Defending Outsider Art

At this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, I took part as the supervillain on a directors’ panel ostensibly titled “Art Lives! Canadian Outsider Cinema vs. the Machine” – essentially about no-budget alternative filmmaking. This is a non-redacted manuscript of everything I was ready to say, of which I only got through about a third because the panel was just too damn wholesome and celebratory, and calling out / sounding the alarm about the evil that’s coming for everything and everyone is a killjoy no one in the audience wants from an openly-misanthropic non-white hipster.

Satanspeed out there.

So with all due respect to everyone here and this is not directed anyone at in particular, but I’m gonna challenge why this panel is called outsider cinema, and how does it earn that titling? Why wasn’t underground or DIY enough to describe it, and instead we’re appropriating “outsider art”, a space meant for the disproportionately alienated and not any budget indie filmmaker with a nonconformist attitude. Using “outsider” as a blanket label also diminishes the “outsider” term.

Words like “weirdo” and “reject” have already been co-opted and appropriated by hipsters to wear like fashion brands, and while I’m not here to argue my labelling, I feel like we have an ethical urgency to argue against gentrifying one of the last terms that real weirdos and rejects have left.

Let’s call out outsider cosplayers:

If you’re hot and alternative, and everyone you meet wants a piece of you, and you’re part of a social clique with swarms of other hot alternative friends, you’re not an outsider.
If you’re funded or facilitated by the government or lobbyists, you’re not an outsider.
If you have an audience of shitposting contrarians of which you’re an avatar for their disaffected irony, you’re not an outsider.
If you’re mad that you don’t have better letterboxd reviews yet you have endless access to festivals and venues that’ll play your stuff, you’re not an outsider.

I’ve seen instagram accounts of so-called filmmakers with no evidence nor links to any tangible or substantiated body of work and whose grids show below-zero substance, and they have followers in the thousands. Someone takes a plain-ass I’m-so-sad-but-hot selfie, gets hundreds of likes, and next thing you know they call themselves a filmmaker. What the fuck are we doing? Otherwise we got mediocre-at-best filmmakers getting into the industry through shallow sexy packaging, clique nepotism, and tasteless inept programmers who have no right to be in positions of such consequence to who gets a platform

I may not be an authority in what constitutes outsider cinema, but I can still defend it from forces that don’t need to identify with it but wish to co-opt it. And I can tell when something isn’t honest.

Whether people wanna admit it or not, there is a dark and sinister right-wing cabal infiltrating the film scene from the fringes. This is an industry where wannabe-artist edgelords are being funded and groomed by the modern-day conservative movement. And because these edgelords are so disaffected and self-important, they are completely okay with who bankrolls them.

There’s being counterculture and there’s being cynical. A large portion of underground filmmakers choose cynicism cause their work is about narcissistic validation, so they’d burn it all down before creating anything humanly meaningful. At best they add to the culture sea of brainrot. At worst they become pawns of the political right. Yeah the same right that gave us this current MAGA hellscape.

These edgelords are too busy congratulating themselves for making subversive shit that performatively flips off the system, while being funded with dark money by the very shadow entrepreneurs that have by the crotch the very system that the edgelords think they’re flipping off. The orchestration of libertarian or evil “conservative” or evil-adjacent “liberal” artists is just another way the fascists, tech bros, and venture capitalists wanna rule over everything including art.

The conservative cabal has been gradually co-opting the socioeconomic terminally-online nihilism of today. What seems like often bratty entitled privileged rhetoric by these dimes squareheads and their copycats in other big cities is even worse a cultural gateway to extremism and conspiracy theories, as we’ve seen with the manosphere, influencers, podcasters, and dipshit poets.

Make no mistake. These shadow forces are MAGA. And you may say that’s in the States, but these edgelord scenes are very much incestuous, and STDs don’t know borders.

Edgelord hipsters also cannot claim ignorance about their lobbyist oligarchs. It’s bullshit to say you don’t keep up with the news or that both sides of the political spectrum are the same. As if ripping away a women’s constitutional right to an abortion wasn’t enough—if you’re co-opted by the same side that destroys the lives of minorities, lgbtq, and the dispossessed, with the endgame of ruling over a white supremacy fascist theocracy, then you Should be well-informed.

But artists are given an apologist pass cause they’re entertainers and “didn’t know better”. But they are passive if not complicit in the catastrophic consequences of the side they’re on. All the media figures who accept MAGA – they accept the death of abortion rights, trans/lgbtq rights, immigrant rights, affordable healthcare, childcare, seniors care, food stamps, due process, so on. Sellouts want a piece of the MAGAt pie and radicalism is just easier than political correctness to shove their provocateur style, comedy, and views down people’s throats.

MAGA takes the most from the poorest—low-income/working class people—all to give even more to the richest—their donor overlord billionaires and corporations. So the irony of edgelords waving the “poor anti-establishment” card is that they align themselves with the worst of the establishment.

I don’t care if you’re just making black magic breakup movies. If you’re enabling a monolithic oppressor, you don’t deserve to make your otherwise inconsequential bullshit, just like the media personalities who thought it was cool and counterculture to align with christian nationalists and bigots cause they “stuck it to the liberal elite establishment”.

This may all seem silly and that compared to everything else, we look like a bunch of randos in the EV building, and that what we do doesn’t matter, but it matters even from the underground. Who you let invest in you matters. If you think outsider art is an excuse to just make it about yourself without consequence cause you’re on the fringes, you are a himbo-bimbo. Everything we do matters and everything is political, regardless how informed or ignorant you are. Do you wanna be part of an entire generation of malevolent mediocrity-to-hot-garbage? Or do you wanna give art that actually makes the world a better place, with heart and soul? Up to you.