SXSW Review: ‘Alone Together’ with Charli XCX, Angels, and the Lockdown Album
“We are all, in someways, going through exactly the same thing, and it feels like this new way of connecting.”
Films that address COVID-19 have generally been very bad. Their approach to the pandemic and it’s widespread social impacts are often met with half-baked, surface level ideas that illicit more annoyed eye-rolls than eye-opening revelations. To make some crass assertion that we as human beings crave connection and the basic lacking of it causes a host of physical, monetary, and mental issues is no more insightful than it is a simple rehashing of a collective experience we have all just lived and would prefer not to relive.
But Alone Together is the first COVID film that didn’t make me want to slam my head against the wall. Not that it avoids the pandemic nor detracts from the the emotional toll of it all, but rather, it’s how the doc sidelines those elements in favor of focusing on the relationship between its subject, English pop star Charli XCX, and her fans, the ‘Angels.’ At the onset of quarantine, Charli set out to make an entirely new album, how i’m feeling now, in forty days through an online collaborative process with her fans, creating a product that leveraged global circumstance and a virtual community to make an album born from the digital era.
Told in a blisteringly brief 70 minutes, Alone Together pulls together content from across the internet to create a digital cocktail of documentary filmmaking. As Charli embarks on her forty day endeavor, she records every aspect of the creative process with camcorder in hand from the solitude of her L.A. home with only her boyfriend and two managers to help her in person. Being a star popularized on the internet and from someone who reliably engages with her fans online, Charli turns to her Angels to get feedback and source material for the album.
Instagram live streams become digital town halls where Charli can present her lyrics and get feedback. Zoom meetups become a place to sample reactions of the latest mix. Chat rooms become a repository of collaborative ideas. And one tweet can rally an army of Angels to create clips for her latest musics video. Pulling all this digital media together makes everything feel like a digital ecosystem, a hive mind of an interconnected fandom who are all befittingly physically alone, but brought together through the internet and their admiration for one musician’s music.
And that’s what really shines about Alone Together: the dynamic between Charli and her fans. Like everyone else, Charli is in lockdown. The doc extends sympathy to Charli regarding her mental hurdles during this period, but critically, Alone Together also extends that same sympathy to everyone else. Her fans are just regular people, not internationally renowned pop stars. They have their own personal struggles in their own private lives under their own circumstances, and the doc recognizes that. It is not singular in its pathos, but rather multidirectional. The interconnectedness of fandom working collectively together yield a support network of sorts where even one lonely fan can feel a sense of belonging with others feeling the same shared pandemic experience, including Charli herself.
For Charli, self-worth comes from her music. In very honest and blunt testimony, Charli worries, like many of us, that she isn’t pretty enough, isn’t smart enough, isn’t good enough to warrant a content existence. Her sense of worth derives from her music, and tasking herself with an entire album that could disappoint stresses those mental hurdles even more. When the doc starts to pull in those same concerns from fans who feel the same sense of self-doubt in isolation, Alone Together starts to level the dynamic between pop star and fandom. It’s only through the creation of how i’m feeling now where we can see how much Charli needs her fans as much as they need her, and when we’ve all been alone for so long, the idea of belonging is a warm sentiment to be had.
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Cinema As We Know It’s SXSW Online 2021 Coverage
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