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. In this world, originality is encouraged, and on anonymous forums, you are only as good as your last post — there is no hierarchy, only glorious and bloody anarchy (the film is dedicated to ‘Anon’, which seems only just).

Moyer mixes online clips with voice-overs and interviews with several young men who tweet sentences such as ‘Everything feels wrong’ and who describe their futureless, dissociated lives, talking about ‘the normal really weird depressed shit you find yourself doing and don’t really know why’. The internet becomes their home, where connection is generated through the wires, rather than in real-life communities.

Does the internet therefore encourage or create incels (short for ‘involuntary celibate’), or does it rather permit a perennial type to meet and relate, to ‘flirt with their despair’, as one interviewee, Sean, puts it? There is no doubting the ‘edginess’ of incel culture — slurs, insults, pictures of guns and exhortations to suicide are all common.