Content warnings for men, suicide, incels, racism, misogyny, and also Tucker Carlson because although I didn't mention him in this review I had to see a clip of him in the documentary and I wish there was a warning before that.

When I have thoughts on something I very truly cannot shut up. That being said, I would hate to waste my brain energy on this any more than I really have to, so I'll try to keep it short.

I hated this. Yeah, I really did. I don't care how nice the aesthetics or the music was. I don't care about the drone shots or the close-ups or the editing. Even if those were pleasing, they ultimately served a bigger purpose and that was bringing this piece of garbage into existence.

If you're an incel reading this and think that I hate this movie because I hate white men or something like that I'll let you believe it because I honestly don't care what you think. But if you're gonna stop reading now, I'll spoil the ending. Tldr; go to therapy.

First things first, this is just not an insightful documentary. Period. We already know that incels hate themselves and are poor white guys that live with their parents. We been knew. Maybe not everyone knew what a wojak or a black pill was, but even after this doc I'm convinced they still don't know. That's because a TON of context was lost in the creation of this thing.

You see, I, like the unfortunate subjects of this documentary, felt increasingly isolated in my adolescence which led to me spending a LOT of time online. I know it well. I've seen incels around, I know some of the terminology. In fact, in college, I used to browse r/TheRedPill when I was truly truly bored just to remind myself that some men Really Do Be Like That. Imagine my SHOCK when, in this documentary, the red pill is never brought up, but the black pill is. Those two pills go hand in hand like shot and chaser. The red pill is the belief of a return to traditional patriarchy through creating a positive identity for men (aka treat women like objects and work on getting jacked and smart so you can get laid). The black pill is the belief that some men are simply too ugly and were born to die alone and there's no use in trying. While the red pill is dangerous to women since it leads men to believe that women are the privileged group and need to be brought down, the black pill is dangerous to everyone because if nothing matters then nothing matters. The black pill is what causes the amount of suicides in the incel community (one of the doc's subjects had THREE of his closest friends die to suicide), it's what causes incels to become mass shooters.

You never get a true sense for any of this in the film. While not all incels have been redpilled or blackpilled, many have and these communities often intersect and feed into each other.

This doc very much centers on a number of infamous incels. Basically all they really talk about is how lonely and alienated they feel. Get in line, bro. So many people feel this way, but why do incel communities form? The doc's answer is that men needed a space where they could talk about their feelings without judgement because there's a societal construct that men should not have problems because they're privileged. Now. What the documentary tried to keep separate from this notion is that the rampant misogyny and racist rhetoric found in these male only spaces are just memes. But like. I can put two and two together. While the documentary makes a joke out of the men joking about hurting a woman.... maybe these male only spaces make these kinds of jokes... because they actually hate women? Or they are racist? Maybe that's their truth and they're upset they can't share anywhere else? I don't know, just my assumption. And this documentary certainly did nothing to prove those assumptions wrong. There's a bit nearish the end where one of the guys who's clearly more of a redpiller than a blackpiller because he's about self bettering himself talks about how he does powerlifting for himself and not for a girlfriend. While his words are picked carefully, you can tell he... kind of hates women. Imma be honest, that was my impression. He didn't like the idea that women were trying to get with him after he started working out and talked about how he didn't like hookup culture. Which, that's fine, but the way he talked about how he hasn't met a woman who is able to better himself intellectually, that's when something smelled fishy. Usually, that means he has definitely met woman who are smart enough for him but he can't recognize it. Maybe I caught it because I know what to look for or because I myself am a femoid but there's so much this doc glazes over because it's limited to the viewpoints of like 5 incels. No one else is interviewed. Not their family members, any women they would've interacted with online or in person, NOTHING. No one.

Now for da racism. The confederate flag ring one character wears kind of sums it up about the racism in this movie. The guy says his use of the "n-word" online (n-word in quotes because while he does most absolutely uses it in tweets, he says "n-word" in the doc) is just jokes and you'd have to be an idiot to take a tweet seriously. But, here's the thing. Earlier in the documentary another guy talks about how people get so swept up in their online personas that first it starts off as a joke, next thing you know you're marching at Charlottesville. He laughed it off and the doc moved on without even acknowledging what Charlottesville was (an alt-right protest against taking down a confederate monument in which actual white supremacists showed up with swastikas and a woman died counterprotesting). I feel like those two sentiments should be combined (it's just a joke vs in this community you can get wrapped up in a persona and end up seriously believing what you preach) but they're not. Nothing is seriously looked out, dissected, analyzed. If they were I feel like this doc would have a very different ending.

