Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Directed by and featuring Eddie Huang, Vice is Broke plays out like the most venomous exit interview of all time. Huang served as a key contributor to the punk magazine Vice during its heyday in the 2010s. He’d made a name for himself as a chef, and appeared to have just the sort of personality that Vice would seek out back then. This was when the magazine was expanding its online footprint with immersive video reportage and outstanding documentaries. They were filing dispatches from war-torn Afghanistan and the hermit kingdom of North Korea. Vice reporters were doing drugs in the Amazon and interviewing high-ranking Taliban officials. On a weekly basis, they were hurling Molotov cocktails of rage, righteousness, and rebellion in the face of legacy media. All of it, according to one person, was done with the aim of making ‘the rich feel cool and the cool feel rich’.
For a while, Vice was the voice of a generation; it’s probably no coincidence that it featured the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh in its pages, and shared the same HBO satellite as Lena Dunham’s Girls. But then, everything crumbled. Huang lost his job, as did scores of others. He discovered that the company owed him over $1 million in unpaid dues. Once valued at over $5 billion, Vice filed for bankruptcy. Huang’s documentary suggests that the implosion wasn’t sudden; Vice had a history of malpractice dating back to its origins in Montreal, before 9/11 altered the very fabric of American society and sent millennials into a meltdown.
Also read – WeCrashed review: Jarring Jared Leto performance reduces valuation of Apple’s first major flop
Vice is Broke investigates the rot that led to the brand’s undoing. Liberated by a recently revoked NDA, Huang interviews several other disgruntled ex-employees who have stories to share about the company’s culture, and the trio of men who founded it. Suroosh Alvi, who also hosted the Vice-produced feature film Heavy Metal in Baghdad, is entirely absent from the documentary. Nobody talks about him, and he isn’t interviewed; it’s almost as if he doesn’t exist. But his co-founders, Shane Smith and Gavin McInnes, get plenty of air time.
Smith is described by more than one person as a sort of carnival barker; a marketing wizard who successfully sold the idea of Vice to corporations like Time Warner and Disney — ironic, considering the brand’s counter-cultural origins. One person describes Smith as a desperately uncool man who devoted himself to buying the appreciation of his peers through any means possible. Another former producer alleges that Smith inserted himself into reports that he had no creative involvement in. McInnes, on the other hand, is compared to a cult leader.
He’s the only one of the three original founders of Vice that agreed to be interviewed by Huang. After being ousted from the company many years ago, McInnes went on to found the far-right fringe group the Proud Boys. He has basically turned into the Americans’ version of Vivek Agnihotri — a deeply disturbing man known for making incendiary statements. But his Proud Boy personality is merely an extension of the persona he’d adopted during his time at Vice. He was the one, for instance, who secretly wrote the infamous ‘Vice Guides’ to subjects such as pleasing men and being a well-behaved woman. He also committed casual acts of harassment, at least one of which is explained and illustrated in graphic detail in the documentary.
Call it a particularly unusual case of schadenfreude, but Huang and a couple of others seem to have a soft corner for McInnes — perhaps because they view him as an enemy of the organisation that they despise, or perhaps because he, like them, was exploited and discarded after having outlived his usefulness. Either way, it’s interesting to watch Huang find excuses for McInnes’ post-Vice persona. “I think Gavin is less of a white supremacist than a nihilist who loves making people uncomfortable because that makes him feel powerful,” Huang theorises, even as McInnes assures him that he actually believes in the vitriol he spews, and that he isn’t an anarchist who enjoys watching the world burn.
Read more – While We Watched: Tragic Ravish Kumar documentary is the best war movie of the year
Perhaps the most insightful moment of the documentary comes in the scene where Huang interviews the OG Vice contributor David Choe, who wonders why Huang is so consumed by his hatred even though he has a three-month-old baby to look after at home. As always, Choe gives off the energy of somebody who has been to hell and back. The visual artist was soft-cancelled himself some years ago, for missteps entirely unrelated to his time at Vice. He knows that Huang shouldn’t still be hung up about what he went through at the company, but he recognises that the documentary might be his way of dealing with the trauma.
There is palpable anger to be felt here, which might appeal to anybody who has survived a toxic employer. But, after a while, Vice is Broke is less concerned about media malfeasance than it is about one man’s quest for for vengeance; it isn’t so much a cautionary tale about corporate greed than it is a personally-motivated hit-piece. At the same time, it’s one of the most accurate examples of corporate Stockholm Syndrome. Huang probably knows that he’s still in an abusive relationship with his ex-employer, but this exercise doesn’t seem to have exorcised his demons.
Vice is Broke
Director – Eddie Huang
Rating – 2.5/5
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
