The Second Screen: A Frolick in the Fantasy of Being Someone

Mojean Aria’s The Second Screen, co-written with Louis Hunter, is a 21-minute character study of a man whose life begins to lose its rigorous demarcations. Like an ill-fated leak, drip shifts into deluge and leaves the audience staring into the endless maw of modern pursuit of happiness.

It is a refreshingly fucked up film. Hunter stars as Charlie, an unemployed man supported by his mother (Susie Porter). He poses as a successful model online to have exclusively online dalliances with a variety of young women so interchangeable to Charlie that they rarely have a face to distinguish them, only an inconspicuous change of username on his screen. Using some very skilled editing, the film makes time overlap so that characterising exposition overlaps. You get to know this guy many sides at once, a kind of cubist style laying out contemporary neuroticism, narcissism, and anhedonia rolled into a restless, complex, yet impressively cohesive idea. Charlie is addicted to attention, and to ensure the supply he has dedicated himself to himself. He adores his fascism. Precise grooming, a cocktail of pills, arduous exercise. An empty apartment. His living space only has a utilitarian function, a green room between Charlie’s interactions with women.

In his real life, Charlie is markedly different. Quieter, pensive, a little sad, but not altogether devoid of a self-absorption. He treads a fine balance of subservience and sweetness with Mamushka, a woman dedicated to the cultivation of beautiful things. And Charlie is among the many showy flowers in his mother’s prized garden. Really, he is the rudbeckia. Without attention he too becomes droopy and sad. Look at his carefully styled hair, the artfully stray lock, and nothing about this man looks independent of the performance. And Hunter has the character in his grip. All expressions and gestures say something about this guy.

Within the confines of his second screen, Charlie performs a show of vulnerability and hotness, whose second act launches him into roleplaying Daddy. He needs the world to give him fundamental existence. Dignity. Not a man unemployed, but the zenith of patriarchal fantasy. Virile. In control. In demand. To username after username, he hands over the plate on which they may serve him a full meal of his fantasy. So self-satisfied is the song and dance, so sturdy this circus tent of magic attractions, that it is the nurturing Mamushka who appears strange and out of place even before she has the chance to affix any substance to those misgivings.

But as Charlie turns thirty-five, the fantasy unexpectedly begins to curdle. The film cleaves in striking imagery, like something out of 70s horror, to mark the points of fracture. The sleekness stumbles. The social media grain filter clashes with the real thing. True agony breaks through from behind the facade of sensitiveness.

The Second Screen is a reward to watch, and a revelatory illustration. It is a film you want many passes over to notice all the details and savour the pleasure of the already familiar while the film has its protagonist grapple with a terrible possibility: What if Charlie becomes nothing?

Watch The Second Screen Short Film Trailer