Epic Fail is a highly creative, avant-garde essay of a short film that questions how we perceive truth, information and politics. Via Short of the Week:
Imagining a world where nothing short of “World Peace” is up for an online vote, Barth envisions this watershed moment as it is digitally experienced by a young man on his laptop, and how, similarly to events of the past year, certainty in “correct” outcomes end up thwarted. Biting, if simplistic observations abound, regarding media preoccupations with horse-race analysis, attention-economy tactics, and the debilitating nature of multi-tasking in information-rich environs. Eventually, our subject forgets to vote while in pursuit of self-serving gratification in the form of click-bait spam that promises “5000 Followers”.
Barth’s analysis is not solution-driven, nor does it highlight unexamined issues, but it is interesting in how concisely he and his co-writer Joe Hampson are able to bundle varying threads in the five minute film: the epistemological threat of social media filter bubbles, the rise of fake news, and a media culture that speaks endlessly about millenials, without really engaging them. Perhaps the self-absorption of our protagonist feels like an easy shot, but we cannot refute the fact that our generation, considered the most politically-conscious of the past several decades, is routinely under-represented in elections.
In discussing his motivations with us, Barth describes the 7 month process of creating the film as a way of “evacuating” his feelings post-election. It is an interesting phrase, and ties into his citation of Sartre’s debut novel Nausea as his inspiration. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of the novel, overcome by a pervasive sickening feeling, obsessively documents every fleeting observation within and outside of himself in an attempt to determine the cause of his discomfort. The result is a confrontation between existence and perception.