by Cory Barker
The other major wrinkle to these practices is the very emergence of algorithmic culture itself, where Netflix recommends and acquires certain kinds of movies based on user preference and accrued data about viewing and rating habits. As Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas have argued, Netflix’s recommendation system points to “a court of algorithmic appeal in which objects, ideas, and practices are heard, cross-examined, and judged independently, in part, of human beings.”57 Their suggestion is an important one, for it signals that the curation and promotion of certain kinds of material to certain kinds of individuals with matching taste profiles. In this model, the promotion of The Square becomes less about raising consciousness across demographics than reinforcing certain sociopolitical ideologies held across certain demographics of Netflix consumers.58
At this juncture, I turn to the text of The Square to think about the way it frames digital media spreadability and circulation as foundational to the Egyptian revolution. This section analyzes how these practices are aestheticized for a more prescriptive and far-reaching account of how media spreadability functions in relation to social revolution. I argue that the film’s title is actually a multi-layered signifier. Ostensibly, The Square references Tahrir Square, the central space of the Egyptian Revolution. “The Square” also represents multiple media frames—both the actual frame through which the user watches the film as well as the plurality of frames that populate the film’s opening act, embedding websites and YouTube videos within frames. The Square’s opening invokes a nesting-egg aesthetic that reflexively displays the act of watching digital media. This analysis follows Thierry Kuntzel’s neoformalist suggestions that the openings of films are key to laying the aesthetic and thematic groundwork for the rest of the text.59 In locating an aesthetic representation for how digital media access builds bridges between online and offline communities, I turn to the opening sequence of the film leading up to and just past the title card. The first shot of The Square is of a power outage across an urban skyline; the subsequent shot is a close-up of a match being struck and a candle being lit. At once, the film sets up its dynamics of space, oscillating between the conflicts of the wider city and resistance being offered at the individual level. This movement from establishing shot to extreme close-up brings the film to the local level, but also substitutes one form of power for another—not just the industrial electricity for the candle, but a governmentally controlled grid for the individuals in the room finding their own light source. As if the metaphor of light across these shots were not strong enough, one of the first lines of dialogue is “The lights are out all over the world. The lights are out all over Egypt.” Again, this operates as a symbolic extinguishing and igniting—the “light” is not only the actual electricity, but also the structures of power that control it and the people who are left “in the dark.”
From here, The Square introduces one of its protagonists, Ahmed, who is photographed walking in the streets and in his apartment. After several moments of watching him discuss his life in voiceover as he moves through these everyday spaces, The Square begins a somewhat extended sequence of Ahmed in front of his laptop. It starts with an image of a YouTube video titled “torture in egypt [sic].” The camera photographs the computer monitor, somewhat distorting the image, but at the same time providing a more indexical record of what was circulated and how it would look within the space of one’s personal computer. The following shot cuts to a close-up of Ahmed’s face with the back of the laptop occupying the bottom third of the frame. This establishes a shot-reverse shot pattern between Ahmed’s face and the laptop screen, where the physical laptop itself never leaves the frame; it is either what we are looking at to see the videos, or occupies a small part of Ahmed’s close-ups. The sequence continues by showing another video—this one titled “Egyptian police torturing a woman murder suspect 1”—with the view counter showing upwards of 511,000 views. From here, the sequence cuts to a Facebook photo of a young man; the mouse clicks to the next photo in an album, revealing the same man’s face severely beaten, bloody, and broken. This image—as seen on the edge of the frame—has 70 likes and 11 shares.
When the sequence again cuts to the laptop, Ahmed is now watching the Asmaa Mahfouz video mentioned earlier in this essay. Mahfouz says, in the video, “We will go down and demand our fundamental human rights.” The sequence cuts to black as the video concludes, but in the next shot, Ahmed’s voiceover remarks, “I went to the streets. I found everyone around me felt just as I did.” Images of a moving, ever-expansive crowd capture people taking photos and videos with cell phones, and a moment later the sequence cuts back to Ahmed in his apartment on his own phone, telling someone to “tell everyone to come down to the streets.” This footage continues for some time, concluding with cell phone footage surveying the square, now filled with people. A man off-screen yells, “we have taken the square,” and the sequence cuts to an overhead shot of Tahrir Square completely filled with people. The title card—The Square—superimposes over this overhead shot. The people, notably, form more of a collective circle, such that their geometric figuration from above actually operates as a rebellion against the shape of the space.
