Director: Andrew Nolan
Writer: Mark Hennigan
Cast: Stevie Martin, Simon Ashe-Browne
Running time: 7mins
This Conversation Has Been Deleted will undoubtedly play well in film festivals across Europe – and perhaps in the US. Director Andrew Nolan marshals his team well, ensuring the piece is well-paced and professionally edited, with an inoffensive (slightly bland) jazz score, improvised by James Tebbitt, David Anthony Curley, and Dylan Lynch to complement visual gags. Meanwhile its script speaks to a fallen truism, mourned by liberals-with-a-small-‘l’ (and that represents a lot of festival programmers). But its frustrated centrism also leaves it feeling like an anachronism; a cultural trope which has seen its moment long since pass, leaving a missed opportunity to explore that more meaningfully.
The silent skit follows two nameless figures – a man (Simon Ashe-Browne) and a woman (Stevie Martin), both scrolling through the internet on their smartphones – as they engage in an anonymised mud-slinging match in the comment-section of a moderate political publication. The article is a tiresome strawman – obviously constructed as clickbait to draw out precisely this kind of dialogue – which argues that the many crimes committed by men throughout history are based in genetics.
Amid the frustrations of middle-age (he has just been fretting over his receding hairline – a symbol of his fading youth and perceived masculine virility – in the bathroom mirror) the man is caught hook, line and sinker by the bad faith article. He is so incensed that he publicises his displeasure from the toilet – angrily tapping out a response with his pants around his ankles. The woman, who is reading on her phone, in bed, doesn’t seem especially moved by the piece – but what snags her is the man’s response in the comment section.
Martin and Ashe-Browne are both excellent at miming their disdain – and even though I would love to have seen them given something more to do in terms of human interaction later in the film, their range between sadness, empathy and rage between the digital and physical realms is excellent.
In that digital realm, the pair soon find themselves hanging on each other’s every word, with the conversation soon descending to insults and threats of violence. Midway through, that world converges with the physical. The woman goes to sleep on her side of the bed – and you can guess who soon emerges from the en suite to join her. The pair sense each other’s frustration, while unknowingly contributing to it – offering reassuring bodily contact, in between furious bouts of their own typing. Writer Mark Hennigan’s script feels overtly pleased with this joke, playing off two people of differing views as foolish, because the assumption is that of course, for all their venomous online rhetoric, sooner or later, they will have to reconcile in the real world.
It is a punchline designed for a Have I Got News for You era of politics – where anyone falling outside the general accepted centre of liberal-conservative compromise becomes a swivel-eyed lunatic, and a justifiable target for ridicule. But that’s a world which simply doesn’t exist anymore – contrary to what the increasingly aloof Ian Hislop and Paul Merton might believe. The film’s suggestion that there might be a way for this couple to communicate their way out of their dispute is possibly the most laughable part of this whole comedy.
Imagine you felt you knew someone for years, only to suddenly discover they were hiding their egregiously sexist opinions from you. Imagine you suddenly found out the person who threatened to mutilate you with a knife for those egregiously sexist opinions was actually your wife. I am not saying it’s impossible to earn back trust lost as the result of a lie, or callous or violent comments. But what cannot ever be revived, is the relationship as it was before this conversation. Someone is going to have to change – and This Conversation Has Been Deleted bails on this matter.
Certainly, coming in late and getting out early is a staple practice in short movies. But thematically it is a problem when the meat of the action alludes to such a heated subject without bothering to depict a consequence (this ‘tiff’ doesn’t involve two equally wrong sides bickering in a bubble – it shows a man repeatedly goading a woman to violence, in a world where he increasingly has access to rights she does not, while probably voting for political candidates who now consider her bodily autonomy as up for discussion).
And practically, it is also a problem, because acknowledging and discussing any of those matters wouldn’t just be more interesting when examining the social attitudes the film purports to centre on. It would also offer up space for a much funnier discussion to cap your comedy film with. As it is, we get the meekest, mildest, blandest version of what this film could have been; delivered competently, but without incident or intrigue.
It taps into that same space as bemoaning how nobody can live in the moment, because of their smartphones; ignoring the more complex opportunities to discuss how society has changed beyond a derivative sense of nostalgia. In this case, it panders to “We used to be able to disagree about things” – a popular fable that has become the fading whimper of a dying ideological moment. That vaguery around just who ‘We’ are is load-bearing. It’s supposed to convey commonality that stretches far beyond the ‘middle class’ households comfortable enough to try and sweep society’s systemic contradictions under the carpet.
‘We’ could simply agree to disagree on whether or not we ought to do something about global warming, because its material impacts were decades in the future. ‘We’ could bury the hatchet after an hour of heated dinner-table discussion about whether people living in particular places overseas should or shouldn’t have human rights, because at the end of the day this was an abstract discussion that didn’t directly impact life in Europe or North America. ‘We’ might have a blow-up about the slashing and burning of the social safety net – but ultimately could move on with the rest of the day because that’s only for poor people.
All these birds have since come home to roost, though. The heathland is on fire because we agreed to disagree on upsetting oil and gas markets. The mass migration necessitated by ‘just getting on’ with life amid imperialist interventions throughout the developing world, has left boatloads of desperate refugees looking to escape to safety, or die trying. And former members of the ‘middle class’ who found their mortgages were built on sand amid a historical financial collapse suddenly find themselves unable to access public services that their support for low-tax, small state policies helped to gut.
Nothing is really different in terms of the contradictions, or forms of exploitation at the heart of things. What has changed, and the reason ‘We’ can no longer treat these questions as simple differences of opinion, is because they are approaching (or have already reached) a tipping point – where either the systems perpetuating the problem are crumbling, and incapable of offering the incentives for a once sizeable portion of working class people to simply look the other way.
Public discourse has inescapably polarised because of this. Instinctively, the people who once thrived in the time ‘We’ could agree to disagree, are desperate to put the toothpaste back in the tube. To bring the world back to (for them) a time of perceived security and certainty. But middle-of-the-road humour is unlikely to do that – not least because it is blind to a key question, at the heart of how ‘We’ got here – the era of Trump, Brexit, transphobia, migrant death-camps, and resurgent, globalised fascism. Who really benefits from ‘agreeing to disagree’ with someone who fundamentally sees other people as inferior and expendable?
In priming us to laugh at this series of misunderstandings, This Conversation Has Been Deleted seems to assume that we are all engaged in its attempts to find a world that’s been and gone. But in a moment where there is still plentiful content of this kind – Have I Got News for You, The Rest is Politics and many more linger on – a production looking beyond that conceit might make more of a splash. It would certainly have offered up more opportunities for comedy than the stale laughs served up here.
