Director: Beeban Kidron
Talent: Jimmy Wales, Toby Turner, Julian Assange
Release Date: 20th September 2013
Beeban Kidron’s InRealLife is a documentary which aims to examine the malign effects the internet is having on children and adolescents. Adopting the tone of an Observer thinkpiece, all the way down to its barely-concealed contempt for the working class, the resulting feature revels for 90 tedious minutes in its received wisdoms about internet use and the fecklessness of youth without ever once illuminating on the subject. The film’s introduction swings from nauseating techno-optimism into a ‘but what if the exact opposite is the case?’ rhetorical switch. Then, intermittent cuts to slow panning across fibre-optic cables and data centres with Giallo-esque ominous cello music playing: formally, it’s laughable. In interview, Kidron badgers her teenage subjects but allows uninterrupted, authoritative speech to the businesspeople, authors and journalists who advance the film’s central proposition: ‘the internet is bad and dangerous and the driving force behind society’s terminal decline’.
The only time a young person is allowed to speak without intercession is when they condemn themselves: an Oxbridge dropout is gradually coaxed into blaming his academic failings on excessive Xbox use. QED. A teenage boy finds it difficult to get close to girls because the lack of privacy afforded them by social media means they’ll get judged as ‘slags’. You’ll note here that substituting ‘internet’ for ‘misogyny’ on Kidron’s bogey-list might result in a more incisive discussion. Later, a young black girl, identity concealed, recounts the story of being lured into a house by a boy who stole her Blackberry, where she is then gang raped. In tears, she scolds herself: ‘I put my phone first.’ Kidron lets this go unchallenged. The idea that this 15-year-old girl’s ‘addiction’ to her phone is the reason she was raped is central to the message of this execrable film, which will plumb any depth, moral or intellectual, to advance its embarrassingly outmoded thesis.