This sequence, while only comprising approximately the first five minutes of the 105-minute documentary, aestheticizes the entire logic of a social revolution based on digital media access and circulation. It individualizes the act of media consumption through conveying the YouTube and Facebook videos as shots from Ahmed’s perspective, and it nestles them within the frames of the laptop to show how they look on particular forms of technology—a technology on which viewers might also be watching The Square. The lighting of the match allegorizes the ability to spread, share, and consume this media; it is no accident that the numbers of views, likes, and shares these media have received populate the corners of the frame. The form of digital media is displayed not only to contextualize how an Egyptian saw these images, but also to recognize how others view media on Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms. This opening foregrounds the shareability of digital media and, in showing Ahmed both at home and in the streets, how they operate to transform the relationship between offline and online spaces. The overhead shot of the crowd gathered in the Square, then, is the demonstration of how online spaces rewrite public spaces.
Having discussed The Square’s visual aesthetic, the site of its primary distribution, and the potential benefits of spreading this media for raising political consciousness, I turn to a discursive analysis of the film’s reception. While the discourse surrounding Netflix’s acquisition and distribution of the film focuses more on raising the website’s cultural capital through its ability to circulate premiere global independent filmmaking, Netflix users’ reception of the film suggests an array of everyday uses for largely American-identifying viewers. In creating parameters for a reception study of The Square, I surveyed the user reviews that had been left on the film’s official Netflix page. At the time of this writing, approximately five months after the film’s premiere, it has generated 133 user reviews. Netflix reviewers are not required to provide any identifying information, so I am unable to assign names, genders, or geographical locations of any certainty to these reviews. The selected reviews attempt to retrieve a sense of how this film is being received politically—what do users see as valuable to its consciousness-raising project? What political or social effect might it provoke? From the 133 reviews, I focused on those where the reviewer self-disclosed information about their nationality—overwhelmingly, they were either American or Egyptian, which may admittedly have much to do with my subscription to the American version of Netflix’s browser. These reviews paint a picture of how viewers affectively respond to the film, understand it as an education endeavor, and see it as a piece of political provocation. Although the bridge between online and offline spaces of activism is not often explicitly discussed in these reviews, they nevertheless point to the affective dimensions of the film’s response and the ways users may continue to use it
in their political—and perhaps public—life.
For instance, numerous reviews tie The Square—quite remarkably—to conservative U.S. gun policy. Most potently, one reviewer suggests: “This [documentary] also reminds you for those living in America why the ‘right to bear arms’ is there for that sole purpose, to allow its citizens to fight back with maximum effort against a government that tries to do this to their citizens. Every person who thinks people should be disarmed should watch this movie and learn a powerful lesson.”60 Another saw the film as arguing it “shows exactly why people must be armed to be free. Hopefully when the time comes in america [sic] we will band together, take up arms, and take back our country,” and still others saying, “I fear this very thing may happen in the US.”61 And again: “this is what happens when disarmed citizens cannot defend themselves from their government.”62 In a sense, this is an odd projection of one country’s political climate onto another, yet it also speaks to the polysemous ways audience members negotiate the meaning and politics of cross-cultural media.
The majority of reviewers who identify with an American national identity are not trying to make these kinds of ideological connections. They rather see The Square as a way to redefine their own sense of what “democracy” and civic action mean. Like the quote that serves as an epigraph to this essay, The Square reminds American viewers of the importance of civic engagement. As another reviewer commented, “Americans in particular need to see this. We love to lecture the rest of the world about how democracy is supposed to work. Well, this film shows real genuine democracy in action. And surprise, it is messy and chaotic.”63 Another echoes: “As a young American, documentaries like this are needed so people across the globe can understand what is happening outside our personal ‘bubbles’ in which we live in.”64 The documentary serves two purposes here: to remind American viewers that U.S. democracy is not indicative of democracy the world over, and to remind Americans, whose elections continue to have notoriously low voter turnouts, of the importance of civic engagement.
Many reviews center on The Square’s educative potential. Reviews regularly state, “I feel like a learned a lot” about Egypt, or “I realized how ignorant I was as an uninformed American.”65 Still others see its boots-on-the-ground perspective as inherently more historically valuable: “Every American who has no idea about the truth of Egypt, who judge by what our media wants us to know as truth, should watch this wonderful, amazing documentary,” or “It gave me a full understanding of what happened at Takir [sic] Square.”66 One viewer who self-identifies as an Egyptian who “lived” the revolution argues, “I think this is the closest we can get to truth before historians alter it in favor of whatever regime happened to be at the moment of them writing it.”67 Another who self-identifies as American suggests, “This should be shown in every modern history or political class in every college in every country.”68 The importance of the film comes in how it stands as an appropriate model for telling a history of revolution, taking the perspective of those on the ground instead of those in power. The “closeness” of this documentary to the event itself, instead of clouding its ability to dissect the revolution, is rather the real benefit—it is a document of the revolution as much as it is a documentary about the revolution.
