Overdosing on Reality

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Timoner, a “Quiet” resident (or captive?) herself, sifts through thousands of hours of footage to portray Harris’ Manhattan hotel and apartment as sites of futuristic depravity, equally awesome and apocalyptic. With its rows of bunk-bed cubicles strung together with monitors and cameras, its 80-foot-long banquet table and wide-open communal showers, “Quiet” is a disturbingly believable metaphor for the up-all-night Internet. When his sizable guest list runs for cover in the wee hours of the new millennium, Harris endeavors to throw a more intimate party and succeeds, particularly when, at the bitter end of WeLiveinPublic.com, he’s all alone.

Much as We Live in Public functions as an abbreviated history of the Internet, the film is also a laser-sharp biography of a man who seems to have been bred from infancy to become the Warhol of the web. The young Josh Harris lived in private, taught by his mom to “fend for yourself” in the kitchen and breastfed on the boob tube. Gilligan, the Skipper, and Lovey were Harris’ real family. Thus Timoner’s portrait of the webmaster as weirdo gets us thinking along chicken-and-egg lines: Does the Internet damage humanity, or does it mainly obsess those who are already damaged?

Timoner, who Twitters from the festivals where We Live in Public has been playing, believes the virtual world has begun to dominate the real one—inevitably, but not necessarily for the better.

“It’s a very human instinct to not want to be alone,” the documentarian recently told blogger Melissa Tuckman. “It goes a step further with fame: We see fame and celebrity as being happy and never being alone. Now we put ourselves out there on the Internet to try to get attention.”

We live in public, yes. But if we identify with Josh Harris, it’s the kind of recognition that comes with a shudder. Scarier than any monster movie, We Live in Public might even send some of us offline. For 15 minutes.

We Live in Public is awaiting U.S. distribution. A fall release is planned.

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