One of the best things about Daniel Goldhaber’s ecoterrorism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline is how an ostensibly radical central event becomes an inevitability. An explosion is exciting, but it’s all the more exciting because you’re confronted, over the course of a series of flashbacks, with the itchy futility of nothing exploding. The world keeps getting worse in broad terms, terms that typically see the strongest reaction from your gut: A sinking feeling when the new IPCC report reveals its upsetting yet intangible statistics. When characters from this world’s vastly different corners see it getting worse in immediate, physical ways, they’re driven towards coalition. Goldhaber drives up our anxieties by boxing us in with the familiar high-level evils of our society. The threats become personal. The responses follow suit. Goldhaber’s first feature, 2018 horror Cam, does much the same, using sex work to highlight a terrifying helplessness of our own creation—and the only real way we have of reclaiming control.
Impressively, Cam was filmed in early 2017, nearly a year before “deepfake” was even coined as a term for the AI-driven face-swap porn that spread from Reddit and started an epidemic of abuse. But it makes sense that screenwriter Isa Mazzei’s personal experiences as a sex worker would develop a self-preservational prescience—as soon as cutting-edge technology can be used to sell porn, it is. Having your finger on the pulse is an occupational hazard.
Cam operates like a Black Mirror episode with the series’ standard-issue annoying third act twists replaced by an intentionally unfulfilling existential showdown: Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as a cam girl under the name Lola, discovers one day that someone who looks exactly like her is doing live shows under her name, on her account, seemingly in her house. Hers is a world of constant screen time, of persona and performance, where adventures into the real world feel far sketchier than anything online…at least, until that protective digital façade no longer obeys the flesh-and-blood behind it.
What’s a girl to do? She’s locked out. Her apparently hacked hosting site’s impotent help desk response naturally favors the person who looks just like her and is in current control of the account. Her doppelganger has stolen not just her livelihood but her personhood. The creepiest part is that “New Lola” doesn’t even know that she’s New Lola: On a private video chat, Alice confronts the unflappable Crankenstein’s Monster and realizes that their identical appearance doesn’t even register to the imposter.
The cops don’t care, and Alice simply doesn’t understand. Neither does her red herring regular client, Tinker, who works “in IT” and hasn’t a clue how this doubling works. He can only recognize when it’s about to happen—which doesn’t affect him at all, so why should he care? He’s happy to patronize the new version, who has fewer scruples than Alice. In Tinker’s grimy motel bathroom, where he sadly beats his meat in the uncanny valley, two of Cam’s potent themes come to a head: The reiteration that, in our society, you start being seen as nothing but a commodity as soon as you turn to sex work, and that terrifying out-of-sight entities—like whatever made this clone—can and will exploit this.
AI that can generate fake images of Gal Gadot, or the Pope, or Donald Trump, or your mom and dad—that can make any of them do anything in increasingly realistic videos—is just the latest reality-shaping development with which we must learn to cope. We’re all at the mercy of forces so much more powerful than us that they are all but incomprehensible, be they the rampant online tech-sploitations scraping our data to generate the advertisements embedded in this very article or the old-school oil and gas infrastructure keeping us from transitioning to green energy. These forces aren’t just operating within the systems of our lives, but shaping the systems themselves. The only rational response, it seems, is for those already on the fringes of these systems to attack them—as Charles Bramesco notes, Goldhaber favors “people whose work has been deemed impermissible by the state.”
And when attacking a systemic, disembodied problem, there’s no weapon you can trust more than your own body. In fact, during Cam’s climax, it feels like the only thing Alice can control is her body. When faced with techno-cosmic horror—which is what whatever created the movie’s clones is, an unknowable force that renders us insignificant—we return to the most significant and vital parts of ourselves: The blood, bone and muscle keeping us moving.
In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the activists suffer gunshots and shattered legs as they put their bodies on the line. Daniel Garber edits it like someone who got too high was freaking out while watching a Rube Goldberg machine move along its track. Mechanisms crash and zip and tick down. Ties strain against weight. You start to hate how much you’re thinking about gravity. Images are shot close, then collide. You’re sweating alongside them, then squirming as they suffer.
In Cam, Alice plays a game of “monkey see, monkey do” against her double, the final round ending as she brutally bashes her own face into her desk. It’s shot and cut with a slower tempo, relying on the upsetting fractal juxtaposition of infinitely mirrored computer screens—all showing the same face and the same scrolling chat of horny viewers. It’s simply too much information, a brilliantly composed technological overload. When Alice thrusts herself down with a crunch, it’s an organic release valve. Her nose breaks, earning respect and additional tips from her viewers, and reminding us of the real. Her double, as a pure computer generation, can coldly replicate the gory effect…but not quite as well. New Lola renders it after a pixelated reconstruction, but it’s too late: Alice wins the game, gets her password and deletes Lola’s account.
It’s a deliciously complex showdown. It indicts her bloodthirsty audience, the kind of misogynists hungry for odder and odder forms of power over the female form, like those catered to by boundary-pushing e-girls like Belle Delphine (or maybe she’s mocking the idea—either way, she’s getting paid). Then, there’s the meta-movie angle: Audiences love to lament the decline of practical effects in favor of floor-to-ceiling green-screen blockbusters. Alice incorporates Fangoria-level make-up gags into her performances throughout the movie, savvy (like the Belle Delphines of the world) to the ids behind the credit cards. When real sex fails, of course New Lola’s cam customers would still respond to real violence.
But the violence is restorative: It gives Alice her life back, just like turning rhetoric into a successful chemical reaction (albeit one that’s not without its injuries) revitalizes How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s downtrodden activists. As the final words of How to Blow Up a Pipeline make clear, these actions might seem self-destructive, but they’re the only self-defense we’ve got against such abstract opponents.
Even then, the fights aren’t close to over, and this self-defense may not be enough in the long run. As our Dom Sinacola wrote when ranking Cam as one of the best horror movies of 2018, “the identities we create online—that we digitally design, foster and mature, often to the detriment of whatever we have going on IRL—will inevitably surpass us. The horror…is in this loss: that no one is ever truly in control of these fabricated identities; that the more real they become, the less they belong to the person most affected.” A far less optimistic movie than Pipeline (a movie where, Goldhaber says, “the good guys win”), Cam is simply a movie where the good guy gets by for the time being.
Alice survives her ordeal and retains her family relationships after her secret profession is exposed. But she still needs money, and she knows she’s good at sex work. So back she goes, once more unto the breach, disguised as a “bot” (EveBot) herself—one more added degree of separation from her horrifically literalized double life—still under siege by powers beyond her comprehension, yet adaptive like we all remain. If she’s doubled again…well, she’s broken her nose before, and her mom can just do her makeup while it heals. Pipeline is an optimistic thriller, but Cam’s pessimism is locked into its capitalist grind. Sinacola concludes that rather than finding tension solely in solving the premise’s mystery, Cam’s terror lies in “the harsh truth of just how vulnerable Alice is—and we all are—to the cold, brutal, indifferent violence of this online world we’ve built for ourselves.” As Cam’s deepfake fiction quickly becomes a reality, knowing how to fight back may soon feel as hollow as blowing up a pipeline.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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