The Fat Jewish, Kirill, Brittany Furlan and Paris Hilton all reflect on a lifetime of small-screen fame. Is there anything underneath the social media lifestyle? The Netflix documentary tries to find an answer.
Before the title sequence of Netflix’s new documentary The American Meme even rolls, model Emily Ratajkowski fires back at people that criticize her for posting on Instagram for the attention. “What’s wrong with attention?” she says.
The nature of the celebrities featured in the doc makes it hard to take anything they say seriously. They construct their lives and social image around what people want from them — something most “influencers” are more self-aware about than we usually give them credit for. But while we can roll our eyes at sponsored Instagram posts and how fake the job seems, these celebrities, as evidenced by The American Meme, are cunning. They know exactly what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and seemingly at what cost.
Social media personality Josh Ostrovsky — known as “ The Fat Jewish ” — is perhaps the most self-aware, and near the end of the documentary he states that he knows all this is going to end sooner or later. He’s built his own wine brand, so he has something that will outlast his social media fame, he says directly to camera. But is his confession more real than what he puts on social media day after day?
The American Meme is a fascinating documentary that you really can’t experience just on Netflix. Much like how the lives of the celebrities within revolve around every profile they have — Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, you name it — the film delivers the impulse to check up on Paris Hilton, Brittany Furlan, Josh Ostrovsky, Kirill Bichutsky and everyone else whose lives are touched upon, to check if their transparent personas match up to what we see online.
