There is a habitual formalization which occurs to every medium over time, a tail end of optimized delivery demanding to be disrupted by reactionary methodology and emergent technology. These periods of disruption and adaptation occur rhythmically throughout the lifespan of every creative medium, such is the cycle of art and the constant evolution of creativity.
The medium of film has long been overdue for such a disruption. When faced with the advent of internet culture and the overwhelming shift into a decentralized form of content consumption, the natural response of cinematic vanguards seems to be a defiant adherence to established form. Occasionally, there are eclectic creators who have eked out some established credibility in the industry while retaining an appetite for novel heterodoxical approach. Such is the case for Harmony Korine.
Harmony Korine's upcoming film Baby Invasion, slated for streaming debut Friday, was leaked online this week. Apparently, the full film was posted on YouTube and a variety of clips were leaked on Twitter simultaneously, with prompt takedowns occurring shortly thereafter.
The narrative of this leak seems suspect, as several of these clips in near perfect contiguous sequence were posted by various art adjacent influencers, surviving the takedowns and remaining quote-tweeted in chronological order by EDGLRD, Korine's studio which produced Baby Invasion. Regardless of whether the leak was a marketing stunt, it provides an opportunity to experience the film before its release
Baby Invasion is about a first-person game leaked through the dark web about armed mercenaries robbing houses and murdering the occupants, the "gameplay" being streamed online presenting itself as possibly occurring in real life.
The film is delivered through a continuous subjective shot, a GoPro view through the perspective of a hooded armed mercenary clad in black body armor surrounded by a similarly uniformed crew, each individual's face obscured by a mixture of digitally overlaid pixelation and the titular infantile baby face filters which give the impression of violent adult sized toddlers running amok in a disparate southern Florida backdrop, a favored locale for Korine's most recent works in the last decade.
The entire film is overlaid with a stream chat, resembling the Twitch emoji spam scrolling feed and occasional windowed overlay of one or more placid individuals wearing skull masks staring directly into a webcam, implicitly "playing the game" as somehow controlling the "character" through a keyboard and mouse beneath the frame.
The footage itself proceeds from a cluttered stash house, a one story multibedroom Florida suburban household filled to the brim with a hoarder's pile of plastic minutiae and household objects strewn about, interspersed with dozens of firearms being handled, loaded, and cycled by crewmembers. Each member of this squad sports a pair of black horns sprouting from their hooded skulls, curled upward with ridged vertebrae resembling gnarled pointed spinal cords.
Throughout a sequence of entering a windowless van, driving to a waterside Miami-Dade mansion, and infiltrating a dinner party to subdue and threaten hapless guests while robbing them blind, various overlays and graphics sprout up. Numbers and weapon selection menus oscillate at random, floating golden coins manifest to be collected along pathways like an augmented reality mobile game, gates and pathways are highlighted with vibrating light pulses to signify progression, and various green boxes and stick figure neon outlines display over human figures resembling the visual recognition software that runs silently in the backend of every modern smartphone.
There is no coherent dialogue, only garbled baritone filters muffling the noises from characters as if they were Peanuts parents experienced through a DXM overdose. Any chance at processing legible language is further curtailed by thrumming music, an atmospheric pulsating electronic beat provided by Burial as the film's soundtrack, interrupting and shifting without warning into ambient droning, heavenly reverb, and dissonant chanting per the demands of the scene.
The cinematography is reminiscent of surveillance camera footage, an ongoing rhythmic traipse through various sequences and sceneries with the unhurried perpetuity of slightly fisheyed bodycam clip connotation. The sterile nature of the footage is interspersed with hallucinatory manifestations of half-opaque imagery generated by AI, presented through pareidolia visual entities commonly associated with older generation computer visual models such as Google's DeepDream. It resembles psychedelic visions, while sometimes shifting into fully coherent images generated in more recent models, such as a giant rabbit swimming in ocean water before fading back into regular footage.
While a fair review is impossible before the full release, Baby Invasion leaked clips seem to convey reasonable expectation for what the total viewing experience would be. Korine's prior works, especially the more recent productions under his new studio EDGLRD, tend to follow along a general aesthetic consistency. A part of the work reveals the substance of the whole, a visual motif which presents itself with immediate connotation and then persists throughout the entire presentation.
