‘BeastMode’
In the recently concluded year of the monkeys, we found ourselves behaving a tad too close like our less- evolved cousins. We weren’t just divided. We were divided violently. Veiled by the friendly profile pictures we mask our complete personalities with in our various social media accounts, we were free to speak our minds, throwing all notions of compromise, decency, and even civilization. We had ownership over our walls and timelines, so we will always be right, and when we are right, we have to fight. That was our mentality. Our virtual lives are being lived in a digital, socially networked jungle where the loudest, harshest, and most outrageous voice is king. In a year of issues, ranging from human rights to dog’s rights, we were eager for blood, we were vocal about it, so long as we were comfortable and clean with a frap in one hand and our IPhones in the other.
The tandem of director Manuel Mesina and writer Mixkaela Villalon cooked up an ingenious idea to explore the extent of our collective bloodlust. They recruited Baron Geisler, a gifted actor whose reputation for being reckless when intoxicated seems part and parcel of his celebrity, in a series of planned incidents that would culminate in a fistfight with Kiko Matos, another gifted actor who was game to play the part of Geisler’s rival. Their experiment ballooned beyond their initial expectations, resulting in inexplicable mania and fanfare, culminating in a real cage fight between the two actors with everyone, from those moneyed enough to purchase tickets to the glitzy event to those who can only afford to witness the spectacle through Facebook or Twitter, taking sides.
BeastMode, a documentary that maps Mesina and Villalon’s extravagant plan alongside observations of how our society gets easily blindsided from real issues by escapist violence, is the product of fortune, of filmmakers whose temerity to depict how vicious we have all become (and all for the wrong and whimsical reasons) has forced them to ride the flow that turned their ruse into a monster. There are gray areas in the filmmaking process, considering that Mesina and Villalon staged the impetus, making everyone, even institutions like mass media, both involuntary conspirators and subjects of the film. However, there is a point to be made, and the staunchest of filmmakers will make use of the medium to make it. Mesina and Villalon just started a joke that made the whole world crying for blood and division. This year, when BeastMode finally gets shown amid probable legal issues and concerns, the joke’s on us and our inner apes.