The World Wide Web is big – really big. It spans the globe, linking people from all corners, at least those corners that are hooked up to it. Type a word into Google and you’re bound to get hundreds of thousands of potential portals to visit. Often when I begin to search a topic, it’s not more than five minutes before I’m somewhere completely different, clicking link after link and ending up somewhere I didn’t intend to but am intrigued to visit nonetheless. Through these links, the Web achieves an interconnectedness that makes its daunting size all of a sudden seem like a community. Jed Weintrob’s thoughtful dark comedy On_Line explores the culture of the Internet, taking it from hundreds of thousands of individual and corporate pages and bringing it to the individuals.
Just as the world’s self-proclaimed oldest profession revolves around sex, so to do the profits of the Web. Porn has been online as long as it has been considered a commercial venture. John Roth (Josh Hamilton) is the co-owner of such a site. He and his partner Moe (Harold Perrineau) run Intercon-X, a web cam site where users can meet and chat with their fetish dreams and overcome loneliness, all for only a few bucks a minute. Though he is the entrepreneur, John himself is a lonely guy. It’s been a year since the break-up with his chosen “one” and all of his coping and hurting has been documented for all the world to see with his digital video journal. He’s vocal and honest about his desires, pains and dreams, as are those around him.
The Intercon-X site is the gateway that brings all of the film’s characters together. Through a six degrees approach, friends talk with friends who talk to friends and in the end they’re all connected in some way. On_Line is clear in its message and intent, sometimes to the point where it becomes a little much. But the film’s biggest strength stems from its candidness and honesty that are hard to achieve without clearly stating your goals.
Much of the action of the film comes through Weintrob’s creative mix of split-screen web cams and digital video. This connects the various and numerous relationships directly, while at the same time keeping everyone at a distance. The dialogue they share is natural and free-flowing. It only adds to the genuine feel of the film. With a fearlessness for being honest, the situations the characters find themselves in are embarrassing and laugh-out-loud funny.
Perhaps more importantly, On_Line raises questions about how relationships are changing since the advent of the Internet. While it brings people closer together in chat rooms and in video conferences, it also keeps people apart, giving a reason to excuse people from leaving the comfortable confines of their desk chairs and the nuclear glow of the computer screen. But then again, who am I to talk. I’m the one typing in front of it right now.
On_Line Gallery
