One year after Get Out, another social thriller deserves Oscar love for its script
Film Features Oscar ThisThis article contains plot details of the movie Cam.
Calling Jordan Peele’s Best Original Screenplay Oscar victory for Get Out “thrilling” would be an understatement. It was a validation of the sort that aggrieved outsiders hate to admit they appreciate, a mainstream acknowledgment of the potential for deep empathy through the experience of identifying with the protagonist of a horror movie. As well as being by their nature metaphorically rich, horror movies—at least, the good ones—activate the body’s adrenal system, setting our hearts pounding and palms sweating along with the hero or heroine’s. And there’s nothing that bonds people like surviving a traumatic event together, whether in real life or on screen.
Peele’s screenplay used horror as a vehicle to talk about race and the commodification and degradation of black bodies in American culture, but the genre’s potential to build empathy extends to other marginalized groups as well. Feminist film scholar Carol J. Clover made this argument 25 years ago in her book Men, Women, And Chainsaws, in which she contended that the slasher films demonized by second-wave feminists could actually make men more empathetic towards women by forcing them to identify with, and celebrate the victories of, the so-called final girl. (Interestingly, Peele used this same vocabulary in a January 2018 interview with the Washington Post, saying simply, “Daniel [Kaluuya’s Chris] is the final girl.”)
One defining characteristic of the traditional ’80s final girl is chastity, or at least the implication of such. But this year, a horror screenplay subverted this trope by telling a story through the perspective of a woman whose sexuality is a key component of her identity. Cam is centered on the character of Alice (Madeline Brewer), who shares characteristics with many final girls of horror. She’s capable, smart, and a bit of an outsider. She’s even a brunette, the traditional hair color of the woman who fights back. But there’s one key difference: Alice works as a camgirl, performing in nightly live-streaming shows for an audience of horny regulars who know her by the name “Lola.” Alice works in the sex industry by choice and—even more rebelliously—likes her job and wants to succeed at it. Neither victim nor virgin, her existence breaks the binary of acceptable archetypes for women in horror.
In the shadow of SESTA/FOSTA—Trump legislation ostensibly aimed at combating sex trafficking that’s actually resulted in putting consenting adults in online sex trades at risk—making a sex worker the hero of your movie is a radical act. Even among supposedly progressive feminists, patronizing and vilifying sex workers is common enough to have its own acronym, SWERFs (sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists). For Cam screenwriter Isa Mazzei, whose own experiences working as a camgirl heavily influenced her script, using the comforting familiarity of a genre movie to convey that experience was a deliberate choice.
Mazzei initially wanted to make a documentary about camming, even going so far as to outline a few scenes with her friend and creative partner Daniel Goldhaber, who went on to direct Cam. But, as she tells The A.V. Club, she almost immediately realized that “a documentary is from an observer’s perspective, by definition. And so, when you are from the outside looking in, you’re never going to really fully embody the subject’s experience.” In her experience showing her friends camming videos in an attempt to explain what she did all day, “I think a lot of people… often couldn’t get past [the feeling of], ‘Omg I’m watching porn,’ to really see the art, performance, craft, and labor that was going into these shows.” She adds:
I started to realize that a documentary might end up with the same issue. Since it’s about porn, it would have to show porn, and watching porn for a lot of people can be a huge hurdle. Putting them inside a sex worker’s head, however, and seeing what she’s seeing, and feeling what she’s feeling, is very different from the outside observation we get with documentary… I could talk to a camera about how it feels to have my digital identity taken from me, or we could make an audience feel digital agency being ripped away from them.
The concept of digital agency is key to one of Cam’s most universal themes: the controlled curation of online identity, and the disassociation that occurs when that control is lost. Social media is the most obvious example of where and how this curation occurs. Who hasn’t posted a beaming photo with a partner on Instagram after the relationship has begun to sour or carefully edited a Facebook status to reflect accomplishments but not failures? It’s the same for Alice, who puts extensive time and effort into molding a perky, playful persona for dream-girl-next-door “Lola.” The horror of the film comes from Alice losing control over her online persona—and, therefore, her identity—when a supernatural double locks her out of her camming account and begins performing in her place, forcing her to utter perhaps the most dreaded words in the English language: “Hi, I’m having some trouble with my account.”