How did it end, you might be asking? Do I even want to know? Well, it ends with a small bit about how you can prevent someone from being an incel. Long answer short, you can't. If you care about them, check in on their mental health. One of the men criticize a twitter thread about how to try and prevent them from becoming an incel and calls it stupid and out of touch. Well, what then? I feel like the obvious answer is therapy. But that would never EVER come up in this doc because incel communities look down on and hate therapy and that is the only viewpoint in this documentary.

But that isn't even where it ends. It ends with a full contextualization of the media hysteria around the release of the joker movie and how we all thought some incel would shoot it up. One of the doc subjects posted a tweet online saying "one ticket to joker please" and got his guns taken away. Everyone in the doc thinks it's a joke, of course, it was a joke. No big deal. It isn't serious. It's just the media that's trying to look bad. Sure he threatened violence against women in a different tweet, but look he has a girlfriend now he found on 4chan! It's all jokes guys. And don't forget, keep hope. This guy has a girlfriend, everything will be ok :) The End :)

Except that doesn't change the fact that there was an incel shooter that shot up a college because a girl rejected him and then a few year later another incel followed him in his footsteps and cited him as an inspiration. Two facts conveniently left out of the film. The same rhetoric and mass hoarding of guns which were a warning sign of an actual school shooter are just jokes when put into the hands of someone else. Disgusting and irresponsible depiction of the subculture. This subculture is creating white supremacists. It is creating mass shooters. It is driving young white men to suicide. Sure, even if the numbers of “actual” white supremacists and mass shooters are lower than the media makes it seem, the normalization of that rhetoric in these spaces is contributing to the culture. Incel culture does more harm than good. Like, just go to therapy? Find friends in nontoxic spaces where people aren't trying to get others to kill themselves. So many of your friends are killing themselves, what's not clicking. I don't know if you know this, but male suicide deaths are so much higher than female because they choose more sudden and brutal causes of death. Aka, a gun death is a lot more likely to kill you than a purposeful overdose. So, maybe incels shouldn't glorify the masculine trait of owning so many guns when they're depressed and suicidal? If the filmmaker cared about the subjects as much as she said she did, why end on a bullshit faux positive note? I hate it here.

In closing thoughts, I was lucky enough to be "radicalized" on Tumblr. I hated it there. I left after I was in a group chat that made me cry and I recognized the number that place did on my mental health. I got out. I saw a lot of dark stuff on there, though. People kill themselves on Tumblr too. People are depressed there. They don't egg people on like they do on 4chan, but it's just a byproduct of growing up with tough home lives on the internet. Everyone is let down in some way or another. On Tumblr, that manifested as a sense of social justice rather than the extreme apathy present in incel spaces. Incels joke about Trump because nothing matters. Well, most of the systemic issues that incels suffer from like poverty and not taking male mental health seriously are in line with leftist and feminist ideologies that are explored on Tumblr and different sections of twitter. It's crazy to think about how while men are so ready to give up when they don't receive what they believe they are entitled to, they try and make things worse because it's funny and means nothing to them, while largely women and people of color mobilize to discuss these issues and how to change them.

Incels, you might be insufferable pricks now, but please try and do better for yourself. Delete your 4chan account or whatever and put all that anger at the world to something productive. Find something positive worth fighting for. I know you're sad, but we're all sad. It's all about how you cope with it. Just because you're a white man doesn't mean you're not allowed to be sad, but that doesn't mean you get to try and flip it around on us. Life is hard for you, but you have privileges. Deal with it. Everything means something. Every word you write is part of a larger rhetoric, why make it so nasty and awful when you can leave something good in this world? Also, go to therapy. Please. If you don't have access to therapy, start a campaign for universal healthcare. It's worth it, I promise. Aight, I'm out.