Jason Sondhi
Look, what’s there to say about the election anymore? About Brexit? Disbelief has worn off, outrage is exhausting, and spending huge chunks of every day refreshing Twitter and being assaulted by toxicity is leaving us (or at least me) numb. The problem is, a lot needs to still be said! Considering the timetables necessary for great, creative works, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what art, media, and entertainment can bring to the discourse.
While there has been no shortage of politically-tinged filmmaking these last several months, (kudos, Field of Vision) the majority of it has engaged issues in a quite literal fashion—a level of earnestness that I frequently find bouncing off my cynic’s armor. Where are the political works that are sly, or clever, or metaphorical? The ones that use humor or absurdity to their advantage, to sneak in under the surface of our biases?
It’s hard to think of an artist more suited to such an approach than Greg Barth, and that’s why the arrival of Epic Fail is such a treat. Barth is a accomplished visual stylist of a trendy form of video minimalism that you’ll instantly recognize. His bright, clean dioramas smartly blend the practical and digital, and his wry observations on culture, explored in works like Fortunes, an experimental comedy, and Essays on Reality, Chapters 1 and 2, are intellectually pleasing without being obtuse. In Epic Fail, Barth, mildly inspired by the writings of Sartre, applies these sensibilities to a sardonic critique of the political climate as it is mediated by the online experience, media, marketing, and youthful solipsism.
Imagining a world where nothing short of “World Peace” is up for an online vote, Barth envisions this watershed moment as it is digitally experienced by a young man on his laptop, and how, similarly to events of the past year, certainty in “correct” outcomes end up thwarted. Biting, if simplistic observations abound, regarding media preoccupations with horse-race analysis, attention-economy tactics, and the debilitating nature of multi-tasking in information-rich environs. Eventually, our subject forgets to vote while in pursuit of self-serving gratification in the form of click-bait spam that promises “5000 Followers”.
Barth’s analysis is not solution-driven, nor does it highlight unexamined issues, but it is interesting in how concisely he and his co-writer Joe Hampson are able to bundle varying threads in the five minute film: the epistemological threat of social media filter bubbles, the rise of fake news, and a media culture that speaks endlessly about millenials, without really engaging them. Perhaps the self-absorption of our protagonist feels like an easy shot, but we cannot refute the fact that our generation, considered the most politically-conscious of the past several decades, is routinely under-represented in elections.
In discussing his motivations with us, Barth describes the 7 month process of creating the film as a way of “evacuating” his feelings post-election. It is an interesting phrase, and ties into his citation of Sartre’s debut novel Nausea as his inspiration. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of the novel, overcome by a pervasive sickening feeling, obsessively documents every fleeting observation within and outside of himself in an attempt to determine the cause of his discomfort. The result is a confrontation between existence and perception. Perhaps grappling with the “essence” of our perceptions of the past year through cataloging them and visually representing them as Barth has done is necessary to access their underlying being. It is worth noting that Roquentin, in ultimately confronting “bare existence” abandons his work of historical biography in order to move to Paris and write a novel. Artistic creation is, in the end, the existentialist’s answer to the absurdity of existence.