The mundane nature of a Kafkaesque customer service call provides another key to Cam’s careful crafting of empathy. The film’s screenplay makes a point of including scenes where Alice performs everyday errands and chores, actions that are generally excised in the name of efficiency. But in this context, they serve a specific purpose. Underlining Alice’s routine responsibilities—shopping for props, vacuuming her performance space, answering messages and opening mail from clients—emphasizes the similarities of her work to more mainstream jobs. Mazzei pushes this identification a step further by inserting these prosaic details into exotic scenarios. One of the film’s funniest moments comes when a fellow performer standing just off camera holds up two delivery menus while Alice and her friend Fox (Flora Diaz) are in the middle of a show. Without breaking character, Fox gestures that she’d like sushi, please. Alice, topless and sitting astride an industrial-strength vibrator, nods in agreement. We all have to eat.
Of course, there are elements of Alice’s work that aren’t universal, and Mazzei has said repeatedly in interviews and Q&As that her greatest hope for the film was that sex workers would find it relatable. This specificity is especially apparent in the vivid characterizations of Alice’s clients, a pantheon of creepy-dude archetypes that includes the leering Barney (Michael Dempsey) and the pitiful Tinker (Patch Darragh), both of whose personalities are coded into the screenplay through their dialogue. For Alice, the loss of control over her accounts has higher stakes than most, given that she relies on the internet for her livelihood—not to mention the physical danger that occurs when her double gives a particularly obsessive client the address of the hair salon where Alice’s mother works.
All these elements—specificity, relatability, empathy—are delivered through the conduit of a traditional thriller structure, beginning with a setup establishing the protagonist’s goal (Alice wants to be the No. 1 camgirl on her site), then creating a barrier (Alice loses control over her account), before following a series of escalating events to a final confrontation and the accomplishment of that goal. Here, as with her subversion of the final girl archetype, Mazzei further plays with the audience’s sense of identification by inserting the psychologically loaded symbol of twins into the film’s core confrontation.
Twins represent cosmic opposites in Jungian psychology, and the dual nature of humankind. That symbol becomes further complicated when those twins are women, stoking misogynist paranoia about the deceptive nature of women (Eve lying to Adam when she gave him the forbidden fruit, e.g.) and reinforcing Freud’s Madonna/whore dichotomy. If two women, one good and one evil, look exactly the same, how is a man supposed to tell the difference? Alfred Hitchcock explored the question from the male point of view in his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo, as did his most slavish devotee, Brian De Palma, in his 1972 film Sisters.
Both of those films feature sets of female look-alikes who serve as mysteries for the protagonists to solve, but Cam subverts this formula by making the main character the one whose identity is split. Rather than an unknowable other, Alice is our gateway into the story, which makes her twin terrifying not because it’s so far away, but because it’s so close. By blending millennial anxiety about how we present ourselves online with the psychologically and politically loaded symbol of the twin, Mazzei’s Cam script appeals to both the viewer’s conscious and subconscious minds. She’s asking us to see a sex worker not only as a relatable human being whose fears we understand and whose triumphs we celebrate, but also as the hero of her own story. The face in the mirror may be different, but its outlines are familiar—too familiar to dismiss as anything but ourselves.
74 Comments
Is CAM an unusual film with an interesting subject matter? Absolutely. Is it *Oscar* worthy…? Personally, I think it lacks a certain finesse and often feels rushed/underdeveloped in places, but in terms of presenting a job the general public have very strong preconceptions about, as something more matter-of-fact, I do think it succeeds brilliantly.
That’s absolutely my take also. It’s a neat little movie with a good idea at its core, but execution is occasionally lacking. Parts do feel rushed and underdeveloped, as you say – and in particular the ending feels like a shrug. The monster is defeated in a manner that feels like the writer improvised it late in the game and wasn’t up to fully explaining it, and the epilogue feels like a seat-filler for a better idea that never arrived.As a horror fan I’m more than forgiving of such flaws, which are rampant in my favorite genre, but I would hope the Oscars would set a slightly higher bar.
I agree. The film spent so much running time building tension, creating suspense and mystery, and then the payoff was incredibly ‘meh’, if you can even call it a payoff. I don’t need clear answers to everything, but I need a lot more than what we got.
