“Mainstream” Review: Joker Takes On Social Media In The World of “Black Mirror”
Alongside Maya Hawke, Andrew Garfield does his best Joker impression in Gia Coppola’s Black Mirror-esque critique of social media.
It’s a cliché nowadays to say that we’re all slaves to our phones and social media, but it’s an analogy worth keeping in mind when thinking about Mainstream. Even more so, the words of self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, who wrote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In the context of social media, this is to say that you cannot defeat the evils of social media using social media. That, however, doesn’t stop Link, one of the protagonists of Mainstream, from trying to do just that.
Link is an odd guy. When our main protagonist, Frankie, played by Maya Hawke, first meets Link, he’s wearing a rat costume. The second time they meet, he’s wearing a cockroach costume. “If you’re in a costume, it’s easier to spot the other freaks”, Link later tells Frankie. This is a guy with a specific view of the world, and he doesn’t have a phone, so you can probably guess what that view is like.
