A Specter is Haunting Social Media: Seizing the Means of Distribution with Leech (2024)

“Can I get a shot of the most gothic shit you have?”

Is Leech a movie about seizing the means of production (or at least distribution)? A rallying cry for the gig workers and content creators of the modern-day proletariat? Probably not, but it certainly has something to say about everything from being Extremely Online to how labor derives its value to the toxicity that is pumped into all our hearts with the rhythm of social media.

From director David Dawson (Flesh Games), Leech is a two-man show starring Jordan Acosta and Mike Miller, and I saw it as part of the Unnamed Footage Festival’s 24-hour online programming, which is perhaps an ideal way to watch it, as Leech is, in essence, a screenlife movie, with the majority of its running time made up of simulated live streams performed by a figure calling himself the Dark Lord of Love’s Park (Acosta).

Before things get underway, though, it opens with a definition of a word that was new to me, prior to sitting down to watch this film. In case you are also unfamiliar with the idea of a “lolcow,” the explanation provided by Leech is direct and succinct enough that you will understand it immediately. This definition provided in Reddit is pretty funny, too, though: “A lolcow is a cow you milk for lols.” Essentially, it’s an online personality who can be easily goaded or exploited into doing ridiculous, eccentric, and even self-destructive things, all for the purposes of laughing at them.

As with Flesh Games, this could easily be a movie without a traditional conflict. For much of its running time, we are simply watching the day-to-day life (and real-time decay) of the Dark Lord of Love’s Park. The only other character is Mike from Content Corner, a fellow content creator (or, perhaps more accurately, content curator) who calls Dark Lord “the next Michael Jordan of lolcows.”

A good lolcow, in Mike’s estimation, must possess a number of specific qualities, including an unshakable belief in their own (nonexistent) talents and an almost megalomaniacally outsized idea of their own significance. The Dark Lord, of course, exemplifies all of the above, and his hubris seems like it will be his undoing.

The Dark Lord lives in a dingy apartment (the “Lord’s Layer,” according to a whiteboard sign in the background) and seems to survive primarily from the donations of his followers, who are usually putting up money to get him to do something ridiculous or harmful.

Before the title even rolls, we see him egged into eating a can of cat food. We see him get (and burn, after some false starts) an eviction notice. Watch him break his guitar (which he calls his “ax”), then go to Guitar Center to find that he can’t afford to either repair it or buy another. See him purchase a knife at a convenience store, and then demonstrate the use of said knife on an orange. “Is there anything harder to cut than an orange?” he asks into the camera. “You bet there is. A lemon.”

As was the case in Flesh Games, the best special effect that Leech could possibly muster comes in the form of its actors. There, Mike Miller was the star of the show, but here it’s Acosta who commands the screen as the Dark Lord, demonstrating the same genuine charisma and absolute lack of self-consciousness that is necessary to make this character both come to life and achieve the arc that the movie has planned for him.

You see, for Leech to work, the Dark Lord has to be someone pathetic, laughable, narcissistic, and unlikeable. He must be someone that you will mock, and not feel bad for mocking. Someone that you can believe people would pay money to watch eat cat food or a dead rat. And yet, he also has to have an actual inner life. There has to come a point when he never becomes any less ridiculous, and yet you realize that this is a real person who has been reduced to this.

Is that moment when he says, “I’m doing this for America, at this point,” just before he eats a dead rat that he found in the woods and named Pete? Maybe not.

To the extent that Leech has a traditional plot, it comes in the form of the rivalry between the Dark Lord of Love’s Park and Mike from Content Corner. Initially, Mike sets out to milk the lolcow that he has found, sharing the Dark Lord’s streams with his followers. To Mike’s thinking, he is doing Dark Lord a favor – increasing his audience share considerably. To the Dark Lord, however, Mike is simply stealing his “work” and profiting on it.

As was the case with Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite from 2019, the title of Leech seems, at first glance, more simplistic than it is. Even Dark Lord’s own followers call him a leech, arguing (not inaccurately) that he lives off the largesse of their donations. And yet, from the Dark Lord’s perspective, the leech is Mike, who doesn’t actually create content, but simply exploits it for his fans. Call him the ownership class of the microcosmic marketplace that is internet influencer culture.

Is that putting an awful lot of thematic weight on what is ultimately a microbudget movie about a lolcow? I don’t think so. While Leech may not be as overly didactic as many modern mainstream horror movies, the questions it asks are no less resonant. That it manages to ask them in a way that is so consistently funny and entertaining is icing on the cake.