Out in Force

Lol, and here I thought I had a narcissistic disorder. From the perspective of a hopeless situation of the object under examination, it resembles Daniel's World, where instead of a pedophile, there's Kamil Fila (*zing!*). It is a superbly shot and edited documentary that sometimes falls into the trap of providing us with some temporal checkpoints, even though it could have sufficed with a fluid narration throughout, as no development occurs here. I can totally empathize with Mareček and his disappointment that the thwarted jealous idiot from the gym didn't end up strangling his ex from his unsuccessful love, which would have made his career. In the case of the documentary's themes, I cannot be completely objective because for many years I strongly defended Fila as our only representative of mainstream criticism who shows high empathy towards films and is capable of contextualizing them in historical and current contexts, using a language that can make all this accessible even to an average Joe. This is despite several sources warning me that he is primarily a sociopath, whose critical abilities and knowledge are legally crushed, and empathy isn't really his strong suit. Even though I wasn't properly warned by red flags such as him strolling around the city in sweat shorts. When he left Respekt for his own blog, it was the first step of his decline for me because it showed how necessary it is for some kind of editorial supervision and spatial limitation to stand above, even though capable, writers. Not to mention that engaging in criticism behind a paywall is generally wrong if one tries to pretend to care about the accessibility of culture and social justice. As more feminist themes started to overshadow the film-related ones in his work, his whole mission must have seemed suspicious to anyone who remembered his misogynistic comments from a decade ago. So, this documentary didn't shock me anymore; it seemed like a logical development of the protagonist. The problem, however, is that Fila, true to his narcissistic disorder, owned it, and his surroundings jumped on this bandwagon. He probably had no other choice, as it applauded its patriarchally arrogant musclehead to prove that being pumped with testosterone and a feminist cannot be permanently opposed. This paradox culminates when Fila tries to pick up his fangirl a few minutes after receiving the Genderman award, resembling Jesse Pinkman selling meth at drug rehabilitation facilities. Following that, he attended screenings of the Strength film series to be available for discussions, where under the guise of a self-reflective penitent, he builds his monument as a conflicting hero, with whom he so eagerly identifies in films, is a monumental failure of the environment and values he represents (but what to expect from an environment where lectures are introduced by slam poetry). As an added value, the documentary aptly describes the absurdity of the therapeutic environment nowadays, where all this openness and self-description of personal states ultimately only serves to reinforce the narcissism of bourgeois boys from secure families. In any case, for the impatient, there is also a shortened version of the documentary. (04/06/2022) (less) (more)