[once he’s finished entertaining his adoring mechanical fan, contributing writer and no-cam cammodel marrrrrrr likes to unwind with a light snack and a breezy horror about the perils of camshows in order to prepare himself for the obstacles he’ll face for his impending porn superstardom. this is Midnight Movies.]
film: CAM (2018)
food: chips & salsa
pre-game: indie horror about a camgirl who starts having a series of increasingly disturbing encounters. screenplay written by the author of a book called “Camgirl” (who also briefly worked as one herself after graduating college). avail on netflix.
post-game: the first scene of CAM, the debut horror film from director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei (herself a former cammodel), finds main character Alice (Madeline Brewer) performing an online sex show in a specially decorated guest room of her newly rented house. when she starts a bidding war for what size dildo she’ll use, one user tips a hefty amount requesting she use a knife instead. she just so happens to have one in her toy chest. the tips come flooding in.
at first, it seems like the film intends to explore a possible connection between sex work and violence, or the possible monetization of violence in the marketplace of sex work. instead, it’s an idea that’s peekaboo’d and then mostly forgotten.
so it is with CAM, a movie that, much like the online shows at the heart of its story, operates almost entirely at the surface. themes, character development, emotional arcs, and even plot devices are teased but never fully explored. the result is an occasionally exciting, but ultimately unfulfilling watch.
Alice, who goes by the username Lola_lola, is bubbling outside of the top 50 performers on the website “freegirlslive,” and is determined to climb the ladder as high as she can. she keeps a tight schedule, plans theme shows, keeps meticulous track of her progress, and even watches the top performers in her spare time — explaining to her cat that she’s “doing homework.”
after a particularly exhausting show riding an infamous toy known as the “vibe-a-tron,” Alice wakes up to discover that she’s, evidently, already logged on and currently performing. someone (or something) that looks exactly like her has taken over her account, sending a reeling Alice on a mission to snag it back.
i’ve written before that i don’t think horrors have to possess “a traditional narrative with an identifiable obstacle for the protagonists to overcome.” the problem is, CAM tries to present this kind of story without fully resolving it.
for starters, Alice is exactly the only character that treats the situation as anything other than mildly curious, even when showing tech support or her fellow model friends definitive proof of the hijacking, and even after she discovers that it’s happened before. when subscription website onlyfans announced earlier this year that it was banning sexual content, there was a loud, united, and consistent uproar from sex workers who had been using it to platform their content (subsequently resulting in a quick reversal of the policy). by comparison, the relative indifference to Alice’s plight exhibited by the fellow models in CAM looks like an unrealistic contrivance that exists purely to drive Alice to increasingly desperate tactics to expose the impostor (while simultaneously diminishing the allegedly progressive approach to sex work that fans of the movie count in its favor).
to wit, while some critics have praised CAM as both “feminist” and “empowering,” these takeaways exist only at the topmost level and fail to consider the actual implications of the on-screen events. it’s true that Alice is mostly unashamed of her job and that the movie, refreshingly, avoids moral judgment of that choice. however, all of Alice’s fans, at least the ones that exist beyond a faceless screen name in her chat room, are revealed to be varying degrees of intrusive, manipulative, and even violent. the world of sex work, at least according to CAM, is devoid of community or solidarity. and the relationship with the clientele is, at best, one of mutual exploitation.
similarly, even though the story resolves with Alice confronting her double head-on, that her fate is ultimately decided by her fans sours, in retrospect, what was likely intended as a testament to her empowerment.
regarding the plot, who (or, most likely, what) has begun impersonating “Lola” is never explained. that wouldn’t be so bad, except it completely undercuts the climactic confrontation between Alice and her doppelgänger, making the already dubious resolution even sillier, as well as watering-down what could have been an interesting exploration of the implications of “online identities.”
even as a character study, CAM can feel incomplete. only two meaningful people exist in Alice’s life: her mother and younger brother. and while conflict is created with both of them over the nature of her career, only one of the relationships is given any kind of resolution.
moreover, it backs away from opportunities to give depth to Alice herself. in one of the most interesting moments, Alice creates a dummy account in order to tip the fake-Lola with a request to “hit yourself.” and then “harder.” the question of being able to direct your own body double is interesting enough, but the scene also hints at shades of self-loathing that could round out a character whose motivations are otherwise muddled. unfortunately, all of the psychological complexity of the situation completely evaporates when the movie decides instead to deploy a repeat scare tactic to lesser effect the second time around.
Isa Mazzei had originally planned to make a documentary about cammodels, but opted for a genre film because she thought it would more easily bring the audience “inside of a character, or inside of an experience.” but, since CAM follows up so rarely on any of its ideas, it creates a barrier to those things, as if you’re experiencing them not once, but twice removed.
in this case, the naked truth might’ve been better for the job.
rating: an initially scintillating, but ultimately hollow, striptease.
