‘Sick of Myself’: cinema’s greatest-ever social media satire
Given how pervasive and insufferable the presence of social media has become in our lives, there are surprisingly few films about the wave of egotistical mania that has swept over our waking and virtual world. Some have attempted to mock the bitchy online monarchy with heightened portrayals of aggressively upbeat influencers who flog car air fresheners and appetite-suppressing lollypops or brain-dead gamers who wholeheartedly promote the flat-earth theory. Still, few have hit the nail on the head.
Films like Zola, Bodies Bodies Bodies and Didi have captured the terminology and trends of the internet but aren’t explicitly about social media. There are brief SNL skits and one scene in High Fidelity that pokes fun at the absurdity of ‘influencing’ but with a more light-hearted dig at the modern profession. For once, I would love an influencer to respond with “I work in advertising” when asked what they do for a living. However, in a sea of stories that lack the nuance to truly scratch the itch of what’s wrong with this dystopian era, there is one film that hits the jackpot and exposes the insidious heart of this new industry.
Sick of Myself, directed by Kristoffer Borgli in 2022, follows a woman called Signe who feels overshadowed by her boyfriend’s recent success in the art world, hatching a plan to gain more attention and regain her rightful place among the elite of social media.
Through Signe, we’re made painfully aware of a culture that is addicted to attention, obsessed by our own image and needs to share every thought we have, commodifying ourselves as we try to package and sell each aspect of our lives. It’s the kind of story that escalates everything to ridiculous extremes, making each situation so hilariously disgusting and absurd that it exaggerates the brutality behind the film’s message – in a world that has commodified everything, at what point do we stop selling ourselves?
It’s a feverish portrait of extreme narcissism and main character syndrome, with Signe becoming dangerously in love with attention that she will do nearly anything for a chance to be in the spotlight, even if that means making herself sick to gain sympathy or lying to people about non-existent achievements and allergies for a slither of scrutiny. She wants people to fawn and obsess over her, having erotic fantasies about her own funeral and quite literally dying for attention.
Borgli highlights the horror and hilarity of this common plight through an extreme situation, shining a light on the normalised narcissism that we see on social media. People are tricked into thinking that others actually care about the people they see, the things they buy, and the way their face looks up close. Borgli doesn’t hide his disdain for the digital age, showing disgust towards the way brands exploit the authenticity and vulnerability of people to draw more attention towards their products, with people themselves inadvertently becoming the product.
There’s an added layer of commentary about the way neurodiversity and disability have been twisted into this marketing scheme, with Signe eventually becoming so sick in her plea for attention that she begins to see this as a new niche within the influencing market and sells herself as the only model with a rare skin condition. It highlights the emptiness of commercial inclusivity, with the brands she works with only being comfortable with her disability when she is able to mimic an able-bodied person and is profitable to them. They become repulsed by her when she shows physical signs of sickness, with their false acceptance of her condition completely fading when she can no longer be in service of their carefully constructed social conscience.
Despite the constant crescendo of perverse and pitiful scenarios that Signe creates for herself, the film’s ending is more stripped back and grounding. While it isn’t extreme, it still packs a punch as we realise that we both feel for the character as she is genuinely suffering, but we feel conflicted because the suffering is of her own making, and we’ve seen someone extremely privileged and conceited do indescribable things to gain attention. It’s conflicting and uncomfortable in the best way, testing the audience as we grapple with the fact that she is someone who both deserves and doesn’t deserve sympathy.
For this reason, Sick of Myself is the only film I’ve seen in recent years that encapsulates the true horror of our normalised narcissism, picking it apart and exposing just how deranged we’ve all become and why we should all be sick of ourselves.
