Women in Horror: Cam (2018)

Alice is a cam girl who puts on elaborate shows for paying men on a website as Lola. She seems to have her life and work well balanced, gaining enough money to rent a nice house and support herself while still buying luxuries for herself and her family. She also comes up with different stories, concepts, and themes for her show to keep it fresh, attract new viewers, retain old ones, and go up the rankings. After going to the Camgirl Clubhouse to do a joint show with a friend, she suddenly can't sign into her account and sees Lola recording live. Then, while struggling to get her livelihood back, her job and her personal life collide in ways she never expected.

Cam is a film that tackles a type of sex work from the point of view of sex workers. Writer Isa Mazzei worked as a cam girl and wanted to "create a film where an audience would empathize with a sex worker." So many films dehumanize sex workers and treat as disposable objects or murder victims. In Cam, we see all facets of Alice's life. We support her as she tries to rise in the ranks of the website and are as horrified as she is when she is somehow copied. She wants to be the best at what she does and Mazzei (in the interview linked above) says the audience shouldn't be expect Alice to do something else and walk away from her career, but there are also other implications at play that affect her private life.

During the first scene of the film, Alice is in a bubblegum pink room as Lola. Her viewers vote on sex toys she should use, but one insistent user suggests a knife and others follow suit with few outliers. Lola slits her throat complete with blood everywhere, acts dead, shows the prosthetic, and says goodnight to her viewers. This scene shows the kind of fantasy Alice is trying to create where unpredictable and make-believe things happen. Her persona Lola is almost always happy. sweet, funny, and flirty except when trying to make her fake suicide look real. To rise in the ranks of the site, Alice wants to provide a show that no one else does and keep her viewers guessing. It also shows the scary side of it where the men seem to want to see her get hurt and play into that fantasy in order to become popular. This is the most memorable scene of the film and could have been a short all by itself. 

Alice in real life is gaining enough tips from her cam job to support herself and still have time to spend time with her mother and her teen brother Jordan. He knows what she does, but she wants to tell her mother when she's higher in the ranks.  In real life, Alice is much less glamorous than Lola. Lola must always look perfect while it's ok for Alice to go without makeup or bite her nails. Alice is a real person while Lola is a perfectly manufactured male fantasy who has nothing profound to say and does whatever she's told. She puts so much into her work and strives to be the best despite hiding her profession from everyone in her personal life. Before anything supernatural happens, her cam life and real life collide in one of her regulars seeing her at the store. It's a brief, uncomfortable interaction that leaves Alice shaken.

The cam community, performers and viewers, are a varied group. Some performers are happy to share methods and tips or do a combination show for views and tips. Alice's relationships with them seem pretty superficial, but it's a job. Not everyone is going to be best friends with their coworkers. On the other hand, Princess_X, a non-nude cam girl, tells viewers to lower Lola's rank and she will strip for them. The campaign is successful and hurts Alice's earnings and feelings. The viewers are essentially faceless behind screen names unless they want a private video with Lola. The two who do so are shown to be pretty scummy. Tink, a hypocritically religious man, stalks her and knows that something is going wrong. He does nothing about it and happily masturbates to the double's show after he promised he would help her. The other man, Barney, seems to think he controls these women's success and has power them even as he throws gobs of his own money away. Alice willingly meets him in person, but is careful to meet him in a public place and not in his room. When he sees the double on her feed, he attacks her. The ones who stay online, get their fantasy, and leave her alone until the next show are preferable to these two men.

When Alice can't get into her account, a double of her, essentially what the persona of Lola is, still performs on her channel. Every attempt to reclaim her account is stymied and nothing is done when she calls law enforcement after running out of options. Alice's image, earnings, and livelihood are taken in one fell swoop. The Lola double is also Alice being unable to control her image or income. The double breaks her three personal rules blatantly, sending viewers to her door and sharing things about herself that she would never do. Her videos are passed around to people she knows, leading to an embarrassing revelation at her brother's birthday party and outing her as a sex worker in a way she would never choose. As a result, her family abandons her in her time of need while they are also mocked by others over the revelation. She loses agency to this double who is even better at her job, eventually rising all the way to the top of the rankings.

The film brings up other issues about sex workers. To stay relevant on the site, cam girls have to put in long hours and keep their shows interesting. Their income is entirely dependent on the viewers, so time could go uncompensated. The social stigma of being outed as a sex worker has a significant part of the story. An awkward interaction with a high school acquaintance has Alice looking successful in comparison to the other woman works a retail job. When that woman witnesses the revelation at Jordan's party, she smirks and doesn't feel so bad about her own minimum wage job. The cops who come to her house judge her for her chosen profession and objectify her while they dare her to admit to outright prostitution, giving them the slightest reason to arrest her. That scene disgusted me the most because sex workers are seen as less than others and less than deserving of basic human decency to many, including law enforcement.

* spoilers *

Where the film stumbles in resolving the issue of the double. Alice finally talks directly to the double and makes a bet with her to get the password to the account. After smashing her face on a table and having the double copy her, the viewers choose her as winner, being entertained by the weird situation and injury, and gets the password. She deletes the account. I was underwhelmed by the method of beating the double. While I liked the metaphor, it seemed a little confused and underdeveloped. The other woman who was copied had died, but it wasn't clear if Alice would die or if the death was incidental. The research seemed to be leading to a big reveal, but proved to be pretty useless. I do like that the phenomenon still exists after the finale and affects other girls, as all those things about having presence as a sex worker online does. After recovering from her injuries (and sporting some new scars), Alice has a new ID and persona, choosing to keep doing what she likes and what she's good at despite the dangers. When her mother asks what she'll do if the bot copies her again and Alice says she'll just make another account and another. She won't let these drawbacks keep her from the job loves and excels at.

Cam is a film about sex work written by a sex worker, showing her own experience. It's a varied portrayal that shows many of the bad things and some of the good things too. From beginning to end, we are on Alice's side even when those closest to her are not. While the double metaphor didn't always work for me, most everything else did. Madeline Brewer does a wonderful job as both frantic Alice and empty Lola. The directing doesn't objectify the cam girls even if their bodies are exposed. The cam girls seen are incredibly varied and not all one body type or skin tone. This is an important film and rewatching it made me re-evaluate my first judgment of the film. Knowing the background and focusing more on what's underneath the plot and characters changed my opinion. This film is readily available on Netflix and is well worth your time.

My rating: 4/5 fishmuffins