I’ve been keeping close tabs on a short film that fell on my desk via instagram. Looksmaxxing, a fifteen minute body horror short film is about exactly what you think it is. The online craze that has bled from the dark, dank forums into the cyber-mainstream.
The film released on its own website that is meant to emulate looksmax.me, the forum where personalities like Clavicular were born and bred. The layout of the film’s site allows for comments on its copycat forum which, in of themselves provide a bleak insight into the brainless ramblings of looksmaxxers who largely mock or condemn the film. Or just say everyone involved is a subhuman faggot, it’s really a gamble. The choice to allow such replies is interesting to say the least.
In the short runtime we meet Niles, a teenage boy seeking a dopamine fix wherever he can get it. He watches alpha male content, reality dating show slop, mukbangs and goons to AI porn on multiple screens at once in his dark, depressing bedroom. He’s completely overlogged on content and ferociously dissatisfied with life.
The film itself opens with a quick collage of ai porn stills, the same woman in the same vulnerable spread pose with ever changing digital faces. As a voiceover of Niles agonizing over his screen obsession continues, we see more well known set pieces from the modern digital landscape; e-girls, detox health guides, anime edits, conspiracy theory videos and disturbing movie icebergs.
Played by skateboarder Sunny Suljic, Niles is timid, skinny and awkward. His eyes constantly darting downward and his shoulders perpetually slouching at an attempt to shrink into himself. Working a meager job at a sunglasses hut in the mall, Niles is socially dominated in an interaction with a “Chad” from school and his hot girlfriend. He cowers at the light accosting and teasing, conflict avoided. A beta cuck–or whatever they call it.
Niles’ mother serves somewhat as the moral compass and center of reality in the story, but simultaneously she is an example of how the individuality and critical thinking of the older generation has eroded with the progression of the internet. She parrots diet trends she saw on Facebook and dispels rumors about her mom friends taking ozempic. She tiptoes around Niles’ obvious antisocial behavior and depression, never wanting to name the thing that takes shape between them. Leaving him to his own devices. Niles only ever half listens to his mother anyway, scrolling through Charlie Kirk video memes as he feigns interest in her.
With thin wrist resting on a busty anime girl mousepad, Niles stumbles across the looksmaxxing forums. Following a hyperlink from a Chad posting a before photo of himself pimple faced and miserable, attributing the improvement of his overall quality of life to the forum. Niles has just entered a secret society, and his brain quickly adapts to the foreign language. Pulling “foids”, getting “height mogged”, etc. Male YouTubers insisting through the blue glow of his iPad that “all natty is a hoax” referring to men who claim they improved their bodies through natural means. Many looksmaxxers believe this is either impossible or gay, and that artificial means are the only way to go if you want real results. A Cheat code or quick fix to your desired life.
Niles works out, stops gooning, begins doing jaw muscle exercises for the chiseled look, chugs protein powders, becomes aggressive towards his male peers to assert dominance–and of course orders some sketchy drugs off of the dark web to help.
But will it ever be enough? Does the pursuit for perfection have an endpoint? A bright exit at the end of the tunnel, or are you always doomed to stumble forward in the dark, hands reaching out, seeking purchase?
When Niles wants another supply of syringes and his card declines, he does whatever it takes to get the money. In a scene that is very obviously inspired by the classic television stretching scene in Videodrome; we see Niles on the brink of insanity reaching desperately for his elixir.
At the behest of a talking tumor on his chest, Niles takes it to the next level: bone smashing. He says to the tumor “I don’t care if my insides are rotting, as long as I look good”. As he gets bulkier and his face scarier, Niles’ appearance only isolates him further rather than gaining him access to the sexual market value and social respect he felt he was just on the outskirts of. This is an interesting aspect of looksmaxxing: the claim is that instituting these made up social rules, adhering to this caste system you read about on a forum and participating in heavy body modification is all in the name of pulling women or gaining respect. Yet your personality becomes so unbearable and your face and body so mutilated, that it further pushes away the very things you claim to be in pursuit of.
It really has nothing to do with social access or fucking foids or mogging chads, it transcends these basic desires. It touches a deeper ache, to transcend your flesh in the context of your physical form being a prison you had no say in being locked into. It’s a peptide soaked bandaid solution for a deeper sense of loneliness and isolation that seems unique to the modern digital age and to a largely male audience.
The film ends with Niles having fully transformed into a bulky monster. His muscles look fit to burst right out of his thick skin, his face the shape of a bicycle seat. His mother nervously mentions to his towering frame that she heard him screaming in the middle of the night, and he simply says he was just adding some finishing touches. The actor is in what looks like a full bodysuit to pull off the level of Chad-body horror at play here, and the film cuts.
