Feature photo: Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) reads in a public place in INGRID GOES WEST. Courtesy of NEON via Mongrel Media.
Last week I saw Ingrid Goes West, which stars Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates) as Ingrid, who becomes obsessed with an Instagram star named Taylor Sloane. Sloan is played perfectly by Elizabeth Olsen, who captures that mid-level social media influencer desperation perfectly. She has just enough followers to feel superior to others but is frantic to break into the next level of notoriety. Ingrid essentially stalks Taylor and moves to California to try to befriend or possibly become her.
The film made me think a great deal about aspects pertaining to social media and my own habits. What has been on my mind is finding the balance between sharing my thoughts on current events (or if I should share them at all) versus my love of movies and pop culture. It’s very hard to go from posting “Check out this interview with a director!” to “I don’t know how we as a planet are going to recover from the current political climate”. Hell, most days I don’t even want to go on social media at all because my various feeds make me feel overwhelmed with sadness and frustration at the state of the world.
Ingrid Goes West grapples with the perfect lives we’re trained to portray on social media. Yet those lives are only a fraction of who we are as three-dimensional human beings. I get having to cultivate an “online personality” – many of us have to do it for our jobs. Or we have to be conscious of what we say publicly for fear it gets attributed to one of our various associations. However, I feel like it’s our responsibility to remain vocal on things we care about. The ENTIRE gamut of things we care about. We shouldn’t shy away from things for fear of “losing followers” or various other insecurities.
Feeds full of avocado toast, eclipses, and puppies are great for some, but shutting out the woes of the world isn’t going to do anything to solve them. I have to remind myself that daily.
P.S. That all being said, you can find me geeking out about movies, television, and all things pop culture, as well as trying to do my part as a citizen of this world by following me on Instagram @the_dhk or on Facebook @thedhkmovies.