"Fake Famous" thinks it has a lot more to say about social media fame than it really does
I went into the HBO documentary Fake Famous not expecting a huge exposé on social media fame, but I certainly expected more than I got. The documentary ostensibly is about taking three non-famous people and cultivating a fake online presence and following for them, trying to see if that can translate into an actual following. And this is all to prove… question mark?
First, I question at least one of their selections for these fake influencers. The filmmakers say they chose three less-expected candidates for for this experiment, but one of them, an aspiring actress named Dominique, is young, white, thin, and conventionally pretty — basically, the exact sort of person it would be easiest to make famous on social media. The other two, Wylie and Chris, are (respectively) a white, gay personal assistant and a black aspiring fashion designer, both of whom are also conventionally attractive. What would this experiment have been like with people with body types, ages, backgrounds, or aspirations that don’t we don’t typically see portrayed among social media influencers? I guess we’ll never know.
I’m also unsure what director Nick Bilton’s final goal was here, other than to sneer at influencers and proclaim “social media bad” (he’s not necessarily wrong, he just doesn’t prove his point at all). He buys bots to follow and engage with the subjects’ content, but what number of followers is he aiming for? If he just wants to see how many it’ll take to get free products for people, then it seems to happen very quickly for Dominique. If he’s waiting for her to get actual money, that’s never stated. At the end of the film, Dominique supposedly gets gifted an all-expenses-paid vacation by a brand, but was that the end game? And it’s also strange to see that basically the entire plan was just to take a few well-staged photos and then buy bots. That’s it. Hardly thrilling cinema.
As well, Chris and Wiley very quickly become disenchanted with the experiment — Chris doesn’t want to build his fame inauthentically, while Wiley becomes worried with what his friends back home think of the whole thing. But Bilton has no interest in really exploring the personal and perhaps cultural reasons behind their feelings, mostly just pointing out how their reactions are kind of fucking up his “experiment.” It’s a missed opportunity to look at how different demographics actually engage with and can succeed on social media, and how certain types of content may work with one person and won’t work for another.
The film ends with the beginning of the pandemic, essentially cancelling Dominique’s trip and the “experiment” as a whole, and kind of ends with saying, “Sure, some influencers used their pandemic content for good, but others used it for bad, and therefore influencers are bad and social media is bad.” I honestly don’t know what Bilton’s ending for this film could have been if COVID hadn’t happened, and frankly, I’m not sure he does, either.
I found Fake Famous a pretty disappointing documentary that did less to expose the seedy underbelly of Instagram fame and more to prove that Nick Bilton just really, really hates influencers.
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Kat
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