Dìdi review – a tender, specific rendering of adolescence on the early internet
It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at nostalgia, so often is fondness for the past used to cover a lack of anything to say. The market is flush with reboots, redos, reunions and the Eras tour, content mining our natural affinity for (and thus, the bankability of) things that shaped us.
What a joy, then, that this year’s Sundance film festival featured not one but several films that accomplished the rare and difficult task of employing nostalgia without feeling cheap, that pulled us backwards to sharp, smart, devastating and illuminating effect. Megan Park’s My Old Ass conjured the excitement and overwhelm of leaving home via a bittersweet, mushroom-induced meeting between an 18-year-old girl and her 39-year-old self. Jane Schoenbrun’s buzzy, word-of-mouth hit I Saw the TV Glow resurrected the thrill of analog TV fandom via its own Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque TV show, for a haunting tale of obsession, identity and fandom. Both film-makers understood that when done well, there are few things more powerful in art than our feelings around the passage of time.
So too in Dìdi, Sean Wang’s semiautobiographical portrait of an Asian American boy in 2008 that is easily one of the best, most seamless films I’ve seen on the experience of growing up online. Dìdi has a clear antecedent in fellow Sundance alum Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham’s 2018 film about a girl’s phone-inflected adolescence that is still the gold standard for affecting films about the internet. The tones are strikingly similar – understated and natural, sweet and bitingly sour, observing the ordinary thrills and horrors of growing up. Both braid the digital lives of their protagonists with striking accuracy – Facebook photo albums and comments, Snapchat stories and Instagram faces, overlaid with longing, loneliness and occasional fun.
Dìdi is the childhood nickname for Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a Taiwanese American kid in Fremont, California, stranded in between middle and high school. He’s adrift in his family – his mostly absent father is away on business in Taiwan; his strained mother (Joan Chen) stuck in a thankless role as stay-at-home mom and caretaker to her judgmental mother-in-law (Chang Li
Hua). His sharp-tongued sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), weeks away from her freshman year of college at UCSD, is four years apart but a world away in his understanding.
Chris is a very familiar type of lost between friends, crushes and embarrassments, hampered by a nascent sense of shame at his own difference. His eighth-grade friends believably communicate via janky YouTube videos, slang and slurs pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with. Wang is spot-on specific with the adolescent parlance of time – the casual homophobic slur, “that’s gangstaaaa (:” on a Facebook wall, plenty of jokes about race. Chris’s friends are a diverse bunch, but all make comments on his race, well-meaning or otherwise. “You’re pretty cute, for an Asian,” says his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), in one of the film’s most quietly devastating scenes. As Chris, Izaac Wang is remarkably naturalistic and heart-piercingly vulnerable – you know that line will sting for a long, long time.
Dìdi is peppered with the easy period signifiers – a Motorola Krzr flip phone, the movie Superbad, Paramore – and also the more specific, tricky details that are hard to nail but, when done with as much curiosity and research as here, mesmerizing. I’m admittedly the target age for this, having also spent the summer of 2008 languishing between middle school and high school, nervously checking AIM and pretending to like the Mandy Moore weepie A Walk to Remember to fit in. If Chris’s initial, formative years on the internet map on to yours, then the effect of Wang’s dabbling in desktop cinema is triggering, in the literal sense of memory boxes unlocking; the shock of familiarity that is the Microsoft XP pipes screensaver, Myspace top friends and “summer 08 xD” Facebook photo albums is arresting, these throwaway things that yet once consumed so much emotional energy.
Dìdi has a deft handle on the eranonspecific teenage angst and turmoil as well, enough that one needn’t to be from the class of 2012 to relate to how Chris’s world opens up, via filming videos for a group of older teens, and crumbles around feelings of shame, inadequacy and the devastation that is being left out. The costumes, setting, computer interfaces and music are all scarily accurate to 2008, a testament to Wang’s airtight hold on this particular strange, liminal period – not just between childhood and adolescence, but between early YouTube and smartphones, Myspace and social media dominance. But its tender blend of emotions is evergreen. Dìdi’s final touching, soft note of growth – so much internalized and overcome already, so much to go – would be moving in any year.
Dìdi is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
overdose, meaning that as well as reuniting with his parents who are ghosts, Adam has been having a love affair with one too.
