Movie Review: Wrinkles the Clown

Wrinkles the Clown *** / *****

Directed by: Michael Beach Nichols.

 

The slim 75-minute documentary Wrinkles the Clown tries to pull back the mask a little on the creepy Florida clown who became an internet sensation back in 2014 – and was the start of those creepy clown sightings that seem to become an obsession in America in the years that follow. Perhaps you aren’t familiar with Wrinkles himself – but you undoubtedly heard about those creepy clowns who were everywhere. Well Wrinkles is based in South Florida (of course, it’s Florida) and the first time he was ever seen was in YouTube video, purported to be CCTV, that showed him climbing out from under a trundle bed of a sleeping little girl – and then turning off the camera, so who knows what happened next? He became an internet fixture – stickers with his picture and phone number – were stuck all over the place, and apparently word got around that Wrinkles could be hired by parents to scare misbehaving children. We hear some of those phone calls – Wrinkles gets hundreds per day – and meet some of those children, who have been threatened with Wrinkles. Does it work? Is it child abuse? You decide.

 

For the first half of the movie, we get the backstory of what happened – how Wrinkles became famous – and follow around the retiree who is the real Wrinkles. He wears a mask that is deliberately made to be a creepy clown mask – the man playing Wrinkles describes it as Michael Myers meets a clown. Wrinkles doesn’t want his face shown – he doesn’t want people to know who he really is. He gets enough grief on the phone, he doesn’t want it in real life as well. And the children we meet in the film really do seem terrified – both the ones who simply get threatened with a phone call to Wrinkles, and those who discovered him online,

 

But about half way through the film, the film twists itself, to reveal perhaps its true intentions – and let us in one the joke as it were. The question about whether or not calling Wrinkles to scare your kids – terrifying them in essence – is child abuse or not is pretty much dropped at that point, and the film becomes a kind of story of the internet age. The kids who got to know Wrinkles online really were scared of him – but not everyone is. There is an entire subculture around calling Wrinkles phone number to scare yourself and your friends (not unlike saying Bloody Mary into the mirror three times) – and some of those kids who were at first terrified of Wrinkles, end up tapping into their own creativity – funneling that fear into their own videos that show some skill. Is Wrinkles any different than say Slenderman? Then again, as we know, there is a dark side of Slenderman that has given way to real world violence – that the film never really addresses.

 

That is part of the problem with Wrinkles the Clown – the documentary. It is a rather slim film, and is at least somewhat afraid of getting things too messy. It seemingly wants to capitalize on the notoriety of Wrinkles – and come out in the same fall of It: Chapters II and Joker – but not really deal with all the issues it raises. So it touches on a lot – even including poor Funky the Clown, a birthday party clown in the classical mode, who has watched as his business has dried up because so many kids are scared of clowns now. There is probably something more substantive here – somewhere- but the filmmakers don’t seem to really want to pursue it. Still, on the surface level, the film is certainly interesting.

Movie Review: Welcome to Leith

Welcome to Leith
Directed by: Michael Beach Nichols, Christopher K. Walker.

It was impossible for me not to think of recent events while watching the documentary, Welcome to Leith. There are currently a group of nonjobs occupying a government building in Oregon to protest government interference in their lives – which prompted Trevor Noah last week to say that the government should just let them stay – that way, all the nutjobs are in one place, and everyone knows where they are. That is kind of what White Supremacist Craig Cobb wanted to do in Leith, North Dakota when he started buying up a lot of property, and giving it to his white supremacist friends. His goal seems to have been to create a white utopia, where they could dominate local politics, and live precisely the way they want to. I also couldn’t help but think of poor Tamir Rice – the young boy gunned down by Cleveland police for the crime of having a realistic looking toy gun. There is a moment where the police confront Cobb, and one of his cohorts, who have real guns, and yet somehow no one gets shot.

Welcome to Leith is a fascinating documentary that has access to Cobb, and his friends, as well as the other locals in Leith – who understandably do not want their town to turn into the white utopia of Cobb’s dreams – and do everything possible to ensure it doesn’t happen. The filmmakers don’t really judge any of the characters in the film – instead it gives everyone enough rope to hang themselves with – presenting their words without comment, and letting the audience sort it all out. It raises interesting questions about intolerance, to be sure, but also about freedom of speech, and how far we are willing to go to accommodate that. As hateful as Cobb and his people are, for the most part, all they really do is talk. What they say is despicable – but do they have the right to say it? Do the residents of Leith have to put up with it? They design rules specifically targeting Cobb and his kind – which if they targeted minorities, would be despicable in itself – but since it’s aimed at the despicable, does that make it okay?

Cobb, of course, makes it easy to hate him. He has no boundaries, will say anything, will mock the murdered daughter of one of his enemies, and post the personal details of people he does not like online – something that may or may not have led to others committing murder. He crosses the line when he grabs that gun, and starts patrolling town, uttering threats, and scaring people. That, no one has to put up with, and of course, they do not – and he’s soon arrested (which he is used to). If he hadn’t done that though, what would the appropriate response to him be?

 
Welcome to Leith doesn’t pretend to have the answers to these questions – it simply sits back and asks them. There probably is no answer. Freedom of Speech means nothing without the freedom to offend – and Cobb and his kind is nothing if not offensive. What they stand for is despicable. But they have the right to say it, don’t they? But others have the right to be offended by that as well – and to criticize him. But just how far can you go? This is a question with no definitive answer- but it’s an important question to ponder.