Yep. I’m good with unresolved mysteries too, but if you’re gonna go that route, I think you need to really lean into the weirdness. Like the best Twin Peaks episodes, or the lighthouse/doppelganger stuff at the end of Annihilation. You don’t have to explain everything (or even much of anything), but you still need that feeling of the story reaching some sort of climax – and if it’s not going to make much rational sense, then said climax should probably shoot for that Lovecraftian ideal where the universe is basically overwhelming the protagonist with its sheer unknowability.
Cam didn’t do either of those, so the ending felt to me like boxes were just being ticked. “Monster is defeated in some vaguely clever way,” check. “Protagonist gets on with her life in a fashion meant to be kind of inspiring,” check.
The same description can be used for Get Out. Great core concept, poor executing, with a third act that entirely jumps the shark.
Right there with you. There’s a rough, unpolished feel about it that keeps it back from real greatness. But it’s a solid, distinct genre entry. Good but no “Get Out”
I’m with all of you, I liked the movie and did find the increasingly distressing situation actually quite upsetting as the lead character’s life just got worse and worse, which is a rare reaction for me when it comes to horror, but the ending disappointed and it’s not quite good enough to be considered Oscar-worthy. The lead actress should get a nomination if anything as I thought she was superb, but I can’t see that ever happening given the subject matter unfortunately.
Maybe you can tell me then what the ghost did wrong, if you feel that the entry is solid. If I find out one day that a ghost is doing my job and doing it well, I’ll just not come into the office, and sit back and watch my bank account grow fat with spooky dollars. If anything, the movie makes cam-work seem completely different from most other jobs, in that the hero needs to get back in the cam game and will risk her life to do so. There was nothing in the movie that said the cam ghost was taking over her internet presence in other ways, nothing that said it was haunting he bank account – it just wanted to do cam shows with her face.
Totes. It was an interesting movie and much of it was well-executed, although I think that was more the script than the directing, which felt a bit flat. Ending didn’t do much for me either.ETA: the headline does specifically say Oscar for script, to be fair.
But the script is the source of the biggest problems! It deserves the oscar for best script even less than the oscar for best picture.I’m TOTALLY fine with ambiguity, but if you’re going to go ambiguous, don’t start to introduce a literal explanation and then just leave it hanging. It feels like there were scenes left on the cutting room floor, or that they ran out of the budget to film them.
Everything Katie says about creation of empathy is true, and it’s really interesting and unique with its portrayal of sex workers, but as a thriller it falls really flat in the last act.I’m also really not a fan of the central performance, I did not find the main actress to be very involving. The guy who played Tinker was nothing to write home about, either.
Answer to anyone asking if a movie is Oscar Worthy is just bringing up that Crash won Best Picture. Cam was a great movie and certainly better than Crash so why not?
Because we’re not comparing films from 2005 to those from 2018? Because ten wrongs don’t make a right? How many more bloody obvious reasons do you want?
Even numbers of wrongs make a right! That’s like basic maths!
Totally agree, I was really disappointed at the lack of explanation for … anything, that happened. Like, oh this really weird fucked up thing happened, lets not bother to figure out what it is at all so we can’t prevent it from happening again or anything like that. How would you make a sequel?
It’s a completely decent film that is watchable and mostly enjoyable but is entirely unexceptional, other than perhaps the choice of subject matter.
No fucking way. This movie is BAD. What Get Out lacked in subtlety it made up with incredible visuals. Cam has none of both.It’s hysterical, incoherent, unscary and ultimately boring.
“It’s hysterical, incoherent, unscary and ultimately boring.”
That description sounds a bit like Katie herself.
Yep. This movie is a mess.
Is it even eligible? Did it get a token theater release somewhere?
I don’t think it is, but I’m not sure. I only saw festival screenings listed here, and I’m pretty sure you have to have a public screening in LA to qualify. I could be way off, though.
IIthink it’s worth a mention- Madeline Brewer was amazing in this.
Cam is a cute little film, especially when you actively compare and contrast it with the Lynch and Cronenberg films it’s clearly inspired by, but you’re really letting the fact it appeals to your woke sensibilities cloud your judgement.