This is due in part to the general style of a Harmony Korine film, a unique aesthetic tone paired with disjointed surreal sequences strung together with plot being suggested atmospherically and furthered through dialogue inference. Many of his films are structured less like stories and more like poems, the actual story being told by the context of the existence its characters occupy.
Such is the case for Aggro Dr1ft, the first major release under Korine's studio EDGLRD. The entire movie is shot in infrared lens, another scenic Miami-core montage of body armored paragons of technological violence and hooded blade-wielding figures of neotonous abandon.
Understanding the films produced by this studio demands understanding the philosophy of Harmony Korine's oeuvre. His essential thesis to creative work is dependent on handing the reins of execution to the younger generation. Korine espoused this in Baby Invasion's Venice Press Conference, expressing a need for Hollywood to encourage the creativity of today's youth.
He outlines that the biggest creative talents of today's generation are being lost to gaming and streaming while institutions adhere to convention. He quotes, "IShowSpeed is the new Tarkovsky." This statement invites uncomfortable chuckles from press goers, but beyond Korine's boyish stare lies a deathly proclamation towards those who refuse to accept this new status quo.
Adherence to the spontaneity that emerges from chaotic youthful impulse is a theme concurrent in all of Korine's works. Kids, while being only written by Korine, adhered to this principle by presenting an unfiltered glance at punk, urban, and skateboarding 90s New York youth subculture. The tone persisted in Korine's directorial debut, Gummo, which assaulted the viewer with a disparate barrage of poverty stricken delirium motifs acting as the backdrop of a wasteland playground for its absurd character ensemble.
Korine's aesthetic paradigm seemed to shift into an accelerated dreamlike state sourced in the heart of Florida through his most notorious work Spring Breakers.
Spring Breakers would begin an unbroken trend of movies set in Florida, a fitting environment wrought with YAYO-core juxtaposition between idyllic manicured beach vacation beauty and concrete sunset decrepit hostility. A contradicting connotation of Disney starlet innocence mixed with rap video violent mayhem serves an underlying metaphor of youth culture escalation which is found throughout Korine's body of work.
The apotheosis of Korine's obsession with chaotic youthful horror lies in Baby Invasion, specifically in choosing to dress anonymous violent criminals in their titular infantile faces as a sort of humorous absurdity accentuating the horror of their brutality. Korine quotes in his press conference, "It's horror. What they're doing is horrible but they're also so cute. So adorable to watch."
This persistent neotonous symbolism reveals an awareness of the online subcultural undercurrent of cuteness weaponized in an increasingly radicalized culture symbiotically attached to an online visual signifier of childlike innocence, exemplified by the Milady PFP phenomenon of radically controversial posting attached to innocuous chibi branding, rooted in the digitally ancient tradition of imageboard archetypal tropes that the most "extreme" poster tends to be the guy with a little anime girl avatar in his profile.
Korine's studio and his current methods of inspiration and production seem to support this awareness, with EDGLRD continually collaborating and onboarding young internet savvy artists and producers who gained their notoriety from having worked in an online environment, fostering a primarily online audience. Korine seems to pride himself on having never met the artist Burial, only corresponding through Discord messages and exchanging audio files for Baby Invasion's soundtrack through PS5 chat.
Concurrently, EDGLRD productions seem to be exploring the online as a medium, particularly with video games being the core driver behind this effort to push storytelling beyond the traditional cinematic structure. The graphic animations are delivered in schizophrenic rapidity, stylistically borrowing from a number of particular sensory overload motifs rooted in online subcultural aesthetic scenes adjacent to niche subcultures emerging from terminally online gamers and dissident disparate forum junkies.
The particular scenes in question seem to intersect between a mid-2010's trend of Web 1.0 sensibility, post-ironic evolution beyond y2k graphic fetishism colliding with the "dissident doomer" archetypes that made MDE and subsequently World Peace a mainstream recognizable aesthetic, incubated in the website subcultures fostered by the likes of Don Jolly's encyclopedia.zone and rooted in underground net artists such as FODKORP, whose cyberjock 3DTestosterone brand of glitch art video production acts as a precursor to the total violence color overlay themes exemplified in Aggro Dr1ft.
