Jaw­line direc­tor Liza Man­delup on the alien­ation of Gen Z

Despite hav­ing almost two thou­sand fol­low­ers to her own name, Liza Man­delup doesn’t fol­low a sin­gle per­son on Insta­gram. It was a tricky deci­sion to make, par­tic­u­lar­ly as some­one who came up as a film­mak­er online and cher­ish­es the com­mu­ni­ties and the space for her work that she found there. ​“I’ve pulled back a lot since I start­ed to think about who is in con­trol of my emo­tions,” explains Man­delup. ​“I want to be in con­trol of my emotions.”

She con­tin­ues, ​“We’re at a time where peo­ple con­sume with­out think­ing about that too much, and they don’t under­stand how a good day can shift from a bad day just because of some­thing they saw on social media. We con­sume like it’s good for us, and it’s not necessary.”

This com­pli­cat­ed truth is the cen­tre of Jaw­line, a fea­ture-length look at the emo­tion­al econ­o­my of the inter­net. Man­delup began shoot­ing the project at the end of 2015, when she start­ed research­ing fan meet-and-greets. Even­tu­al­ly, she came across her star: Austyn Tester, a 16-year-old nano-influ­encer from rur­al Ten­nessee. In a par­al­lel nar­ra­tive strand, now-infa­mous tal­ent man­ag­er Michael Weist pro­vides a coun­ter­point to Tester’s wide-eyed inno­cence. We see the 19-year-old snap­ping at his clients in the min­i­mal­ist Los Ange­les man­sion in which they all live togeth­er, plead­ing with the younger teens to film their spon­sored con­tent on time.

As Tester gains trac­tion online, Man­delup helps us nav­i­gate his spe­cif­ic slice of the social medi­as­cape, pop­u­lat­ed almost entire­ly by Gen Z teens. This is the Insta­gram-adja­cent land of live broad­cast­ing, where the dis­tance between fan and cre­ator has nev­er been slimmer.

Teen fan­girls clam­our after the boy broad­cast­ers in con­ven­tion cen­tres, shop­ping malls, and through video por­tals on YouNow with the fer­vour of Beat­le­ma­nia. Through a series of inter­views, the why of their admi­ra­tion becomes clear – the plat­form, and a lack of age dif­fer­ence, has allowed for an arti­fi­cial inti­ma­cy to form between view­er and per­former. For one fan, these boys are ​“the friends I nev­er had, and wish I had”. Anoth­er notes how the medi­um lets you ​“feel like you have a fam­i­ly”. A third explains how she had to han­dle life alone when her par­ents began exper­i­ment­ing with nar­cotics, but that she’s glad that her younger sis­ter was for­tu­nate enough to have broad­casts to turn to when the sit­u­a­tion began to affect her life.

Man­delup orig­i­nal­ly planned to fea­ture only one fan­girl in her film, but changed her mind when she realised their view­point was bet­ter rep­re­sent­ed in an ensem­ble. ​“I always felt like a lot of his fan­girls were try­ing to escape some­thing in their life. They just want­ed some­thing that would take them out of the day-to-day strug­gle, and give them this alter­nate ver­sion of their present, some­thing that made them feel hopeful.”

Depict­ing the prece­dence of screens in the lives of these girls was one of Mandelup’s biggest chal­lenges. ​“For me, the answer to that was: the inter­net and social media rep­re­sents a fan­ta­sy. So I was think­ing about ways to ele­vate people’s rela­tion­ships to social media as people’s rela­tion­ships to their hopes and dreams, and that lends itself to a lot of imagery. Every­thing was about cre­at­ing this dreamscape.”

What we see of the broad­casts them­selves is a relent­less slew of pos­i­tive apho­risms. The boys pep­per the girls with com­pli­ments and ques­tions about their day, assum­ing a role that is part-ther­a­pist, part-boyfriend. It may raise alarm bells, but Man­delup is hes­i­tant to give the sit­u­a­tion a moral valence. ​“Peo­ple try to ask me if it’s good or bad for them to be fol­low­ing these live broad­cast­ers, and it’s not real­ly that easy to answer. If some­one can give you a sense of com­mu­ni­ty and pur­pose when you don’t have that oth­er­wise, that is not a neg­a­tive. On the flip­side, you can go too deep into that side of your­self, and lose touch with what your actu­al life is.”

Cer­tain­ly, the ten­den­cy to over-focus on fan­girls’ vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty denies them a degree of agency. ​“I think you have to give some cred­it to these girls. They know what is cool and what is not. They ulti­mate­ly are the ones who decide who sticks around.”

Jaw­line is avail­able to watch via Hulu and in select US cin­e­mas from 23 August.