Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Alex Haughey
Starring: Taylor Joree Scorse, Spencer Vaughn Kelly, Chandler Young, Zach Paul
Brow
Full disclosure: I don't have much experience of influencers, YouTubers,
internet personalities. I am a male of a certain age, after all: the only
opinions I am interested in are my own. I simply ignore the doyens of
social media, which is fairly easy as they chiefly exist (unlike, say, the
inescapable Barbenheimer discourse or the leaden music of Sam Smith)
within a segregated feedback loop between consumer and content creator,
the perceived exclusivity of the relationship part of the draw I suppose.
The closed circle has always made me suspicious of naysayers, too: I've no
idea why people are so sniffy about influencers when the phenomena is
avoidable if you're not interested, nor why an automatic suspicion abides
regarding what I imagine to be harmless escapism (you know, like films,
sports, books). Such unfamiliarity of the fad is perhaps beneficial to
watching Under the Influencer, however, which, rather than functioning as a cutting-edge insight into
the perceived absurdity of influencer culture, is instead a broad comedy
for the uninitiated which trades on the accepted stereotypes of social
media personalities.
Like pop singers, athletes and a lot of movie actors, the average career
of an influencer is less than a decade. And that's if you manage to
successfully navigate the vagaries of the medium such as cancel culture,
trends and the fickle nature of predominantly young audiences. At an
ancient 25, Tori (Taylor Joree Scorse) is a YouTuber who is at the
natural decline of her popularity after a decade in the game. We open,
furthermore, with her awaiting results for a potentially serious health
issue. Not that Tori seems bothered though, as she mugs, emojis in pink
neon and overshares to her TikTok followers while her doctor attempts to
deliver the concerning news. When he does, we have our fiction trigger:
Tori is suddenly aware of her own mortality. Will she decide to forgo the
perceived superficiality of her chosen lifestyle, and instead keep it
real, whatever that means within Under the Influencer's binary expectations?
If we didn't clock that we're positioned to impugn social media, we next
see Tori visit her psychiatrist, who is an older educated white man and
therefore a Reliable Figure of Authority (you notice that a lot of
approbation surrounding influencer culture seems to come from older men
discomfited by the apparent success of younger women). The man spells it
out for us by delineating Tori's "compulsive need for validation," and her
"dependency" on platforms. This sort of thing always rubs me the wrong
way: we all need validation, for the love of Maslow. Why is seeking it via
a TikTok channel so bad? The negative paradigm is consolidated by Tori's
imaginary alter ego, who spectrally appears and gives gnomic advice to our
hero as a manifestation of Tori decked out in classic Hollywood look (a
kettle/pot comparison of old and new media?) as she struggles to cope with
an impeding diagnosis and waning reputation.
Tori embarks on a series of increasingly humiliating streaming sessions
(the most effective of which is a hatchet job conducted by a younger
rival, mercilessly suggesting the cutthroat nature of the world), with the
film relentlessly illustrating how fake and exploitative social media is,
yeah? Even though this central theme is what
Under the Influencer builds itself upon, it is reductive to
judge a film solely on its ideologies. And so, in terms of filmmaking
craft, Under the Influencer is pleasingly brisk and poppy,
held together by the infinite charisma of Scorse, who is both funny and
affecting.
Tori's immense likeability compels us through the hit and miss narrative
of competing influencers, parasocial fans and diminishing returns towards
a third act break down where Tori, narrowcasting on her channel, tearfully
admits that she is "nothing" and loses her platinum wig. It is so
*authentic*. From then on the abrupt swerve from baby blue and shocking
pink colour tones into an auburn mise-en-scene expressive of the film's
notions of credibility was so jarringly sudden that I thought one of the
cats had accidentally changed the TV channel to Hallmark. We cut to a
modestly dressed brunette Tori, hiking the hills and having a (annoying)
meet cute with a rugged hunk (Sayer - Spencer Vaughn Kelly) who
seems to have stepped out of a Nicholas Sparks novel, mansplaining the
name Victoria (which is what the newly mature Tori goes by now, you know,
like when Suga changed his name to Agust D), drivelling homespun wisdom
which extols the benefits of "working outside in the dirt" and bemoaning
L.A. - "concrete everywhere."
The principles at work in Under the Influencer grate because
of their lazy simplicity, which fatally undermine the hectoring polemic.
There is an interesting film to be made regarding influencer culture and
its finite nature, the scrabble for relevance, the rapid change in media
climates; but this isn't it. Under the Influencer's apparently happy ending juxtaposes the energy and fun of the film's
opening of silly scenes and Scorse's comic oomph with a deeply mundane
exaltation of small c conservative values: wounded veteran Sayer is
crossing country to visit his grandma, and Tori's burgeoning music career,
which the film champions, is most charitably described as M.O.R.. The idea
that we will share the film's assumptions - that a singer/songwriter music
vocation is more culturally valuable than youtubing, that travelling
aimlessly from town to town is somehow noble - is frankly insulting.
Additionally, the myopic prejudice which the film harbours towards Tori's
chosen career betrays Under the Influencer's limited understanding of the form, which even I can see trades in
knowing irony where both producers and audiences are often aware of the
medium's inherent artificiality and accept it for the trifles it offers.
Dislike and unsubscribe (except for Scorse, who is great).