I can’t speak for Katie, but Lynch and Cronenberg are my two favorite directors, and I loved this movie for reasons that absolutely nothing to do with “woke sensibilities”.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the film, but to suggest anything about it is genuinely Oscar worthy would be to do so solely because “online sex workers” has been a massive social justice hot topic over the past few years and you like the subject matter.
And, again, I am not speaking for Katie. She’s the one who said it was “Oscar-worthy”. I said nothing of the sort. But I would say, whether I’m playing devil’s advocate or not, that someone could legitimately say “I think the screenplay is Oscar-worthy” and even if I disagreed with them, I would never say “the only possible reason you could think that is because of your social beliefs”. You might suspect that, and in some individual cases you may be right, but ultimately you cannot know. To dismiss someone’s opinion like that out of hand just seems rude and disingenuous.
He was already being rude when he called it a “cute little film”. The rest was just wankery.
I couldn’t get through this review because of your determination to make this all about social commentary. Also, enough with the legitimization of sex work. People are entitled to choose to do it, and we should endeavor to make it legal or safe, but I am entitled not to respect people who choose to degrade themselves for money.Sex work is inherently exploitive, and the claims of empowerment are bullshit rationalizations. Treating this work as something positive encourages young people to make bad choices. Watch the Rashida Jones documentary or spend 10 minutes in any strip club.
I think this was a good vehicle for its star who did some great acting, but far from the standard Get Out set for modern horror films.
I like Madeline Brewer and am glad to see her getting good roles & for things to be working out better for her than they did for her character Tricia on Orange is the New Black, who as her prison mom Red said, was buried in the prison cemetery with her name spelled wrong on the headstone.
Her best work was in Handmaid’s Tale. She played the girl who got mouthy so they plucked her eye out.To me, even though she headlines, this film was a step backwards.
I’ve been meaning to watch this, but I have a question for those who have seen it: My partner cannot watch scenes that imply rape or sexual assault. Am I going to have to set aside time to watch this by myself or is it suitable viewing for the both of us?
There’s a guy who seems like he’s probably a rapist, and he grabs the main character and tries to abduct her, but fails. Another guy is a stalker who is just generally disturbing but doesn’t do anything violent.
https://www.unconsentingmedia.org/items/2266It looks like it should probably be ok.
There’s some disturbing sexual play for some (like cutting) but no sexual assault
I think even the cutting is fake.
There is an almost sexual assault, but she gets out of it
As a rape survivor, I felt that there was nothing at all in the film that would upset someone sensitive to sexual assault or rape scenarios. The main character is a survivor too. There is some violence and there are some looming creepy characters, but nothing at all that bothered me.
Yeah the scene referenced on the Unconsenting Media site might be triggering, she gets cornered and it’s scary. It happens inside a restaurant bathroom and it’s not super sudden i.e. you’ll see it coming if you want to skip over the scene
The movie does have several scenes that depict sexual assault of varying levels… if your partner is sensitive to it, then it won’t be suitable for them.
The info posted above looks very accurate. I think you’ll be alright. I’m pretty sensitive to depictions of sexual assault as well (I can watch, it’s just really unsettling) and I don’t even recall having a worry during this one. Great film btw.
I honestly loved this movie, and it definitely wasn’t *just* because it has good intentions socially (although of course some people will never stop saying that that’s the only reason you loved it; can’t be helped). The writing, acting, direction, and cinematography are great, it’s unusually good at making Internet interactions make sense on screen, and (speaking as a big horror fan) I think it’s really effective as a straight-up horror movie due to how well it follows through on all the ways that this simple premise can be frightening and dangerous. One small choice that I thought was particularly cool was that when Alice first confronts the creature on video chat, you expect it to break character and do a scary voice or something, but instead it just starts flirting with her like a regular viewer because it doesn’t even recognize her— which I thought was even creepier.
Jungian AND Kafkaesque used in an essay about a camgirl thriller film? Get Out, indeed.
Not enough stars.
Wow scalding hot take, bro
Why do you think those terms don’t apply here, or (as you seem to imply) can’t be utilized in a piece about a “camgirl thriller film”?
Hyperbolic comes to mind.
