We Live in Public

While spending seven years following The Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre for rock-doc classic Dig!, director Ondi Timoner was putting in an even bigger stint on a quite different film.

We Live in Public is the result of 5,000 hours of footage that dates back to 1999, the heyday of Josh Harris. Harris was a man ahead of his time: visionary founder of Pseudo.com, the first online TV channel, he was worth $85 million before the age of 40.

Part of New York’s Silicon Alley, Harris became a major player in the city’s avant-garde art scene, bankrolling a series of extravagant projects. For his most notorious stunt, Quiet: We Live in Public, he built a huge bunker that hosted a hedonistic millennium party in which every participant was recorded 24/7.

Part-proto-reality TV project, part-concentration camp, the bunker experiment crashed and burned. It pre-figured Harris’ own personal and financial collapse as his obsession with the internet – and, more specifically, the way it could be channeled to fuel people’s desire for connection at any cost – began to exert a destructive pressure on his life. And that’s before he started turning up to business meetings dressed as a clown called Lovey.

We Live in Public is, in part, a merciless portrait of a radical entrepreneur with seismic pathologies. Captured on camera through straight-up interviews, but more tellingly through archive footage that includes a brutal taped message to his dying mother (Harris refused to see her) and web cam clips of his disintegrating relationship with girlfriend Tanya Corrin, Harris is revealed to be the classic little boy lost. As a child, his only source of emotional sustenance was the television; and as a man, it’s only through the mediation (and validation) of technology that Harris can really understand the concept of intimacy.

Less convincingly, We Live in Public is a warning. In Timoner’s eyes, Harris is a symbol of what happens when you break down the boundaries between technology and the self. As our private thoughts are uploaded to public places and Facebook friends replace the real thing, our feelings of connection mask the reality that we are isolating ourselves in an artificial world.

Perhaps for a younger generation these concerns ring true. If they’re not online, do they exist? But for Timoner to presuppose that we’re all heading this way ignores the fact that for every Facebook and MySpace addict, there are thousands of people for whom life continues as usual.

There’s more weight in her argument that the corporations behind these social networking giants have assumed dangerously invasive rights over the material that grows out of our lives, but this is the inevitable consequence of a new technology that has grown with phenomenal speed, not a doomsday scenario.

What Timoner has done for sure is assemble another documentary of monumental scope. She has a priceless knack for being in the right place at the right time, allied to a filmmaker’s instinct for narrative, and a journalistic tenacity. There’s no one else like her out there.

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

After Dig!, any Ondi Timoner documentary is a big deal.

Enjoyment:

Where does she find these people? A unique documentary about the dark side of the internet.

In Retrospect:

A troubling account of where we might be headed. But not always convincing.