All About Lily Chou-Chou

I downloaded All About Lily Chou-Chou several years ago because I'd heard it was about a bullied kid who found solace in fandom friendships. Seems topical.

I didn't get around to watching it until recently for some reason or another. In the time since, I'd spoiled myself on the wikipedia page, which sounded awful lot like an extreme load of sexual violence combined with the oldest catfishing story ever told about internet friendships.

But after watching it, I've realized that there's a very big difference between All About Lily Chou-Chou and tales like the documentary Catfish.

See, the usual catfishing narrative relies on the lurid shock value that The Kind Of People You Find On The Internet holds for normal people who do not live on the internet. We, the people who actually do live on the internet, understand that the majority of people we encounter are mentally ill deviants who are probably not terribly good-looking and probably suffer from one or two off-putting habits in the flesh. Knowing this, I think most of us have good intentions to be as honest with each other as our neuroses allow, and only a minority of us engage in true catfishing--and we condemn this behavior amongst ourselves too.

Nonetheless there is one profound difference between a good-faith internet friendship and one formed in the context of a geographic community--and that is that the pretense of your friendship likely lies in the deeper, kinder abstractions of the human experience. You share your pain. You share your happiness. And, since your internet friend only ever knows about your life through the purity of your own perspective, it is rarely complicated by the other person thinking, "Bitch, I can't believe you're complaining about the group leaving you behind on that swimming trip. The whole reason that happened was because you wouldn't stop splashing everyone."

All About Lily Chou-Chou's identity reveal twist isn't about being Fooled By Crazies On The Internet. It is about the pain of discovering that your closest friend, who thinks and hurts so much like yourself, is an enemy in your daily life.

That's something real about the lonely internet nerd experience.

And because of that, I can forgive its flaws in depicting the general human experience. All About Lily Chou-Chou's world is suffused with a bleakness that's too much even for me, and I don't think it quite understands how that bleakness got there.

For instance, near the end, the clueless teacher talks to the protagonist about the plummet in his grades and can only speculate that perhaps it's because he's had difficulty studying. This might be a real moment demonstrating how adults are blind to the cruelty children inflict on each other in their presence, if not for the fact that several of her students have died. Under these circumstances, you can't convince me she wouldn't have a few better guesses as to why some students in her class are failing.

I don't know if you should watch All About Lily Chou-Chou. If you're bad with sexual violence, don't watch All About Lily Chou-Chou. If you dislike extreme bleakness, don't watch All About Lily Chou-Chou. If you're bad with shakycam films, it would probably take you 5 separate sittings like I needed to even get through the film.

But it is one of the only narratives I've ever seen that really captures the feeling of being a loser who lives on the internet.