I should know better, but ok, I’ll bite.“Hyperbolic” implies that the terms used in the review were used out of proportion to the subject, that they were exaggerated in some way. But scale isn’t really important to analogy. If something is analogous – let’s just say, for example, the thematic elements of a given film – to something that came before it and that (virtually) everyone agrees has more cultural importance – let’s just say, for example, the works of a certain important author – it’s ok to draw that comparison. The point is, they are comparing them because of what they share, not the scale on which they share it.If your friend says they completely dominated a tennis match and they say “I went DefCon 1 on that fucker!”, do you really object and say “whoa, whoa, that’s hyperbolic! DefCon 1 refers to military warfare! That’s not applicable here!”. Of course not. You understand the two things aren’t literally the same, it just an analogy and the scale isn’t important. Now, if you have actual reasons why the terms “Jungian” and “Kafkaesque” do not apply here for thematic reasons, I’m all ears. But all you said was “Hyperbolic comes to mind”. That says nothing. I could say “It was nonsense.” Hooray. I Said A Thing.
Uh… I loved Cam too, and the concept was fantastic. But don’t Oscar movies have to have an actual ending? It was a good idea and done very well, but this is not a GREAT movie.
I would have preferred if Peele had won Best Director over Best Screenplay. There aren’t that many memorable lines of dialogue, but the execution of basically every scene is top notch.
I took the opening emphasis on the mundane aspects of the job to also show how every aspect of her life was monetized: I’m taking a bath? I could sell it. I’m hanging out with my family? I can use this time to connect with clients on my phone.And how that slowly seduced her into metaphorically losing herself. That very universal fear of tech/capitalistic critique was my favorite part.Other notes, SPOILERS: I love Melora Walters wherever she appears, even just to be the Mom here or a homeless victim in Venom. Good casting as she would have been the lead 20 years ago.I ended up cringing at the interpersonal uncomfortableness of some of her interactions with her johns, and skipped past her meeting Barney in the hotel (as well as some of the “family finds out” scene). I liked the ending, and took the whole thing as deepfake algorithm designed to make money. Apparently some of the stuff I missed (it recreates other people) might contradict this for some, but I thought it was all possible for an AI that could create images of people who weren’t there, and make guesses about who she was/her family based on facial recognition tech. No supernatural required.
See I found CAM to be a C+ type of film at best. Like it didn’t go full dissociative identity. Like it didn’t go even half Perfect Blue and it probably should. Like if you’re going to make a film about a woman who sees herself and slowly loses her mind due to what she sees on the internet and it involves around the horrors of her being sexualised whilst her colleagues don’t really care about her then do what Perfect Blue did and just play with the audience. Don’t just half ass it. Like Perfect Blue did it better and man it would have done the world of good if it went that route and not the ending route where it was a virus or something. Like is it an adequate film? Yeah, yeah it is. Is it a great film? In my opinion, no. If y’all wanted a computer film to get nominated for an Oscar then brother do Searching. Top 3 favourite films of 2018 for me was Searching followed by Spider Man Into The Spider Verse followed by Halloween (2018).
“Alice works in the sex industry by choice and—even more rebelliously—likes her job and wants to succeed at it.”Nothing about that is “rebellious”
In a society like ours that all but demands people look down on sex work, I’d say it is.
Even among supposedly progressive feminists, patronizing and vilifying sex workers is common enough to have its own acronym, SWERFs (sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists)It seems like almost anything gets its own acronym in progressive circles though. I confidently imagine there’s an acronym to describe people who post snarky comments about progressive circles in articles on the internet.
Yeah, SCAPCIAs.
SWERFs are a big problem in feminist discourse, actually, along with TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). When a problem is as big as them, it needs a name.
Yeah, that seemed odd to me too. I don’t doubt that it exists, but I am leery of trying to work into a conversation something so incredibly niche as if it’s just another term we have to start utilizing.
Stop being such a JORNF.
“I think a lot of people… often couldn’t get past [the feeling of], ‘Omg I’m watching porn,’ to really see the art, performance, craft, and labor that was going into these shows.” The art of separating losers on the internet from their money? I don’t begrudge anyone their job, but I think she might go a little to far.
Get Out was entertaining at best, but it didn’t deserve an Oscar, not by a longshot.
CAM on the other hand, was absolute horseshit from beginning to end… the movie was a solid piece of shit, through and through.
To even insinuate that such a craptastic movie deserves ANY kind of award, much less an Oscar is idiocy that reaches legendary levels of stupid.
