“TFW NO GF” Is the Defining Documentary of a Generation
By: Zachary Schwartz
Tags: Men, Memes, Documentary, Movies, Internet

TFW NO GF is a movie named after a meme. The new documentary, which trended #1 on Amazon Prime last month, begins with ‘Wojak’-the grey, anguished avatar of the online underworld-and his favorite caption, “TFW NO GF”: “that feel when no girlfriend.”

But TFW NO GF isn’t just a documentary on Wojak, or the r9k board on 4chan that he inhabits; it isn’t an ‘incel movie,’ although it examines them; and it isn’t only about young, alienated men. It covers the gloom of an entire generation-a disaffection overlooked yet fanned by the hysteric social movements of the 2010s. TFW NO GF is the mainstream’s first hard look at this phenomenon, and for that reason, there is no more important documentary to watch today.

At the heart of TFW NO GF are the stories of four young men: Sean, Kyle, Charels, and Kantbot. At first, all we see is their misery-they are NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), with no future and few friends. As the film unravels, we realize that each character has been chosen for his online notoriety: Kyle made a video about the blackpill, the ideology that there is “no hope” for incels; Charels’ bitter tweets turned him into a media scapegoat as a ‘misogynistic jihadi’; Kantbot bizarrely related Donald Trump election to the raising of Atlantis in an interview.

What binds these characters is the hell that the mainstream media raised about them. Yet, as TFW NO GF shows, the juxtaposition between its subjects’ media portrayals and their corporeal forms is jarring. In reality, these men (with the exception of the impressive Kantbot) are lost, rabbit-eyed souls, drifting alone through the American wasteland, their only anchor the forums, image boards, and MMORPGS (online role-playing games) where they can commiserate with other men.

In a different era, these men might have been saved. Someone would hear about a friend’s younger brother playing video games all day, or a mother’s son who just wouldn’t leave his room. “Hey, why don’t you come down to the men’s club at the VFW. We meet Wednesday night. Chance to blow off some steam and talk about life.” “Me and the guys go out shooting every week-why don’t you come with us next time? Sure beats sitting around all day.” Gradually, a hikikomori would be eased out of his misery-he would be set up a with a job, a date, a reason to live.

In postmodern culture, there seems to be no desire to see such men climb out of their holes. Attending college in the first half of this decade, I noticed a peculiar, even evil satisfaction in the suffering of such young white men as getting their “just desserts.” Any complaint was a symptom of poisonous entitlement. It was their burden to simultaneously accept their privilege, their predicament, and their pain.

Just as perverse is the strange stigmatization of men’s self-improvement. In the last decade, whenever a men’s movement emerged that promoted some type of discipline or development, the mainstream media lunged over each other to see who could tie it to the alt-right (i.e. this ridiculous Rolling Stone article about NoFap or this Mel Magazine article about raw eggs). Jordan Peterson, whose primary message to young men is to “clean your room and sort yourself out,” is demonized as a Nazi by a whole swath of society, and his majority-male audience has been used as a line of attack against him, as if no one should be trying to target and help young men.

The males of TFW NO GF, while not all able to articulate as clearly as Kantbot, feel this demoralizing culture. “No one cares about you if you’re a guy,” says Charels. That’s not necessarily true; there are a few men that everyone cares about-who keep the gate and make the money and hold the power-and it is these ‘Chads’ (as incels call them) who run the world and get #MeToo’d.

Infinite more men are total nobodies. Their only recourse is to scrawl a message in a bottle and throw it into the digital abyss-”TFW NO GF.”