So, about those sex scenes …
Adam is only able to let his guard down enough start his relationship with Harry once he confronts his past and meets the ghosts of his parents – after he’s first come back from Croydon, he gets together with Harry after their discussion about the terms “gay” and “queer”.
After Adam has come out to his mum (Claire Foy) back in Croydon, he has sex for the second time with Harry, who has encouraged him to take a bath because he’s feverish. It’s never made explicit in the film, but Haigh told me that Adam starts to feel unwell after his mum mentions Aids, and in the bath he tells Harry (who has no such hangups) that for years he had been too frightened of the disease to have sex with anyone. Later on in the film, as Adam runs through the tube train tunnels looking for Harry, there are old public information posters about Aids on the walls. In order to break out of his repression and fall in love, Adam has to lay to rest his terror of catching HIV.
What happens in the club?
Shot in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in
London, one of Haigh’s old haunts, this is the only big musical moment that isn’t set to an 80s hit – the soundtrack to Adam’s ketamine trip is Blur’s woozy Death of a Party, from 1997. Haigh told me that there’s a subplot buried within All of Us Strangers in which Adam manages to break out of his loneliness and live as a happily out gay man – so perhaps this is the way he would have gone out partying in his early 20s, in the 90s. While he’s high, Adam imagines himself and Harry having the long-term relationship he has yearned for – though sadly it doesn’t seem to last, with Harry gliding past him in the club after locking eyes with someone else, before Adam wakes up screaming.
What’s going on in the diner?
All of Us Strangers takes place in a mysteriously unpopulated world – a metaphor for Adam’s isolation. He and Harry appear to be the sole residents of their tower block, and Adam and his parents are the only guests in the diner where they have their last encounter, a childhood outing Adam never got to experience. The only other person is the waitress: presumably she can’t see Adam’s mum and dad, since she wonders whether he’ll be able to finish the family meal he’s just ordered.
Adam’s mum asks him whether she and Adam’s dad died quickly after their car crash – he tells her that they did, even though we know that his mum took days to die, a white lie that I felt was Adam kindly parenting his parents, shielding them from harsh truths they didn’t need to know in a moment of mature understanding.
The line that really got to me, though, was the part when Adam’s dad (Jamie Bell) tells him that he’s proud of him, and when Adam asks why, given that he hasn’t done anything, his dad replies, “Well you’ve survived. It can’t have been easy.” Finally, his parents recognise his sadness and pain, and the effort it’s cost him to keep going, even if he doesn’t have a wife, kids, a successful career or any of the other trappings of heterosexual manhood to show for it.
And what the hell is the ending about?
In the last scene of All of Us Strangers, Adam and Harry cuddle up together on a bed. Harry asks Adam to put on a record, and without him doing so, The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood comes on – Adam was watching an old Top of the Pops performance of it from 1984 when Harry came knocking at the beginning of the film. The song contains the deeply romantic declaration “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw / Keep the vampires from your door”; in a (to him, unconscious) allusion to the lyrics, Harry had told Adam, as the older man turned him away, “there’s vampires outside my door”.
Now Adam and Harry can truly love, console, protect and care for each other, but it’s a brutally bittersweet image as it’s happening in some kind of supernatural realm, not real life. As the camera gets further and further away from the spooning lovers, it depicts them as one of a constellation of stars in a night sky, perhaps the other lonely strangers of the film’s title.
So is Adam also dead? I don’t think Haigh means us to think that he is. I think the image says that love is strong enough to smash the boundary between life and death, and that it’s our only defence against the infinite darkness that surrounds us, something Adam has come to understand after spending a lifetime running away from his own desperate need for human connection. Now, I think I may have something in my eye …
album, What Do We Do Now, Mascis has created some of his best work outside Dinosaur Jr. His gently emotive voice, halfway between a croon and a croak, carries a set of acoustic-leaning folk-rock songs that are punctuated by Mascis’s unfurling guitar solos and some pummelling percussion.
In the video for Can’t Believe We’re Here, a number of famous fans, including Idles and the comedians Fred Armisen, David Cross and Eugene Mirman all sing along in what feels like a timely tribute to four decades of Mascis’s inimitable work. “He just keeps coming out with really good songs all the time,” says My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, another alternative guitar hero. “I’ve been a fan since 1987 and have heard pretty much everything he’s ever done.” The moment that made Shields into such a fan was Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me. “It was a real ‘wow’ moment,” he says. “Like, what is this? It was dynamic, melodic, aggressive, extreme, original and unbound by dogma – going in all different directions seamlessly. Nobody else was doing anything like that.”
