Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam (2018) begins with camgirl Lola entertaining her male clients with a series of erotic betting and wager games during one of her online shows through the website Free Girls Live. Camming is online sex work in which models and performers craft shows (organised through cam websites as “rooms”) around their viewers’ wants and needs. These can feature anything from explicitly erotic interactions to models engaging in more mundane activities such as eating, washing their hair, or exercising. Here, the camroom mood quickly sours when an unknown viewer bombards Lola with derogatory slurs and threats of violence. For any femme, woman, and/or sex-worker, the escalation of eroticism into abuse is as frightening as it is horrifyingly commonplace. The back-and-forth with the anonymous bully intensifies, and then Lola pulls a knife from her nearby trunk and slits her own throat. Blood pours from her slumped body and pools on top of the fuzzy pink carpet: she springs awake again. The Free Girls Live feed continues uninterrupted throughout both the mock suicide and the surprise resurrection. Lola, Alice Ackerman offline, celebrates as her site ranking and profits increase with the influx of new viewers entering her camroom. Cam’s title card blinks across the screen.
After the opening pantomime snuff performance, Alice cleans up the fake blood and begins to entertain several clients. During a web chat with Barney, a man revealed to be the owner of Free Girls, Alice expresses her desire to be the site’s top model. To do so, she must beat Baby, the current top cammodel. Although unseating Baby from the number one slot comes with financial gain and increased popularity, Cam treats Alice’s desire with clear ambivalence. Wanting to be the best has an obvious economic motive, and the film examines how desire functions in a capitalist system. Alice’s single-minded quest denies her a holistic existence, as viewers wonder does Alice have friends? Does Alice have hobbies? Who is Alice beyond the camroom? Her obsessive study of other models presents the audience with an endless stream of potential competitors. Cam footage scrolls across the screen without stopping and asserts the futility of becoming the top performer on only one site. The market is saturated. If the critique here is fuzzy, it is still effective – viewers are made to consider how happiness can exist when one only exists to compete. This dynamic of constant competition is not limited to Alice’s camroom, but is the driving force of capitalism and a significant factor in the creation of unsafe, exploitative, and unfulfilling work conditions. Competition shapes Alice’s solitude and is the cause of her vulnerability, cultivating an environment in which she can be terrorised. While Alice’s distance from her mother and brother forms the basis of a predictable narrative arc of estrangement and reconciliation, her suspicion of and transactional attitude towards the area’s camming circle generates a potent source of dread.
Both Mazzei and Brewer are at their best, and Cam at its most unsettling, when they explore how an economy of loneliness fuels the frightening appearance of an online double that threatens Alice’s life and livelihood. Alice rarely leaves her home camming studio, she barely interacts with her mother and brother, and has only one ‘friend’– a fellow co-worker whom she seldom sees. This webbing of isolation entraps the viewer, too, pushing them to consider digital desire, death and the self in the age of the online promoter, Instagram influencer, and gig economy. Alice’s relationships, or lack thereof, with local camgirls serves to catalyse the success of her eerie double – friends within the sex work industry could have proven to be her most helpful allies in her fight against the appearance of a second, false, Alice. The double first appears the morning after a successful show. When Alice attempts to access her account, she finds that she is already logged on. She sees ‘herself’ filming live from her studio – interacting with her clients from the comfort of an inflatable children’s pool. Though the film offers no clear answer about the double’s origins and nature, viewers get the sense that it has been formed from the ephemera of Alice’s online life. As Cam tests the nebulous boundaries between digital life and ‘IRL’, the double begins to make its presence known in all aspects of Alice’s carefully curated life.