Baby Invasion escalates these many ingredients of inspiration into a literal display of film as a video game. Critics and early reviews from journalists deride the film as nauseating, an object of dysphoric dissonance meant to be left on in the background rather than directly focused upon, lest the viewer seeks to disorient themselves into a state of disarray. This is a curious phenomenon, one possibly due to the disconnect of control the viewer experiences in watching a "game" be played rather than controlling it themselves in the same manner that car sickness occurs to passengers rather than drivers.
This fluorescent mixture of security footage and first-person cinematography seems to harken back to the bold work of Surveillance Camera Man, an anonymous YouTuber who released a series of lengthy videos documenting intrusive filming of random people in public as an artistic statement on the pervasiveness of modernity's capacity for documentation. Similar corollaries of surreal discomfort are found through several examples of candid snuff violence, such as body cam footage of police violence on LiveLeak or the horrific livestream from the Christchurch shooting of 2019.
Baby Invasion offers a very clear commentary on the audience-fueled nature of streaming pervading the social consciousness. The aspect violencing becoming desensitized by the dualistic consumption of shooter games in conjunction with streamer culture is touched upon by Neveldine/Taylor's Gamer, a precursor to Korine's recent explorations in digital overlay thematic presentation and guerilla-style dynamic motion filming style, specifically Neveldine/Taylor's particular method of shooting films such as Crank on compact digital cameras while rollerblading intersecting with Korine and Larry Clark's earlier focus on skateboarding culture in films such as Kids and Ken Park.
Motion is a significant component of Korine films. Baby Invasion's video game nature forces the story to progress in a sort of linear tunnel, one which relegates background characters as an extension of the set rather than individuals. This type of viewing experience is similarly executed in Aggro Dr1ft and to a lesser extent, Spring Breakers. In these films, the Florida swamp tinged local population act as leaves and plants to be pulled aside by the protagonist as they further towards a chaotic descent into urban wilderness. Machete wielding midgets and bug eyed drug addicts peer into the camera, staring through the viewer in a hypnotic manner similar to Herzog's African tribals in the third act of Cobra Verde.
The uncanny nature of having the film "come at you" is once again emblematic of the nature of video games. The subjective shot was used to convey uncanniness long before the advent of first-person games, specifically in the aspects of horror films.
However, no film would ever truly successfully capture the proper video game FPS experience until Doom in 2005, when Karl Urban's character cathartically shoots his way through a labyrinth of demons in the style of the Doom games for which the movie was made.
The FPS tunnel vision sensory overload motif simulates the intensity of "furthering" which is experienced when locking into a video game that masters a mixture of speed, violence, and visual intensity. This dynamic, previously suggested and now directly alluded to, is accentuated by the slight fisheye bulge of Baby Invasion which brings to mind the stretched FOV of Quake, a seminal first-person shooter now imitated by dozens of retro-stylized polygon technicolor hyperviolent PS1 graphic games intersecting the same cyberjock network artist scenes, such as Cruelty Squad or the recently criticized Tamashika, which has now been sponsored by EDGLRD as of this week, affirming the intersection as a deliberate inspiration Korine's studio seeks to ingratiate itself with further.
Harmony Korine's method of grasping towards youth culture and allowing young upcoming underground internet artists to help execute his vision reveals a sort of playful improvisation to works such as Baby Invasion. Small hints of generational dissonance are revealed in the cracks of this work, particularly in the chat overlay. Emoji spam messages and likely LLM-generated dialogue comes off as indifferent watered down neutral commentary, losing a bit of the authenticity to either caution or simply missed opportunity.
The chat is an integral element of the film, it could have been the host of a concurrent storyline told exclusively in messages, a separate dialogue telling a B-plot between alternate characters acting as a Greek chorus to the film itself in the same manner of Twin Peaks' television soap opera segments. While this assertion may be proven wrong upon the film's full release, the intention of video remixing performed live during the film's limited theatrical debut seems to suggest otherwise, necessitating a lack of cohesion to fragment each clip effectively.
Fragmentation is a key aspect of Baby Invasion. It is highly likely that the film's leak was facilitated by EDGLRD studio as a soft debut, a thematic cognizance in presenting the film in the same way much of media is consumed by the public today, in broken one-minute clips scavenged haphazardly online divorced from full context.
