The film was made last summer, and drew heavily on the director’s and writers’ real experiences. The characters are based on the actors themselves, and one actor’s girlfriend even plays herself, complete with real phone messages and pictures from the time when their relationship was a long distance one. Sometimes Hollywood movies are fun to watch to see how different stars are from ourselves. In LOL’s case, the audience and the characters will likely be extremely similar, sometimes hilariously so, as well as occasionally painfully.
Joe Swanberg (the director-writer), Kevin Bewersdorf (writer-composer), and C. Mason Wells (writer) play the three main characters. Tim (Swanberg), Alex (Bewersdorf), and Chris (Wells) all rely on various technologies to conduct their lives, and their relationships. Tim is joined at the hip by his cell phone, his laptop, and his girlfriend (Brigid Reagan), in that order. Alex pines for a girl he only knows from a fantasy website, while using a girl (Tipper Newton) who likes him to get closer to that fantasy. Chris’s girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) lives in New York, and constantly annoys him by not sending him camera phone pictures with the right amount of sexiness. The three guys are all friends, and they enable each other’s shared addiction to technology, while at the same time hurting the women in their life.
These men are self obsessed and passive aggressive, constantly checking their messages and emails, but only replying to the ones that promise instant gratification. The other side of the gender fairs better, but they also engage in game to get what they want. (Tim’s girlfriend flirting with a beachgoer in front of Tim is a prime example). In the end, both sides get hurt, but the women display and articulate their pain much more movingly. The pain on Newton’s face or the sobbing message of Gerwig affects the viewer, even if it doesn’t really touch the male protagonists.
Beyond being a knowing character studio, “LOL” uses filmmaking technique to create a collage of image and sound. The editing is inventive, and closely tied with the soundtrack. Audio of a distressing phone message plays over the jubilant clatter of party conversations. Short, jump-cut montages quickly explain a character’s earlier activities. In the most inventive component, short music montages are integrated into the film, dubbed “noiseheads”. Bewersdorf , like his character in the movie, edited together videos of various people (including filmmakers across the country) making strange noises. Every so often, the movie cuts to a noisehead excerpt, and we get to see a catchy rhythm based song formed from disparate, random blips and tones.
The score (composed by Bewersdorf as well) shifts from the punching beat of the noiseheads to melodic, sad melodies. The contrast perfectly encapsulates the pace of everyone’s surface lives, and the deep feelings that sometimes exist underneath. The problem with the Tim, Alex, and Chris is they try to avoid experiencing the down points in their lives. Instead they jump from computers to real life and back again, searching for gratification for a few seconds, changing the communication channel if they can’t find it.
But they are self aware – Tim knows when his girlfriend catches him on the phone late at night that he’s going to be sent home. The scene is funny, but at the same time just deepens our appreciation for his problems. Addicts usually don’t give up their addiction even when it’s hurting those around them. Just because Tim knows he is damaging his relationship doesn’t stop him from doing it. Are his addictions specific to this generation? On the surface they are, but Swanberg has said that if the characters weren’t addicted to the internet, they’d be addicted to something else.
LOL was shot in a 4:3 aspect ration, and is filled with tight, narrow shots. They start to get almost claustrophobic the further you get into the characters minds, and you begin to focus on their problems almost as much as they do. Luckily, the movie cuts back and forth between characters, so we can get the different points of view. Still, the basic motifs of technology preventing and aiding communication are never abandoned.
For all its self contained themes, there do seem to be echoes of earlier films, such as Woody Allen’s romantic comedies. Allen’s realistic, brutal take on relationships are familiar, as well as some of his methods. In one scene, Tim and his friend are sitting on a couch behind his girlfriend, instant messaging each other while his girlfriend watches TV. The message text is shown on screen – it reminds of the scene in “Annie Hall” when Allen and Diane Keaton have a roundabout conversation while their real thoughts are shown in subtitles. In “LOL”, instead of thinking to yourself, you can broadcast your thoughts to the world while being verbally silent.
The making of “LOL” is often what the movie is about. Email was used to transfer the noiseheads. The movie was probably cut on a laptop (maybe even the one Tim describes as a “sexy machine”). Music was coordinated over phone and email while Bewersdorf was in Europe. This movie couldn’t have been made only a few years before, not only because of the technical limitations, but because many of its specifics wouldn’t have existed.
Fortunately, Swanberg and his team were able to make this film, and are now self distributing using the flip side to the same techniques. Swanberg runs a site for each of his movies, and updates the production journal section frequently. They also have myspace pages, spreading the word through friends and fans. Finally, there is “Young American Bodies”, an internet soap opera produced for the website Nerve.com. All these productions cross reference each other, in the real world as well as in the pretend one (“Young American Bodies” is the website in “LOL” where Bewersdorf finds his internet fantasy).
But once you absorb all the facets of LOL, what really stays with you is the characters. These people stay up late on their computers. They call each other 3 hours before an event to check availability. They login to their email constantly (Alex is shocked to learn that Newton’s character doesn’t have an internet connection, and only checks her email once a week). Through these characters, the film creates a mood that every scene serves to perpetuate. Like the best movies, you come out of the theatre in that mood, and in the characters mindsets. What did I do when I got home? Immediately checked my email of course.
• Alex Mechlin writes about the movie industry monthly, exclusively in Lumino Magazine. E-mail Alex at alex.mechlin@luminomagazine.com.
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