I haven’t read it yet but this article gets kudos for just the headline making me laugh out loud in an empty room like a supervillain. CAM was among the least competent horror nothings I saw last year, and there was nothing to recommend it to anyone. The acting was trash, the cinematography was useless, the narrative development was minimal, and nobody can tell me what the fucking ghost did wrong.
Eve didn’t lie to Adam when she gave him the forbidden fruit.
I just wanted to add that I loved this movie. It far exceeded my expectations. Just on paper, it sounded like something really tuned to my interests, and it had me hooked from the jump. I didn’t mind the ending as much as others here did, I guess. Madeline Brewer was amazing. Really looking forward to what the director will do next.
The concept of CAM was interesting, the delivery however .. just made absolutely no sense as we entered the third act. I’m still waiting for some credible explanation of what actually happened at the end. And how does a person demolish their face without knocking themselves out in the process made even less sense … This movie has received an unusual amount of praise. I guess at some point someone will explain the end and it will click for me.
I watched Cam. It doesn’t deserve any Oscar consideration.
Mmm… Nah.
I praise Madeline Brewer for being a Netflix darling in Hemlock Grove, Orange is the New Black, and Black Mirror, but this movie is not Oscar worthy. Absent of her, the movie makes no sense. I like to think that an Oscar worthy movie can hold its weight if one actor suddenly disappears. This is not the case.
i hope its better than Get Out, i dont really see how that movie managed to get an award for originality when its basically a tweaked version of the wicker man
I don’t understand how this movie even remotely deserves all the praise it gets.It’s an incredibly silly cringefest, I feel like the movie’s undoubtedly original concept and the progressive ideas within it are just distracting people from the actually quite poor quality of the flick.
I thought Cam flubbed the ending by, ironically, not taking the cop-out. After all the build up about how the industrial strength vibrator was somehow dangerous and/or a bridge too far, when we get the shot from her perspective while she’s on it of the ceiling blurring out and then the smash cut to the next morning, when her doppleganger problems begin, I thought “aha, okay, everything from here on in is a stress-related hallucination and she’s gonna snap back to being on the vibrator at the end”. And then in the final confrontation with Lola, when she’s slammed her head onto the desk a bunch of times and we get another shot from her perspective of the ceiling blurring out, I thought “aha, a matched shot to when the hallucination started, she will come back out of it now”. And then she didn’t.
But that would have made way more sense! Instead we have to take the vague technobabble bullshit about Lola being some sort of Turing-shattering AI (that knows things that were never digitized, like what Alice’s actual house looks like from the inside, but not what Alice looks like even as it duplicates her) as being an actual satisfying explanation, which it’s not… and then the actual ending, where she deletes her account only to make a new one, just had me confused. What was your goal, exactly, Alice? And why is “if the AI takes this account too I’ll just go to war again, smash up my entire face, and start from scratch as many times as it takes” a good plan?
Speaking as someone who hates, loathes, and despises the lazy “It was all in the main character’s head!” plot “twist,” I am extremely grateful they didn’t go down that route. It’s been overused so much that the rest of the movie has to be really damned great for it not to ruin everything that came before. (I honestly can’t remember the last movie to use that ending that I actually enjoyed.)
It’s funny how many reviewers are so smitten by the idea of this film – sex-positive, veracity, backstory, low-fi – while the actual product is such boring garbage. In no particular order: slogging story, redundant scenes, thin protagonist, caricaturish supporting cast, weak dialog, poorly defined stakes and rules, slow pace, lame ending. Even this dryly academic dissection can’t really posit that the movie is necessarily thrilling, exciting or interesting. It possesses overwhelming theoretical excellence since we have to support such a progressively plucky protagonist. To call its screenplay something revelatory is a joke considering its tired 3-acts are basically filled with the same scene of the protagonist whining ‘Woe is me.’ An article about Hereditary’s weird characters, black angst and subversive structure would be a far better use of time.
WHAT?!? Oscar worthy???? Ummmmmmm no…… Joe Dirt had a better chance at an Oscar than this piece of trash. lol
I watched it, and thought it was nothing more than a typical tits and ass suspense/horror movie with an ending that made no sense, until I read this review.I had no idea it was actually good.