Old goats like me who had a Spyder bike with playing cards in the spokes, posted letters without zip codes, and knows that Elgin-2745 is a phone number do not get this generation. Take phones: to us they are devices used to speak privately (pre-NSA) to other persons over long distances, not substitutes for maps, post cards, or movie screens, and what's wrong with a flip phone, anyway? Other than the town gossip, we did not live on our phones. But you guys do. Specifically, you live on social media, which is the modern equivalent of a party line (you don't know what a party line is? Punk.). You claim to have 675 friends. No you don't. You have two. The rest are stalkers.
Ingrid Goes West is about one of those stalkers, Ingrid Thorburn, played by Aubrey Plaza (the cute version of the Shadow King in Syfy's Legion). She is a wacked-out cyber troll who believes she has close personal relationships with anyone she "likes." After spending several months in an institution for a rather unfortunate incident involving one of those "friends," Ingrid latches on to a hippie chick (we're using my generation's terms, okay?) in Los Angeles named Taylor Sloane (played by the Scarlet Witch) who innocently replies to one of Ingrid's posts, which is a reply to one of Taylor's posts showing her breakfast. Right there: who takes pictures of their food and sends it to everybody? Certainly not us old goats.
Ingrid converts her mother's inheritance to cash and moves to Los Angeles, renting a townhouse owned by Batman. Well, not really, it's owned by Dan Pinto (played by Ice Cube, Jr) who is a Batman-obsessed screenwriter wannabe working on a script for some unofficial Batman treatment
in other words, fanfic. Ingrid then sets out to make her imagined BFF her actual BFF through stalking and dognapping and dinners and binge drugging and stealing Batman's truck and even buying the house next door. Hilarious, right?
Depends on your generational viewpoint.
From theirs, this is a comedy of errors and mistaken identity and farce and misstep, like The Big Lebowski. From mine, it's tragedy, and not even tragicomedy, although there are some rather funny moments. The underlying tone is menace and insanity and desperation. Everything is fake, from Taylor's bohemia to her husband's artistic ability; everything is performance art, from shopping to girls' nights out, and it is all displayed worldwide one selfie at a time. The only real person in the movie is Pinto, who has a legitimate, heart-wrenching reason to become Batman. Ingrid, trying to keep up with her new "friends," escalates things to the point of near- murder.
Ingrid becomes undone when Taylor's brother steals her phone and discovers her scamming, but, really, why was that necessary? A simple Google search would have accomplished the same thing; indeed, would have disclosed her previous incarceration because she doesn't use a fake name. Why not? Because Ingrid and everybody else inhabit an alternate reality (which used to be a science fiction concept) so insular that anyone who replies to your post must be you. A generation that considers itself internet hip is internet stupid.
And internet redeemed. When Ingrid's lies finally unravel, she does not get what I expect; she gets, instead, what she expects. I scratch my head. You cheer.
The space between us.
