We Are All Lifewasters
Vewn is one of my favorite visual artists and animators if not my favorite. I think her surreal and "ugly" art style capture the feeling of dissociation, detachment, and alienation from the human condition that come with being depressed and abused or neglected.
She's been making more live action content recently in the form of YouTube shorts (which are all fantastic) heavily inspired by our fast-paced, overstimulating, and information overloaded world. Vewn put out her first live-action short film, Lifewasters last month.
Lifewasters is a rather short short film, only about 8 minutes long, and follows the main character Marla and her in-progress lolcow documentary of an autistic and schizophrenic man known online as "Sparky" who has religious delusions centered around a cartoon monkey.
I won't resummarize it here, so I highly recommend anyone reading should watch Lifewasters and the rest of Vewn's filmography before reading onwards.
I think what stuck out the most to me about Lifewasters was how even if Sparky was the target of Marla's and many internet users' bullying, he wasn't really the one "wasting" his life—Marla was. This is pretty obvious when her boyfriend tells her that he doesn't understand why anyone would spend their time watching videos or reading about a lolcow online. Her boyfriend is even his own kind of lifewaster as a crypto stock market chaser who seems entrenched in hustle culture, based on the podcasts he listens to. They both seem "normal" and "well-adjusted" but they're both inauthentic and deeply disconnected with each other—more roommates than lovers. The disconnection comes to its peak at the end of the film when Marla isolates herself after confessing her true motivations to Sparky, but when feeling sorry for herself, she sees DJ in the bathroom. The cartoon monkey that Sparky claimed was coming to reign as humanity's new god.
I think the ending of the film is actually really poignant, even if it might seem absurd on the surface level. The average person often feels "above" the physically and mentally disabled. We walk past people suffering on the street or we read about a tragedy on social media and think "that could never be me... I work hard and I'm sane and healthy, I've worked to earn this status" when in reality, we're one cascade of bad luck away from experiencing psychosis and being in the same shoes as Sparky. People who work and can care for themselves are not any "better" than the people who yell at an unseen danger in public, people taking shelter in libraries, or the intellectually disabled people who need constant care. In the end we're all chasing something and wasting all opportunities of truly connecting with people for the sake of a hustle, fame, or just a quick laugh.
It's easy to laugh at the misfortune of others when you think you can never stoop to their level, and Marla is like this for most of the film...until she's in Sparky's shoes and realizes she is the one wasting her life on ridiculing and mocking someone who never hurt anyone.