An old script for the indie Web

On Friday, a friend told me about a film script he’d written eight years ago. He wanted me to give it a look, so that we could discuss its narrative development. When I saw it was 150-page long, I thought it would take me way longer than an afternoon to finish it. Boy, was I wrong. I read it all on a whim, despite my literary hungover of late.

Albeit stocked with rock-solid productions and artists, our national cinema throughput pales in comparison to other countries; especially the US. And though quantity isn’t equivalent to quality — especially in the US — we nevertheless miss in representation. This is why my friend’s script caused me such great joy: I had a much deeper emotional connection with its familiar background.

It does feel nice for a change to have characters eat our food, share our landscape, or study in schools that might as well have been the ones I attended in my youth. However, truth be told, most of its personal appeal for me lies within its depiction of a particular time and economic class, rather than a particular space, such as our country.

His 2010s story brought back some delightful memories for me, a middle class nostalgia-ridden zillennial. However, unlike the petite bourgeoisie I came from, not everybody was unfairly privileged enough to have those experiences. It was rare, the access to the Internet, its online forums, messengers, and slang; to mobile phones; or to enough English knowledge to sing along indie rock tunes.

Either way, my friend knew better than writing a naïve, rose-tinted view of the past, despite looking back to its pleasing aspects. It was unbearably painful to revisit the naturalised fat-phobia of that time. The worry its queer characters experienced, stemming from their obliviousness to the LGBTQ+ ethos, was also much too real.

Therefore, the text is not a mere wave to an idealised liberal past. Rather, it’s a portray of that liberal thinking contradictions, its widespread hurt, its murderous roots… But also, a portray of the people who lived, laughed and loved in such a reality: out of spite and in spite of it all. The story was food for thought, yet quite sweet. There is so much charisma there, so many familiar references, and it was all so carefully structured and directed. It was ingenious.

Perhaps even more joyful than the reading itself were our following conversations, though. If there is something amiss from that past Web, it must be the heavily community-driven spirit of that time. For outcast artists like me and my friend, the old Internet was a lush platform where we could share our work, whilst also engaging on meaningful, fulfilling conversations about it. Even more than that: about our honing craftmanship.

Thus, when he showed me his text and we discussed it on the weekend, I relived that experience. How I’d been longing for it! It’s also made me realise that, provided there are people out there moved by an authentic passion for sharing art, knowledge, empathy; provided there is still solidarity, the Internet will still have a coin left to continue.

And that is something we should not lose sight of. Particularly nowadays, when there’s been an annoyingly defeatist buzz about how the Internet is dead, sacked by dystopian billionaire monopolies, its corpse rotting behind the walled-gardens of social media platforms, crushed by the infinite weight of artificially generated mumbo-jumbo.

Well, is it so? It’s time for another respawn, then.