The Looksmaxxing film being given a body horror angle is an incredibly apt choice because the very concept of looksmaxxing is Cronenbergian. Like something ripped right out of Videodrome: to become “the New Flesh” you must first kill “the Old Flesh”.
Decades ago in the 80s and even before that in the 60s, sci-fi endeavors were expressing ideas and thoughts of futurism in relation to the body. A distant point in time filled with possibility, often punctuated by the notion that one day we could custom design every aspect of our physical form. Remaining how you were born (not in reference to gender affirming care, though it’s worth noting that I find the transphobia in the looksmaxxing community interesting given that the forum dwellers and methed up streamers are not unfamiliar with taking hormones) was positioned as archaic. The idea that there will be a device or a pill or a tape that projects a tumor into your brain, thus changing your physical biology isn’t new. All these years ago we thought it was a sure thing, that we’d be able to change our biology at the snap of a finger. And in some ways we were right, but not in the ways the looksmaxxers would’ve hoped for. There is no pill to take or easy cheap surgery to request in lieu of smashing your cheekbones with a hammer. There are ways, but they aren’t perfect and they certainly aren’t cheap.
But, seeing 18 and 19 year old men on a live stream injecting mystery chemicals into themselves and their young girlfriends (like the time an 18 year old Clavicular injected a fat dissolver called Aqualyx into his 16 year old girlfriends face and accidentally stabbed all the way through her cheek into her mouth) or doing meth for cosmetic purposes and then overdosing live on camera or smashing their faces with hammers in a desperate attempt to force their bone structure into submission is, real life body horror. However, it’s not just unimaginable and perverse manipulations of the human body we are witnessing; it’s a total loss of humanity.
As early as 1964 (and likely long before) the concept of shortcuts to the perfect appearance or easy access to beauty that would then grant larger social access was being written about in film and television. The first instance I could think of when meditating on this piece was episode 17 of season 5 of The Twilight Zone. In “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” the year is 2000. In this dystopia all young people undergo “the transformation” at age nineteen. This rite of passage involves choosing a socially acceptable and conventionally attractive body and face to be changed into. You choose from a small pool of preset models, there is zero room for deviation, individuality or error. In true human fashion, many men and women choose the same models. Men often go for #17 and women for #12, meaning everybody in this society looks the same and must wear name badges to tell themselves apart.
When eighteen year old Marilyn, who’s father instilled radical ideals in her before his suicide (directly linked to his regret for undergong The Transformation) elects to not do the procedure, social unrest ensues. She is institutionalized by a Sigmund Freud knock off and realizes that though the transformation isn’t written into any legislation, it’s really not optional. Not to get too on the nose with my points about loss of humanity in these appearance obsessed circles, but as young Marilyn attempts to appeal to the emotions of her friends and family, pleading with them to understand her decision, she realizes that everyone who has undergone The Transformation has also lost all empathy and emotional capacity. When she shows negative emotions she’s urged to drink a glass of “instant smile” (wow future!). In the episode’s opening we see the beautiful doe eyed Marilyn disinterested as her mother prattles on about the procedure. She then asks her mother: “Am I very homely now?”, to which her mother responds “No darling…not to me…but afterwards you’ll be beautiful”
In David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and The Fly we witness a similar loss of humanity and drastic change to the body as an entity in pursuit of the assumed “ultimate” experience, whether that be scientific, a progression in society at large or an optimization of the self and what we experience through The Body.
In Videodrome our protagonist Max Renn stumbles upon something he believes to be the future of television and the world. In the pursuit of capital gain he slings this rotten depraved material to viewers at home, murder and sexualized violence via satellite. But he is naive in thinking there is not a larger battle for the minds of America and The Body as we know it at play here.
The violent television signal implants a tumor into the brain of the viewer, Max included. One camp of people think this tumor is a deserved punishment for any degenerate willing to consume such filth. A new form of eugenics being ushered in to cleanse the earth of the subhumans. The second camp believes these tumors are a gift, and that the television as well as the hallucinations it produces, are the new frontier of existence. That soon nothing will be more real than what we experience through our screens and our own individual mental perceptions. One of these radical TV thinkers states: “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye. That’s why I refuse to appear on television, except on television. Of course, O’Blivion was not the name I was born with. That’s my television name. Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.”
As Max is steeped deeper and deeper into this glowing underworld his body begins to change, and eventually he doesn’t mind it. He is told that Videodrome will usher in a “new flesh” but to become this “new flesh” you must kill the old one. You can’t be afraid to let your body die. You will continue on as something new, better. Your body can only take you so far.
Of course, Videodrome was largely a manifestation of the anxieties and sentiments in the 80s of an ever evolving society that was becoming increasingly reliant on technology and gadgets. In a way it was mourning the old “flesh” –the physical world– that was being beamed into the cold unfeeling screen. It also dealt with conversations on America’s desensitization towards violence through media. But there is something there that rings familiar when you stack it against this looksmaxxing movement.