From what is presented "officially" on the EDGLRD account, there is a particular sequence towards the end of the few minutes allowed to be displayed. Specifically, it is a calm euphoric moment of oceanic bliss in which all overlays fade away and simple text phrases fade in and out centered upon the screen:
THIS IS NOT A MOVIE
THIS IS A GAME
THIS IS REAL LIFE
THIS IS NOT REAL LIFE
THERE IS NO MORE REAL LIFE
THERE IS JUST NOW
THE ENDLESS NOW
Through these messages, Korine directly explains his goal. As quoted in several interviews, he seeks to disrupt the institutional stagnation of film as a medium. He looks to the online as a guiding point for where he believes entertainment is headed. The suggestion of perpetuity defies the cinematic beginning-middle-end formula of storytelling, one rooted in a sort of Western temporality. Rather, the medium of the internet and its ongoing interactive nature seems to embody a more Eastern coded cyclicity, a samsara of constantly evolving content with no clear beginning or end.
This cyclicity could be a source of Korine's fixation on youth culture. In seeking out the creative immortality of perpetually focusing on what young people are doing, Harmony Korine highlights the fulcrum of culture being rooted in instinctual impulse which can only arise when someone enters existence with a blank slate unmarred by the logistical impositions of necessity, aging, and obligation.
Harmony Korine's filmography can be interpreted as a steady escalation towards Baby Invasion, starting out as playful mischievous loitering and Bacchanalian indulgence through the proclivities of teenagers in Kids, mimicking the chaotic tribalism of Lord of the Flies further evolving and accelerating into the dreamlike Floridian hyperviolence of Springbreakers, eventually shedding humanity to reveal underlying symbolic archetypes solely dedicated to their narrative purpose beyond any biological imperative in the likes of Aggro Dr1ft and Baby Invasion.
While this may seem to be simply a thematic arc of escalation common for many artists' oeuvres, it actually has some real life precedence. Violent street gangs, such as West Coast bloods and crips, were once roaming bands of teenagers solidifying their microcultures into distinct tribes and subsequently engaging in turf warfare. Simple scuffles would escalate to chains, sticks, and knives, a Westside Story-esque humorous affair relative to the firearm related homicides which would follow as these street gangs escalated into full blown criminal organizations in following years and decades.
The inevitable escalation of unchecked tribalism into life-or-death warfare fractally mirrors the entropic nature of human social dynamics as a whole. Children and their games have always mimicked the actions of adult humanity. To hone in on games is to look at the distillation of the human condition, even simply the condition of all autonomous life as demonstrated by game theory functioning as a strategic model for existence itself.
In transforming kids into criminals, criminals into metamorphized archetypes, and eventually all of the world into a virtualized simulacra, Korine's films over the past three decades have acted as a sort of chronology for the state of humanity as it evolves through exposure and integration with a state of existence online. Each instance of escalation through his ongoing crystallization of youth is a snapshot of society evolving far beyond anything historically conceived as possible.
While the capacity for realized execution remains to be seen with Baby Invasion's debut, some credit is due to Korine for embracing the already shifted meta of content consumption. By attempting to capture the essence of how young people today process reality via exponentially increasing layers of refraction and condensing the experience into a concise format, he pays tribute to posterity and exposes his insulated institutional peers to an online medium which they otherwise would have dismissed as trifling brainrot content.
Ultimately, Baby Invasion at least crudely succeeds at portraying a distillation of the contemporary online content consumption experience. Where squinting boomer coded Gen X and millennial detractors would find its starkly epileptic presentation nauseating, the zoomer audience would process it as familiar, if not comforting.
As Korine himself states, movies are not going away. The next form of idealized content consumption will not remain in this disjointed limbo of view algorithm optimized schizophrenia, this is merely a glimpse of a fetal stage of the process, one which will likely take decades for humanity to reconcile still new technologies of both the video game metaversal medium and the condition of being online.
Some day there will be an elegant fusion of all of this technology, a maturation of medium which will be the "cinema" of our children's generation. This too will plateau into refinement, awaiting the next unpredictable singularity to emerge and disrupt the status quo once again. We will see it in our lifetime, and in turn, the young of today will become antecessors passing on the torch of relevance and boundary to their descendants.
Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.