Of all these responses, the most interesting and most useful for this analysis are those that incorporate some kind of revolutionary rhetoric. For example, one states, “This film motivates me to be the change I want to see. Go out there and change the world. Don’t wait for the world to change you.”69 Others suggest The Square is “a handbook for change,”70 providing methods that could be applied to a number of social circumstances for enacting revolution. Still others discuss, in impassioned terms, how the film affected their personal worldview: “I never delve into foreign politics, but NOW I know that I MUST!! This Doc, shows how YOU can actually manifest CHANGE in your Governments by the choice of A TRULY FREE PEOPLE!”71 Another reviewer even went so far as to say it “made me want to travel to Egypt and join in the movement for peace, justice, and democracy,” and that the film provides lessons that “are extremely valuable to revolutionaries globally.”72 Whether they focus on their individual response to the film or a belief that it can affect groups and civilians the world over, these reviews focus on the fluidity of its circulation and its ability to digitally “travel” across contexts. While stopping short of calling The Square a universal text, these reviews all stress the film can motivate and enable social revolutions “globally”—that it has considerable value apart from educating viewers about the Egyptian Revolution.
I have taken the space to survey these reviews—despite the inability to truly position their authors geographically or politically—because they reveal much about the polysemous ways users approach, view, and discuss The Square. The viewer who suggests moving to Egypt to join the revolutionaries, for instance, may not actually do so and may forget about the film after writing her brief review, but the suggestion that the film works across historiographic, educative, political, and activist axes is explicit in this sample of reviews. Further, the global circulation of The Square suggests the meanings of political documentaries are radically shaped by where and when they are viewed, such that the increased “mobility” and “spreadability” of media becomes important in relationship to the individual or group consumer. This is to say that American viewers ostensibly project their own politics and circumstances into the film, attempting to create analogies—appropriate or not—between Egypt’s struggle and their own.
This analysis poses a necessary question: do viewers genuinely see The Square as a starting point for their own social protests, or are they performing sympathy in public cyberspace? This question is both of deep concern to this essay and yet wholly rhetorical—it may be impossible to ever “know” the extent to which a political documentary inspires offline, “real” activism. The larger point may be that, regardless of any binary that exists between activism and slacktivism, these users who engage Netflix’s review space find many kinds of value in The Square. For American reviewers, its lessons from “over there” are applicable to the situation “right here” across an unexpectedly wide array of political positions.
Conclusion: View, Share, Revolt, Rinse, Repeat
Issues of access, consumption, and shareability take on a different dimension when brought to bear on streaming subscription services such as Netflix. While important to recognize the technological and governmental barriers that exist in how users can engage with on-demand culture, this essay has placed the brunt of its analysis on the spatial dimensions of circulation. This negotiation between online and offline spaces, between civically-engaged media and civic participation, is ultimately a new dimension of Jane Gaines’s “political mimesis.” Gaines, in her discussion of political documentary, defines “political mimicry” as the generation of affect through “the conventionalized imagery of struggle.”73 The documentary form’s indexicality, predicated on a relationship to Real spaces and Real people, “establishes a continuity between the world of the screen and the world of the audience, where the ideal viewer is poised to intervene in the world that so closely resembles the one on the screen.”74 This is again a version of spatial transgression—the space of representation carries into the lived space of the viewer, such that they are hopefully affected and compelled to “mimic” what the documentary shows them.
Especially as Netflix viewers have called The Square “a handbook” for revolution, it seems pertinent to consider Gaines’s ideas in relation to media spreadability and circulation. “Freed” from the boundaries of the cinema screen, political documentaries like The Square become more mobile, but sequences of revolutionaries being spurred to action by social media videos also demonstrates a model of action. Apart from being a consciousness-raising project—documenting how the Egyptian Revolution happened from a number of individual perspectives—it also demonstrates how to use spreadable media to engender social change, while itself existing i
n a digitally distributed and shareable format. The Square is then a meta-text for shareable civic media, advocating both for social revolution and demonstrating how it has functioned in one specific site. This proposition begs a deeper understanding of what The Square can actually do in offline space. The Square may spur similar modes of film production, film acquisition, and film circulation. It may spur similar modes of civic engagement and challenges to current orders of government regimes in different geographical locations.
While Netflix’s most notable non-series acquisitions of 2014 were a variety of comedy specials and a deal to produce several original feature films—including an exclusive deal on a series of Adam Sandler movies—it also released animal rights documentary Virunga in the latter half of the year, suggesting socio-political documentaries may remain a crucial—if limited or “boutique”—part of the service’s distribution arm.75 In that sense, Netflix uses its expanding collection of socio-political documentaries as a strategy to court one of its “highly differentiated micro-audiences.”76 Film festival acquisitions become, in this logic, another of Netflix’s algorithmically-determined business practices designed to encourage certain types of viewers into subscriptions and habituated viewing practices more than a way of using their service to make a sort of political statement about the possibilities of digital film circulation.