Timothy Stueve
The year is 2008: Web 2.0 is in full force, Motion City Soundtrack is playing on your MySpace page, skateboarding is the epitome of cool, and major advertisers have not yet discovered YouTube. I remember what it was like to be a kid at this time—to feel like you are failing in your social circles but that you can see and understand the world from the vantage point of the computer screen. Writer-director Sean Wang captures this new type of childhood in his film Didi and I can’t help but feel like he is one of the first filmmakers from my generation to fully understand what growing up in, around, and on the internet is like.
A question hangs over films such as these: why do so many films struggle to depict digital culture? For decades, it seemed as if nobody could crack the code—how to make films or TV shows that connect with the youth and have their own self-generating cultural machine? No matter how relevant media made by major studios tried, they simply could not catch up with the ever-accelerating speed of online culture. Miley Cyrus in LOL (2012) showed just how little film studios understood what it meant to communicate online and films that had a more judgmental tone fared even worse with audiences and critics, such as the infamous TV movie Cyberbully (2011). But it is important to remember that this rule worked both ways for a while: attempts to bridge internet celebrity into mainstream media were also pitiful. Smosh: The Movie (2015), Shane Dawson’s Not Cool (2014), the list goes on and on.
Such media has even received its own meme (“hello, fellow kids”), which in turn has become shorthand for media attempting to manipulate young people. But in recent years, we have seen films by people who actually grew up in this digital-obsessed generation that represent a different approach. Bo Burnham, originally achieved stardom through YouTube but used his platform to launch a successful stand-up career, which straddled both internet and mainstream virality. In other words, Bo Burnham was seen by internet users as “one of our own,” and his incredible coming-of-age film Eighth Grade only cemented the fact that he precisely understood how to depict digital culture in a relatable way.
The secret to Eighth Grade was that it did not try to show how great it made the world for young people; rather, it showed how the internet compounded the awkwardness of an already exceptionally awkward period of life while paradoxically representing a unique way to express oneself and their development. Later on, his massively popular genre-defying stand-up special Inside (2021) seemed to have captured the zeitgeist of the born-online generation entering adulthood as a culture that is exceptionally cynical and confused. A24’s Zola (2020) is likewise on the shortlist of commercially distributed films that actually organically grew out of digital culture, seeing as it was based on a lengthy Twitter thread. Zola depicted how intertwined digital technology had become with the world of prostitution and treated digital culture with a hitherto unique matter-of-factness.
So how does Didi figure into this story of depictions of digital culture? Well, Didi takes an approach similar to Eighth Grade, seeing online culture as an extension of the awkward figuring out of who you are and how you fit into society. The internet in Didi is a double-edged sword: it enables some of the most cringe-worthy aspects of youthful drama to be extended and intensified, as well as offering a nostalgic look at when the internet was sincerely a more innocent place. YouTube receives a particularly nostalgic portrait, offering the opportunity Didi’s lead character, Chris (Izaac Wang), to find his identity in skateboarding videos. One of Didi’s most delightful depictions of digital culture comes when the audience sees him prematurely type a heart emoticon before deleting it and replacing it with a smiley face—a moment that elicited a collective gasp in the theater I saw this in.
The film follows Chris as he navigates his final year of middle school, replete with failed attempts at romance, growing apart from his closest friends, encounters with new people and subcultures, and continual attempts to be cool and just apathetic enough. The film does a particularly good job at capturing how in-the-moment embarrassment can shape our decision making and identity construction. We can see this in how Chris postures his racial identity throughout the film. When we initially see Chris in and among his friend group, which emphasizes racial difference, he embraces a juvenile and racialized nickname, “Wang Wang”. When he is later introducing himself to a girl he wants to impress, he mentions his nickname, but when she is clearly off-put by it, he, embarrassed, insists she just calls her “Chris”. After the same girl disparagingly calls him “attractive for an Asian guy” he begins to subtly de-emphasize his identity as a Taiwanese-American. When he later falls in with a friend group of skaters, he is embarrassed when he is referred to as “Asian” and insists they call him “half-Asian”. When that friend group later discovers that this is untrue, it causes distrust and discomfort. Once again embarrassed, Chris pushes this friend group away. This is one of many threads in the film showing the minuscule ways these sorts of moments effect how one presents themselves to others and the outsize influence being embarrassed has on one at this formative age.
I would be remiss not to mention the real heart of the film: Chris’ relationship to his family, particularly to his mother, in a brilliant performance by Joan Chen. The film captures a similar sibling dynamic as that depicted in Jonah Hill’s film Mid90s (2018): siblings who are constantly bullying each other, yet secretly feel quite fond of each other. The mother-son relationship depicted in the film is powerfully captured and eventually reveals itself as the main narrative arc of the film.
Whether or not you grew up in the same generation as Didi‘s Chris, many will find the film doubly relatable: a Bildungsroman from the perspective of a first generation immigrant, as well as an encapsulation of how the internet used to feel. Part of me feels like the nostalgia that Didi captured—the nostalgia many feel for the early days of the internet, for the pre-smart phone era of social media—is not just like the same type of nostalgia for youth that is captured in something liked Dazed and Confused (1993). The nostalgia for 2008 internet is tempting, seductive, and perhaps fuels our continued addictive relationships with digital technologies. Those who grew up with it hope that the internet will make us someday make us happy the way it used to, but the truth is that the internet was simply innocent just as we were, and innocence is not the sort of thing that can be regained.
