The Art of Self-Incrimination: A Social Media inflected CHRONICLE

*Some Spoilers, Fair Warning*

Perhaps a goofy co-incidence that Facebook filed with the SEC to launch its $5 Billion (with a B) initial public offering in the same week as this viral/web advertised film hit cinema screens. The dollar value for the filing is itself equal parts news-catcher, market-hubris and ultimately an underscore on where society, in the here and now, lays its value:  Social Networking. Even more curious that the script for Chronicle makes room for Carl Jung and Arthur Schopenhauer, but relegates Facebook and Twitter curiously to subtext. Chronicle is an interesting name for the movie; perhaps more literal in meaning (a chronological ordering of events - here by an unseen editor) but also less on-the-nose than say, "Status Update."

I'm getting ahead of myself, perhaps.

The latest found footage movie is one of the more interesting uses of this increasingly strained sub-genre and this is why: The main character, an angry young man with nascent telekinetic powers who is well on his way to becoming a super-villain, not only self-incriminates himself by filming the process of his road to villainy but (and here is the kicker) he uses his powers control the camera's framing of his own story. In the case of the films big climactic show-down, the full self-realization/actualization of himself as the Apex-Predator, he uses dozens of cameras to capture things from multiple angles. The thing that always struck me as strange with the outbreak of social networking, is how so many young people capture themselves drinking underage, skipping school, or other such activities that are both unacceptable in society (but also loaded, perhaps, with a cachet of cool) and upload it THEMSELVES to later be prosecuted, ostracized, or whatnot by their own self-publication. To make the the unspoken, but underlying 'thesis' of the film is interesting to me.  One might argue that the serial killer genre has always been filled with this self-aggrandizement, from Man Bites Dog to Seven/Zodiac, but there is a key difference in that others were documenting or processing the information flow.  Here it is self-mythology by way of what is filmed and how; the very fabric of a found-footage self-portrait.   I wish the filmmakers (Josh Trank and Max "son of John" Landis) did not have to be so overt with every character justifying or explaining why they are filming all the time (see also George Romero's Diary of the Dead) because, dammit, it is 2012 and rather obvious that we are race of beings whose souls are been stolen by the camera on pretty much an hourly basis - from mall and street security, to our own goshdarned phones!

Certainly this is interesting enough to let me make my way through a film where the acting is somewhat mediocre, and the character moments are played at 'eleven.' Perhaps over-simplification of motive is a side effect of the comic book superhero-movie genre which almost always wears its emotions and character beats on its sleeve, but it also plays into the 'crafting of a story' boiling a narrative down into blog entries or emoticons. I will not say the idea of building an crafted personality (ahem, Catfish) or video autobiography as catharsis (Tarnation) are new, but Chronicle is the first movie to mould these ideas in an interesting mash of genre-filmmaking (teen angst, superhero.) Well loved movies B-films such as They Live or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) were not the first time their respective ideas (Trickle-Down-Reaganomics and The Red Scare) were put out there, but man, they captured their times in timeless (and yes, slightly clunky) genre fare. I do not believe that Chronicle is any different in shouting out our own bigtime flaws. Note: In the logic of Chronicle, the emotional fallout of the death of the high school super-star popular guy is given equal parity as hallway heresay of a blowjob gone wrong (Oi! Easy A eat your heart out.) The film ends on a possible note of (self-aggrandizing) blasphemy - a video blog of one of our three Übermensch filming himself in front of an isolate Tibetan monastery - in other words, "One kick-ass Facebook update, Dude!"

Instead of all these nostalgic cold-war era Marvel and D.C. comic books being turned into films, radio-active accidents and military-industrial-complex billionaires, this is the super-hero movie that our times deserve.