The Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova, 2021) (Patreon)

It's hopeless, really. If I were to actually take the time to articulate how stupid this is, I'd be falling into its trap, demonstrating that I'm the kind of unhip, decrepit "victim culture" leftist that Nekrasova and her "dirtbag left" comrades despite. If it's too loud, Scary seems to sneer, then you're too old. And lodging the complaint that this film exploits the idea of Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, and the "Clinton Crime Family" without exhibiting one iota of compassion for Epstein's victims, would probably just be missing the point. (I'm sure one of Dasha's slavering fans would post a gif with "the point" sailing over my head, or just dismiss me as a boomer.)

But look, this is an utterly incompetent film. Scary might receive a passing grade in an undergraduate filmmaking class, since it shows a kind of misguided ambition. But it's just a stylistic blender recipe, poorly aping Argento, Polanski, and Kubrick in the most superficial possible ways. And superficiality is the order of the day; Scary has the depth and insight of the average semi-serious conspiracy post. Craig Baldwin's classic Tribulation 99 deftly showed how conspiratorial thinking, the paranoid drive to link random events into a meta-narrative, is a reactionary impulse, one that makes left-wing and right-wing ideology into an interchangeable mishmash. Nekrasova, meanwhile, gleefully molds feminist anxiety into QAnon-tier bullshit, since both she and her film are too flippantly cool to ever slip into sincerity.

Scary of Sixty-First has no business turning up in film festivals or theaters. But since it's "the Red Scare movie," it practically arrives pre-sold. Again, I know that I am only marking myself as an irrelevant fossil for saying so, but Dasha Nekrasova makes a pretty good argument for cultural gatekeeping. In the Internet era, with podcasting largely supplanting most forms of journalism, there is no seasoning period, no growth, no getting sent to the woodshed for jejune content, unsupported assertions, lack of nuance or sophistication. Immaturity has been repackaged as bratty irreverence, and the result is the triumph of flashy mediocrity.

If the future is just going to be more of this horseshit, I might take an early retirement.