A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America

TFW No GF is a portrait of young men who are facing a future with no long-term economic opportunity and little in the way of meaningful democratic engagement or collective civic life. In particular, Moyer’s exploration of the American landscape draws our attention to the effects of the 2007–8 housing-market collapse and the subsequent austerity politics that so devastated public-sector institutions like education. As Kantbot puts it:

People used to graduate and go get a job, and that used to work pretty well for them. But now that’s impossible, you have no experience in anything, you’re from a small-town background and you don’t have any connections, so you end up living back at home, and your parents are telling you to apply to McDonald’s or something because it’s better than you staying at home.

One of the film’s best shots is a lingering view of military vehicles being carried across the Texas desert on a freight train — overlaid with Kyle’s musings about the fact that his aging parents own neither their house nor their car, and his own limited economic options. The sequence plays like a perfectly hammed-up version of Marilyn Manson’s tirade in Bowling for Columbine, where Manson, backstage at a show, clad in makeup and platform boots, calmly suggests that goth music may have little influence on the action of school shooters when compared to the pervasiveness of reactionary American jingoism.

Manson stood up for teen goths in the face of mainstream media representation that wanted to demonize them. In a similar move, Moyer wants to challenge the idea that incels are nothing more than a violent threat to society. Moyer is careful not to simply diagnose the men as part of a “loneliness epidemic” — the cohort of incels tells us about friends who have died from overdoses and suicide, about dropping out of school and moving back in with their parents. To its detriment, the film has a tendency to leave out the crueler elements of inceldom. Nonetheless, what Moyer is saying is worth listening to: the incel story is, at least in part, about the breakdown of institutions and a broader loss of meaning.