The pivotal scene in Kristoffer Borgli’s black comedy, “Sick of Myself,” is one that, in any other film, would be a frightening harbinger of what’s to come. We see Signe, a fashionable young barista from Oslo (played by Kristine Kujath Thorp), making a coffee during her shift. She glances down at her arm and notices a grizzly rash beginning to crawl up the inside of her elbow, as if she has been infected by the Cordyceps-ravaged zombies from “The Last of Us.” But, in this satire of tech-addled millennial and Zoomer culture, the rash is auspicious, a sign of triumph. The unusual skin condition will be Signe’s ticket to a kind of micro-celebrity that she’s been desperately striving for; she has inflicted the rash upon herself. Borgli has created in Signe a stand-in for a generation who will literally do anything, to the point of self-mutilation, to achieve notoriety.
Signe’s quest for attention has been prompted by her live-in boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther), a fine artist who has recently gained an elevated status. He is showing at prestigious galleries, receiving interest from major institutions, and being featured on the cover of magazines. He’s reached a level of niche acclaim that Signe shamelessly desires, and Thomas compounds her insecurities by neglecting her as he becomes increasingly ensnared in the trappings of his career. One day, despondent and deprived of validation, Signe reads a tabloid report about a prescription drug with a sedative effect that also causes a grotesque skin condition. When she gets ahold of the black-market medication, she starts taking huge quantities in secret, until the symptoms set in and the skin condition begins to ravage her upper body. Though Signe’s antics, in the not too distant past, would have been considered a cut-and-dried case of Munchausen syndrome, they can now be understood as a response to the modern pressure to brand oneself.
Is victimhood truly a shortcut to status for the young and terminally online, as all the hysterical pundits would like us to believe? In Borgli’s absurdist universe, the answer is unequivocally yes. Once Signe’s face has been engulfed by her self-inflicted ailment, she unlocks a new and thrilling portal to notoriety. She spins the disease into a sob story that lands her cover placement on a Norwegian news publication. (Signe’s path to fame is full of horrifying and sincerely hilarious gags, including a scene in which she taunts and smacks a dog that’s leashed on the street, trying to lure the animal into maiming her.) Every cynical notion we have about the opportunism and self-involvement of millennials and Zoomers is reinforced in Signe’s upward trajectory. Once she’s discharged from the hospital, she signs with a fledgling modelling agency that preys on disabled women who could be cast in “inclusive” branding campaigns. When she lands a spot in a ludicrous advertisement for an oversized T-shirt company called Regardless, she arrives at the set almost too injured to participate. The quizzical, panicked looks on the photographers’ and stylists’ faces are well worth the horror of witnessing Signe spurt blood from her head.
Satirizing the attention-seeking culture wrought by social media is almost as difficult as impersonating Donald Trump: the source material is already so cartoonish and despicable that most attempts to mock it seem obvious to the point of being dull. Perhaps no screenwriter could have imagined a character as controversial as Jameela Jamil, the British actress who’s been vocal about her various afflictions, which have included shellfish allergies, celiac disease, mercury poisoning, partial deafness, and a history of run-ins with bees. And perhaps no performance artist could have staged a hoax as elaborate and culturally radioactive as Jussie Smollett’s. But Borgli, as a storyteller, comes pretty close with Signe. She’s a character who calls to mind the cast of “Search Party,” a show in which a group of aimless and self-involved millennials go looking for a missing classmate in an attempt to find meaning in their own lives. (Their “missing” classmate, it turns out, is just taking a breather after a bad breakup.)
Like the creators of “Search Party,” Borgli is not trying to tiptoe around modern narcissism or layer it with nuance—he’s pouring gasoline on it. If you appreciated the blunt, indelicate social commentary of a movie such as the Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness”—which features wealthy people vomiting and soiling themselves on a yacht for fifteen minutes—you will likewise enjoy the overblown slapstick energy of “Sick of Myself.” (I did.) There are no ethical dilemmas to be contemplated or argued over, only the pleasure and clarity of the raw contempt that we’re encouraged to feel toward Signe. It’s a pleasure similar to the kind evoked by an outrageous news story that confirms all of our worst suspicions about something we despise.
And yet, in spite of the reprehensible motivations that drive Signe throughout the movie, Borgli infuses the film with a dimension that asks us to sympathize with her. As she forges her path of fame and destruction, the film features sequences in which Signe fantasizes about the possibilities that her illness could bring her. She giddily imagines her own funeral, and envisions the crowd forming outside of an event held for the memoir that she eventually hopes to write about her disease. Most of us would never dare execute the disturbing plans that Signe hatches, but few among us are immune from fantasizing about the adulation we’ll receive for work that we have not even begun to do.
Signe also earns our affections in contrast to Thomas, the boyfriend, who is contemptible in his own right, despite not suffering the same warped fantasies as she does. Shoplifting is part of his art practice; he casually thefts rare pieces of high-design furniture to incorporate into his work. When Signe is being photographed for her newspaper piece in their shared apartment, Thomas voices concern that the shoot will look too similar to one that he recently did for a magazine. His arrogance, though derived from actual artistic accomplishment, rivals Signe’s chronic lies and delusions of grandeur. He is so distracted by his rising stardom that he is barely concerned about her illness. When they have sex, Signe begs for Thomas to say that he’s worried about her, which, to her, is such an exotic sentence that it’s a form of dirty talk. It’s enough to make you root for Signe in the face of Thomas’s self-importance, if only you hadn’t spent so much of the film wondering why she’s with him in the first place.
An act of storytelling provocation would have been to make Signe victorious by way of self-realized victimhood. But, from the earliest moments of the film, there is never a question of whether the other shoe will drop. Borgli detests what this character represents so fiercely that he relishes the chance to punish her spectacularly. Self-styled victimhood might earn her a modelling contract and attention from the press, but her more levelheaded peers never seem to be fooled by the bit. At parties, brunches, and group therapy, Signe constantly draws conversations back to her own story, barely registering the eye rolls and skeptical or bored glances that she elicits from the very people whom she is trying to impress. Her illness continues to disfigure her, and by the end of the film she is unrecognizable. She is forced to come clean to the journalist friend who brokered her cover story, who reacts with appropriate disgust rather than the empathy that Signe had allowed herself to fantasize about.
The only solace Signe can find is in the walls of a holistic healing center filled with people recovering from addiction or suffering from invisible chronic illnesses. Thomas, meanwhile, has been arrested and imprisoned for theft, and in his diminished and distant state Signe finds that her perverted love for him has deepened. Her path of self-destruction is complete, and her hopes of a book deal have been dashed. Perhaps the cruellest aspect of her fate is that she doesn’t even have the consolation of knowing that her story would have made for a pretty good movie. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
