I don’t know all their names, but I am intimately familiar with the faces of the millennial Instagram gays who populate my feed when I’m doomscrolling at night, caught somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. Sometimes they’re spouting banal observational comedy in a lightly droning voice, like Seinfeld on Lexapro; other times, they’re doing front-facing impersonations of hyperspecific personality types: Yes, that is how my friend who just got back from Italy would act at an Olive Garden. At some point, as my eyes get blearier, they blend together into one person: a man who says relatable things, upkeeps an aspirational appearance, and somehow spins minor social interactions into meandering videos without inventing anything ex nihilo, reflecting the world back to me but never adding anything new to it.
At several points in that numbing stream, that mono-face has taken the form of Jordan Firstman. Part of a wave of comedians who rose to prominence during the 2020 lockdowns with front-facing camera impressions, Firstman has more recently released a video pointing out the scarcity of ice cubes at European restaurants (they do not give you very much ice), a bit about Jesus coming back on Easter weekend (it would be painfully on the nose), and an extended riff about how straight men don’t need pickup trucks (it’s true; they don’t.) He is funny, inasmuch as this style of humor has become the norm of our social media lives, but I admit I’ve always regarded him and his peers with some resentment. Here I am, an ugly queer duckling trying to craft original stories in a world that’s ravenous for entertainment but unwilling to pay for it, and a pleasant-looking gay guy can rocket himself to a life of Angeleno ease by using Zoomer slang in a pretend therapy session.
That’s the same lens through which director Sebastián Silva initially views Firstman in his anticipated new independent feature Rotting in the Sun, now streaming on Mubi. The meta comedy follows fictionalized versions of the filmmaker and Firstman as they meet on a beach in Mexico and eventually agree to an ill-fated collaboration. It doesn’t take long for Silva’s self-insert to tear into the Instagram personality: “You’re not funny,” he says. “You do impersonations because you are nobody. Like, you’re impersonating things and people because you are nobody.” Not long later, though, when Silva can sense that he’s losing the attention of some glib development executives on a Zoom call, he’s quick to cash in on Firstman’s social media cachet, claiming that he’s already in development on a project with him, much to the delight of the HBO suits.
To say much more about where the film goes from there would be to spoil the year’s most delicious and darkly funny comedy. Suffice it to say that the Firstman of the film has something of a drug-fueled existential crisis after coming into contact with the nihilism of Silva’s stalling career. “I am not real,” he declares to his followers on an Instagram live. “Nothing I have ever done on here is real. You enabled me. I hate all of you. I fucking hate myself.” (“What is this new dark personality? It’s unwatchable,” a friend tells him afterward, in one of the film’s most hilarious lines.) Rotting in the Sun is perhaps the closest cinema has come to approximating the dissociative feeling of a K-hole, like Uncut Gems with more anal dildos and unsimulated sex.
This is a meaningful step beyond the casting stunt in which movie stars play vain versions of themselves to send up their public personas (see, e.g., Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent or Michael Cera, who was coincidentally Silva’s first choice for the role, in This is the End). Clearly, Firstman is allowing Silva to have some fun at his expense. (“I told Jordan I would fully humiliate him and make fun of what he does, not even ironically,” the director told IndieWire.) But this isn’t a didactic film about how making queer indie cinema is True Art™ while Instagram Reels are cheap simulacrums; rather, it’s an interrogation of what any of it even means. On multiple levels, too, it’s an indictment of a media ecosystem in which creatives need social media stars to get a project off the ground and social media stars need creatives to help guide them out of the bite-size mentality the algorithm seems to inculcate in them.
The Rotting version of Firstman — much like his real-life counterpart, I would presume — has aspirations beyond making Chrissy Teigen laugh with a portrayal of “banana bread’s publicist.” And who wouldn’t? None of those faces I see during my two a.m. doomscrolls are people who have achieved their ultimate dream, even if they’ve attained some degree of material comfort. They are doing the same thing I am doing, making money while they chase more elusive goals: a bestselling book, a TV show, maybe a national tour. Because as much as short-form video is scrambling our brains and vacuuming up our time, those traditional-media benchmarks still mean something to us, vestigial memories implanted deep in the hearts of anyone who needs attention to survive.
Firstman will definitely be tapped to do bigger things, judging from his comic and genuinely affecting performance in this film, but I’m sure there’s a bill somewhere that will need to be paid with a pitch-perfect imitation of a business traveler taking a phone call at an airport terminal. Among the sentiments that Rotting lodged loose in me was the pre-baked judgment I bring to that sort of content: I blog to keep the lights on, and is that really any more ennobling than amusing people while they sit on the toilet? We want to create, we want to make, in a world that is rotting. What else can we do with the doomed impulse besides laugh at it and pick it apart?
Rotting in the Sun is streaming now on MUBI.
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