This fervent idea that a new way of life is being ushered in. That you know the secret. New rules to play by and adhere to with the strictness of a soldier on the frontlines of a political battle much like the video arena. A yearning to change your biology at any cost, even if it means killing the old flesh. After all, your body can only take you so far.
Even when we examine the relationship between looksmaxxing and the internet, we see imprints and echoes of Videodrome. As Brian Oblivion says in the film “The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena — the videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.”
Many of these depressed lonely individuals (largely young men) live their life through “the cathode tube” so to speak. The forums become their church, the usernames and zeros and ones become their peers. The set of rules they live by that another user has kindly outlined in bulletpoint fashion for them aren’t real or true. Famous, successful and well to do women aren’t “subhuman” because you put their face into photoshop and the lines told you it wasn’t symmetrical. Women as a monolith don’t value looks over personality, and many wouldn’t tolerate the personalities and uncanny looks of these moggers and Chads. None of it is fact, but they believe it is because their computer told them so.
In The Fly, we see even more apt parallels. An ambitious scientist with a top secret teleportation device accidentally merges his DNA with a common house fly after it flew into the counterpart of his device. This causes a series of bodily changes in the young scientist. At first they’re confusing, frightening. But then, he reaches a peak. He feels strong and energetic and sexually potent. He becomes haughty, believing using the device is the key to peak bodily performance and “purification”. He tries to pressure his lover into using the device as well.
As his body continues to change and deteriorate, he becomes violent. He discards his girlfriend for not adhering to his dogma. No longer interested in tending to the neverending task of having a good personality or good interpersonal relationships. He goes to a bar where he challenges a man to arm wrestle, proving his power and masculinity. He leaves the man seriously injured and takes his girlfriend home as a dehumanized trophy, later throwing her out for not wanting to enter the teleportation machine. The pattern of discarding those who don’t see things the way you do continues.
What’s really happening here is he is losing his humanity and becoming unhealthily obsessed with a new idea of perfection that is not at all based in reality. The more changes he undergoes,the less human he becomes. As the changes progress he grows farther and farther away from the common and unifying human experience, further isolating himself in his deluded ideals.
This is what I see echoed on these livestreams and forums. Rapid changes that provide an adrenaline like euphoria, but when you plateau after the peak, the damage is irreparable, and socially you are an alien. The more obsessed you become with this perverted idea of perfection and peak experience the farther from your peers and fellow man you become. You lose your humanity and dehumanize everyone else along the way who won’t adhere to your made up stringent set of rules.
The body horror in Videdrome and The Fly are not too dissimilar to the vertical clips of men cutting the edges of their mouths for wider smiles, hammering their faces, or overdosing on meth on a livestream for the world to see. The nephilum-esque appearance of Niles in Looksmaxxing isn’t even terribly fantastical. It is a hyperbolic version of the self mutilation and body modifications that looksmaxxers and any other subculture that is fueled by body dysmorphia and depression subject themselves to, but it’s not entirely monstrous either. I think that’s why the sfx in the film works so well, his final form isn’t possible but also isn’t wildly far fetched.
At just fifteen minutes it’s hard for any film to flesh out all of its ideas which I can’t punish it for, that’s just the formatting of short films. I think I would love Looksmaxxing if it had the time to stretch itself out, director Elan Alexander teased the possibility of a longer film down the line in a recent Dazed article. In the same article he addresses the categorization his film has been given of “The Substance for men” by giving Fargeat her flowers but asserting his script predates the 2024 film, placing the inception of his idea at 2022. What’s so interesting about this timing is that Looksmaxxers weren’t spread across the mainstream internet zeitgeist quite yet. When Alexander stumbled on these forums Clavicular wasn’t even a digital character yet, he would’ve been sixteen years old. It must have been surreal as Elan’s idea grew, to see Clavicular grow alongside the concept as a groomed mouthpiece for the cesspool community.
Elan in interviews has cited Cronenberg as an inspiration so maybe i’m not too far off. He also declares that his film is 100% a critique of looksmaxxing, albeit a sympathetic one. He claims he wants to do less of the fingerpointing and laughing and more of the digging to find understanding and root causes. Again, something that can’t perfectly shine through in just fifteen minutes. His angle was to make the film unsightly and bleak, to highlight the false fantasy being sold by streamers and content creators making a buck on the misery of young people. Or even the anonymous commenters egging on the self mutilation just for sick personal enjoyment.
I’m hoping for a feature length in the future to see these concepts fully actualized. You can watch the film at
https://looksmaxxingfilm.com/
but be warned the open forum comments section is pretty dismal.
Long live the new flesh!
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