The Beta Test (Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe, 2021) (Patreon)

Cummings' debut feature Thunder Road was quite the opening salvo, a film defined by its full-on embrasure of squeamish embarrassment -- what the kids now simply call "cringe." It tells us a lot about Gen Z that they so needed to define this often undefinable experience, which usually entails some mixture of astonishment, mockery, and pity. If, as we were told by umpteen thousand think-pieces at the time, 9/11 sounded the death knell for Gen X irony, cringe brings it back as sincerity gone wrong. This inevitably invites the spectator to feel superior to someone else, but partly undercuts that smugness with a mostly-feigned "there but for the grace of God" auto-apologia.

In this regard, Thunder Road captured a Zeitgeisty emotional twilight zone without necessarily being a very good movie. The Beta Test is a better film in every way, and although Cummings and collaborator McCabe have moved onto another set of era-specific concerns, there's quite a bit more bubbling beneath the surface. It's ostensibly another cautionary tale about the Straight White Man getting pulled under by his own misguided sense of specialness; although films like After Hours or Under the Silver Lake are relevant here, The Beta Test is chiefly an Internet age / new economy reconsideration of Eyes Wide Shut. This, strangely enough, turns out to be a pretty good idea.

The lead performance even reads like a self-aware, malfunctioning Tom Cruise impersonation. Jordan (Cummings) is a late-late capitalist Hollow Man, a mid-level agent at a mid-level talent agency. (Jordan's friend and colleague PJ (McCabe) is obsessed with the agency's standing with respect to CAA, which is not especially good.) After receiving an anonymous postcard inviting him to meet a mystery woman at a hotel for a one-time tryst, his tightly wound life begins spinning out of control. He suspects that there is a greater conspiracy afoot, but [SPOILER] it turns out to be an Internet start-up that links couples based on similarities in their scraped data, then charges / extorts money from the users (or their real-life partners) in order to reveal the identities of the participants. Basically, it's Ashley Madison, but the first one's free.

But what is most compelling about The Beta Test is Jordan's affect. The bland, caffeinated persona he adopts in his work life ("there he is!" / "I'm really excited" / "let's keep talking") that has become the sum-total of his personality, and this seems to be Cummings' and McCabe's commentary on who we have become in the era of Big Data and flexible capital. Jordan is practically an avatar of himself, a pneumatic, Max Headroom action figure whose outbursts and panic attacks are simultaneously spontaneous and performative. He is constantly watching himself behave, but his self-awareness is out of sync; he's forever chasing after his own words and actions, trying to reverse them but watching them slip further and further away from him. Jordan is indistinguishable from a sitcom character, or someone trying and failing to mask their neuro-atypicality. The Beta Test is about a useless individual coming to terms with his utter banality. Jordan is all of us, and that's the problem.