Prior to blowing minds in Dinosaur Jr, Mascis grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, as a “weird kid”. A music obsessive, he would build a wall of furniture around his bed to listen to records by the likes of the Beach Boys, Deep Purple and Neil Young. When punk hit town, he formed a teenage hardcore band called Deep Wound – his mum even knitted him a sweater with their name on it. Obsessed with Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party, Mascis would break eggs into his hair to try to emulate the singer’s wild crow’s nest haircut.
He formed Dinosaur – the Jr was added later due to legal action from another band called Dinosaurs – in 1984, with Lou Barlow and Patrick “Murph” Murphy. The aim was to make “ear-bleeding country” music and the volume they played at quickly got them banned from venues. This ferocious assault would later morph into a sound that blurred lines between alt-rock, grunge and a more melodic and jangly sound coming out of the college radio boom. Their influence in the world of alternative music is seismic, inspiring everyone from Radiohead to Blur, with Kurt Cobain even inviting Mascis to join a pre-fame Nirvana (he passed).
Despite Mascis’s withdrawn approach and a daily routine that mirrors a stoned teenager on school holidays (“I get up late, ride my bike and then mess around with guitar or drums”), to call him a slacker would be a gross misrepresentation. In reality, he is a prolific artist who has released more than 20 albums in various genres and guises over the years.
He says making solo albums allows him to go to places he can’t with his regular band. “With Dino, I’m writing with them in mind, so it’s limiting,” he says. “I’m thinking about the limitations of the band, but I don’t think about that with solo stuff.” If that sounds like a slight dig at his bandmates not being as elevated musicians as Mascis – who usually plays all the instruments on his solo records – then that would hardly be surprising. Despite appearing somewhat milquetoast, Mascis has been accused in the past of being controlling and overcritical. Both Barlow and Murphy have had prolonged stints outside Dinosaur Jr due to fallings out before getting back together as a threepiece in the mid-2000s.
Despite assurances from Mascis that “we’ve figured out how to deal with each other and we communicate better now”, you still get a sense of lingering tensions and unresolved frustrations. Mascis feels the band have never quite managed to lock back into the groove – both sonically and interpersonally – of 1987’s second album You’re Living All Over Me. “That was just a moment in time when things were coming together and our sound was getting more defined,” he says. “I don’t feel like we’ve surpassed that at all. We were getting along then, too. I guess mainly because Lou didn’t talk at that point so there was nothing to not get along about.”
So it makes sense that Mascis would choose to savour memories of a time of less drama, and one loaded with optimism and naivety. There’s a beautiful moment in Michael Azerrad’s book about 80s underground rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, in which Dinosaur Jr are fresh from touring with their heroes, Sonic Youth, for the first time and are so overcome with joy that both Mascis and Barlow are almost brought to tears in the tour van.
It also marked a period in which the band hit their only real milestone. “Our goal in forming was to be on SST records,” says Mascis of the indie label home to Black Flag, Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü. You’re Living All Over Me was Dinosaur Jr’s sole release on the label. “After that, everything was weird because we’d already achieved our goal. It’s like: where do you go from there? You’re just kind of floating and that’s been the rest of my career.”
Dinosaur Jr continued to have great success, artistically and commercially, throughout the 90s, so does Mascis really feel like that? “I guess,” he says – another verbal shrug – before exposing a little vulnerability. “It feels more existential now. Like, does anyone listen to albums any more? Do they have enough of my albums? Is there any point to making an album? You just do it anyway but it’s weird because you don’t know if anyone will hear it.”
Despite having a genuinely excellent new solo record, Mascis admits it can be harder to break new ground when you have four decades’ worth of music made by someone with such a distinctive style. “I wish there was an app that told you what song [of yours] you’re ripping off with your new song,” he says, before talking himself out of his new invention. “Although a lot of times ignorance is bliss and you just don’t know until someone tells you later.”
As we wrap up, it is clear that hitting the big 4-0 as a band and having fun is not of any significant interest to Mascis, but does he still feed off the raw power he can create musically? “I still get a kick out of making a racket,” he says with a flicker of positivity, before that understated dry humour seeps back in again. “I mean, I don’t have many other interests.”