Unnerved, Alice calls Free Girl tech support, but the site’s tech team is unable to provide any assistance. Though the fake Alice’s shows are in a sense ‘similar’ to Alice’s earlier attempts at erotic violence, her lack of agency in the double’s productions means that these displays are violations. The double routinely crosses the boundaries Alice has set up for her career: it tell clients that it loves them, performs sexual acts in public places, and talks about Alice’s family during shows. In sex work consent and agency are key. The double’s emotional, psychological, and monetary threats all hold physical ramifications for Alice and her family. As the content of the fake Alice/Lola’s shows escalates to a simulated suicide by gunshot, the real Alice’s offline work-life equilibrium begins to fray. She is outed as a sex worker to her family and sexually harassed by police officers. Her mysterious double continues to steal her online life. In Christine Holmlund’s reading of Otto Rank’s conception of the doppelgänger, the figure of the double embodies the protagonist’s conflicting inner desires. The doppelgänger’s externalisation of the protagonist’s internal struggles allows for their relationships to gender, sexuality, and eroticism to develop and grow.[1] Situations in which a character is faced with their own doppelgänger are fundamentally uneasy. This ambivalence comes from the fact that confrontation with the doppelgänger is an inescapable audit of one’s own life, a test of mortal boundaries.
Alice’s online encounters with her doppelgänger speak to our current cultural moment. Digital experiences are enmeshed in daily life. The aspirational lives presented on social media platforms are manifestations of our desire – we want to be the carefree traveller or upwardly mobile careerist. But these curated pursuits drive us further away from genuine, messy, human connection. In the gap between digital artifice and reality anything can grow. If the double represents Alice’s untethered ambition to become the top Free Girl, then it is via its sinister presence that Alice is forced to confront the immensity of her own desire. The double crosses her professional boundaries, engaging in risky sexual scenarios and self-harm, and Alice is made to question what she would do to become ‘the best’.
In the final showdown with her double, Alice suggests a joint online performance in which both characters compete for the attention of the camroom’s viewers. She is prepared to do anything to shut down the doppelgänger’s account, and challenges the doppelgänger to a series of dangerous stunts. The film doesn’t spend much time on the details, but the suggestion is that if Alice beats the doppelgänger in obtaining social cache (which here is the applause and attention of camroom viewers) she will defeat the doppelgänger. To win, Alice repeatedly breaks her own nose, potentially disfiguring herself. Why is that self-harm defeats the doppleganger? Perhaps because in this moment Alice is vulnerable, messy, wild, and strong – in other words Alice is at her most intensely human, a state that is the antithesis to the double’s highly curated digital fantasy. Afterwards, she deletes the double’s account and the film cuts forward in time to Alice’s mother helping her prepare for a new camshow. It’s a shame that Alice’s mother’s newfound acceptance of her daughter’s career is not handled with the same care that Cam gives to issues of digital consent and agency. Although she calls her daughter sexy, confident, and capable, not enough time is spent on the scene in order for the compliments to be anything more than buzzwords. When she asks Alice what she plans to do if the doppelgänger reappears, Alice tells her that she will never stop making accounts, and the film ends with the unveiling of her new account under the username Eve_Bot. This final metaphorical birth complicates what would have otherwise been an unmemorable ending of mother daughter reconciliation. Alice’s incarnation as Eve fits within the Cam’s commentary on the zero sum game of aspirational economies and digital desires: when you fail, simply become someone new.
Premiering last July at the Fantasia International Film Festival and on Netflix last November, Cam is a tangled film. Mazzei, writing from her own experience, creates a sex working protagonist whom the audience cheers for while experimenting with genre and narrative. This can sometimes make for a confusing watch. Alice’s drive, intelligence, and refusal to be victimised are admirable character traits – and even revolutionary when we consider how popular media usually represents sex work – but as these traits are inextricable from her single-minded quest to become the #1 camodel on Free Girls Live, the film’s positive representation of sex work is necessarily limited. But considering Alice as an actor fully invested in the capitalisitic trappings of her industry benefits the film’s examination of fruitless self-interest. Recognising and dismantling such avarice remains difficult. Cam’s message to all those working to survive is this: What would you do to be number one?
1 Holmlund, Christine. “Sexuality and Power in Male Doppelganger Cinema: The Case of Clint Eastwood’s “Tightrope”.” Cinema Journal 26, no. 1 (1986): 31-42.
Annette LePique is an independent arts writer and researcher based in Chicago.
