The kind of stories gathered by Cynthia Lowen for her documentary “Netizens”—having its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival—should have been told so often in print and on screen by this point that we should be able to predict their basics by heart. But that isn’t the case. Even though the Internet remains a near-perfect tool for predators to wage war on the women they target, frequently with impunity, there hasn’t been much appetite in the media for extended dives into the topic. Recently, some interest has been paid to specific subsets of online-centered abuse (like last year’s Backpage.com trafficking documentary “I Am Jane Doe”). But often, when it comes to media representation, these victims have been on their own.
Trying to give a voice to the victimized, Lowen profiles three women who have suffered online harassment. They hail from different backgrounds and face specific kinds of abuse. But they share a unifying characteristic. None are backing down and ceding the battlefield to their abusers. The central protagonist here is Carrie Goldberg, a New York attorney with a big sunglasses-Carrie Bradshaw take on fashion who has turned her own experience with being harassed online by an ex-boyfriend into a boutique legal business assisting women with the same problems.
Goldberg’s lemons-to-lemonade story is contrasted with that of Tina – a commodities trader, she ended up losing a job because a stalker created a Google barrage of websites filled with stories about her being a prostitute. By the time Lowen catches up with Tina, she’s scraping by in Florida, waitressing and teaching dance classes to children and unable to put her MBA to work because of the Google trap that follows her like a dark magnet. “It’s been three-and-a-half years,” she says, “and I’m tired.”
The third leg of Lowen’s story is Anita Sarkeesian, whose story is a little different. She’s deeply embedded in the online culture, and she was targeted for things she said – not as revenge for a breakup. After creating the video series “Tropes Versus Women in Video Games,” Sarkeesian was targeted as part of the GamerGate assault by basement bros on women who dared to express opinions about gaming culture. Unlike the highly personal assaults on Tina and Carrie’s lives, the attacks on Sarkeesian are broad-based and open-sourced, with whole troll brigades sending murderous tweets and calling in bomb threats. The attacks are so constant that Sarkeesian worries she’s become “desensitized” to the vile abuse.
Given the vast sprawl of the issue, it’s surprising that Lowen would settle on such a narrow-cast structure. “Netizens” brings in some other subjects, like “Celia,” the client of Carrie’s whose online stalker continually posts ads for sex on Craigslist that sends strange men to her home and place of work. “Netizens” provides these first-hand accounts of the maddeningly persistent nature of this kind of abuse—even a Net-positive optimist like Sarkeesian says “It’s still terrible, it’s still harassment every day.” While “Netizens” effectively documents the trauma of losing control over one’s identity and safety, it frustratingly fails to scope out the full extent of the issue. Perhaps more importantly, “Netizens” ends up repeating itself ad nauseam detracting from the overall impact of a well-intentioned doc.
Lowen also doesn’t allow herself ground for forwarding momentum. Two of the women are essentially in the same place at the end of the movie as the beginning. That doesn’t mean the filmmaker should have created some artificial barrier for her subjects to overcome. But the way that “Netizens” keeps covering the same ground and never quite tackling the root problems of this kind of aggression, and how it’s facilitated by online media, unfortunately, doesn’t leave the narrative anywhere to go. [C+]
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