you ultimately get beyond your fantasy that a woman will save you (she won’t) and learn to live with everyday misery?

Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary TFW NO GF, internet-speak for ‘that feel(ing) when no girlfriend’, is the first attempt to make cinema out of incel subculture (and perhaps thereby also signalling its end). Is it even possible to translate the fast-moving, often-undecidable tone of the internet into the much slower medium of film? Moyer does a great job, flashing up anonymous forum posts and tweets, explaining who various meme characters are, such as ‘Wojak’, a worried-looking man with a bald head, who forms the basis for hundreds of thousands of increasingly outlandish permutations.