Director: Patrick C. Collins
Writer: Patrick C. Collins
Cast: Mirja Poelstra, Zuheimi Serevino, Nicholas Stankevich, Patrick C. Collins
Running time: 11mins
Over the last decade, the rise of the social media has given rise to a very particular kind of grift. The user-generated content of the modern internet suddenly made video-based diaries a viable form of work for a portion of young people. The more interactions their content garnered, and the more followers they collected, the more they could ask corporate partners for in sponsorship fees.
There have been too many specific negative consequences of this to go into in detail. But two are relevant to this review. First, like the free press before it, this led to the coopting of much of the initially alternative space of user generated content into mainstream social-political norms. Sponsors favour people who don’t rock the boat – so the content that makes the best income tends to be the stuff that re-confirms the ideological assumptions held by those who have the most money and power in society. At the same time, there has been a boom in the people chasing the life-style, imbibing those assumptions and abandoning whoever they were in reality to conform to whatever they think is needed to succeed as an ‘influencer’. And the majority of that is faking it, whether or not you make it.
Patrick C. Collins’ short drama Keeping Up follows two people who are both ensnared in the trappings of this new industry to different extents. First and most obviously, is Debra (Mirja Poelstra), a working mother doing her best to thanklessly juggle the expectations of her remote work, with the demands of caring for a toddler and a baby in Amsterdam.
Rushing between kindergarten and a Zoom meeting, Debra is chastised for being late to her arsehole boss (the perfectly-cast Nicholas Stankevich) and his excruciating but apparently essential anecdotes about his grandmother’s drinking habits. She also has to try and contribute to the meeting at later points while changing the diaper of a screaming baby – which her boss does not understand. Another man on the call then recycles her comment as his own to win praise – but there is no time to contest it, because Debra has to rush back to nursery to pick up her daughter.
As the situation continues to push her to the limit, with both children beginning to scream incessantly while Debra struggles to work at her desk, her husband arrives home. He picks up the two kids and bounces them around playfully, and soon the crying hushes – which is apparently Debra’s cue to get out of the door, and pick up some food for dinner.
All the while, Debra has been bombarded by video updates from ‘Duncan’s Mom’ (Zuheimi Serevino) – an aggressively positive social media influencer, whose channel revolves on being a ‘Super Mommy’. Debra is run ragged in her life, seemingly with no support (or much understanding) from any of the men present in it. And while the polished and relentlessly happy presence of Duncan’s Mom keeps displaying just how much vomit-inducing love she has for her “hubby and kiddo”, and all the things she can do without so much as a hair slipping out of place, Debra feels like she is something of a failure.
On her trip to the shops, however, Debra discovers that all is not what it seems with the ‘Super Mommy’ she has been gawping at in awe on Instagram. As you might have guessed, there’s much less idyllic about Duncan’s Mom’s life than her content would lead you to believe, and like so many others, she is very much faking it until she makes it. The wisdom Collins’ script is set on imparting, then, is not to believe everything you see online. And that’s fine. To an extent.
I would contend most people are to some extent aware that ‘perfect family content’ is a ridiculous facade. Life with children is inescapably messy, and the pretence that any parent is eternally sunny, made-up, and energised, is pure fantasy. But considering the other aspects of Debra’s life which we have been party to, it’s a bit of an underwhelming conclusion.
Possibly Collins is a victim of his own success here. He has painted too authentic a picture of the contemptuous position of privilege which men occupy in society. They can domineer and belittle women in the workspace, take credit for their efforts, and monetise them without any empathy. And at the same time, they can utterly take for granted the unpaid labour women have traditionally been foisted with in the home space, rearing the children, cooking and cleaning for when their oblivious husband finally saunters through the door to act like the hero.
In this scenario, there is a clear need to address the treatment of Debra by her employer and her husband – both exploiting her energy and taking it entirely for granted. But when it feels the story might be building momentum for a confrontation on those fronts – informed by the fact even the most idealised woman in her life isn’t just naturally able to ‘do it all’ on her own – it stops short. The message becomes “Hey, it’s OK to struggle”, not “Hang on a second, why is anyone struggling like this in the first place?”
The film is in dire need of a scene in which Debra takes her work colleagues for task for their lack of support at a time when Dutch law suggests she could probably be on maternity leave anyway (even if she is working remotely for a Draconian US firm). And it also is crying out for some kind of acknowledgement that her husband could do more to help her than bumbling into the room after she’s been working and taking care of two young children all day, and then expecting her to fetch and cook dinner while he spends ‘quality time’ with the kids.
As it is, everything is just too neat, too timid. The film shies away from asking the most interesting questions at its disposal, and ultimately rocks the boat less than the social media influencers it has in its sights. Considering it offers so little in terms of its uninspired camera work and pedestrian montage-based depictions of daily life, that’s not enough to keep us from scrolling on to find more compelling viewing in our bottomless feed.
Collins’ script is a little too good at being annoying, and at setting up conflicts the audience will expect to be resolved, which aren’t. At the same time, his story lacks the initiative to ask the bigger questions that could mark this production out as a cut above other similar content.