Searching for the 'incel' | Culture

Fluid mechanics is a branch of physics that studies the movement of fluids, their interactions with the boundary that limits them. Fluids do not resist shear stresses. I read this explanation on holy Wikipedia and I understand that Gala Hernández López, in the short documentary with which he won the Caesar, uses this metaphor, with the significant lability inherent in metaphors, to think about how our eroticism twists in the world of the internet. The algorithmic mechanics, the match, It violently imposes itself on the liquid state of love relationships. We are substances contained in the contour of an anatomy, but our nature leads us to exceed it to encounter other substances. We exchange fluids. The body is the only thing we have, but it is also a border that blurs in the flow towards other bodies.

This has been the case until the flesh is transformed into phantasmagoria within the screens, and the chance of the loving encounter, the free flow of blood, semen, saliva, tears, vaginal discharge, the liquefaction of our pleasure, are sublimated and spiritualized under the algorithmic prescription. Loving passion is decanted and encapsulated on Tinder. She tightens. It is simplified. Passion is profitable. There is no time to lose. Nor does rejection or inattention require consideration. Movement to the right or left of the screen. The cascade of love is reduced to a drop, controlled in the laboratory, which is set in motion with the little motors of the jacuzzi. We swim in a pool against an artificial current and we don't move from the spot. The body wears out. Our bodies have not yet adapted to that absence of temperature, cutting geometry, which dwarfs complex emotions. Our bodies still do not tolerate that absence of body, that mise en abyme, that dematerialization of screens. They howl and contort: ​​the false limits of the body imposed by stereotypes are painful—fat, ugly, amputated, short—but it also hurts to lose corporeality. The condemnation to be a spirit and a pixel.

Gala Hernández López is a 25-year-old woman who experiences uncertainty, but she does not do so from digital illiteracy or physical deterioration that sometimes justifies nostalgia. fluid mechanics, through the heterodoxy and hybridizations of its visual proposal—virtual, documentary, perhaps autobiographical—allows us to intuit between the cracks of the image. However, the most outstanding thing about this piece is the voice of the filmmaker that flies over the frames and, from the communicative search and the attempt at interlocution, dispels the hatred and its crystallization in a discourse emanating from the implacable, anomalous, reductionist logic, of the algorithm applied to our emotions: simplism and the concealment of the body in the networks converge with the basal machismo of our societies, giving shape to the figure of the incelthe involuntary celibate, who transforms his loneliness into hatred against women.

Gala Hernández, from a solitude equal to and different from that of the incel, From a cosmic loneliness that is interpreted politically, she tries to understand those wounded and brutal men who kill themselves and kill themselves, and would make her a victim. The empathetic attitude of the voice of fluid mechanics, That respect and curiosity to understand the pain of others, that way of behaving, our dignity and our strength, also constitute our greatest fragility. Gala Hernández's excellent short film investigates pathology incel as a symptom of a sick society, but, above all, it reflects on an essential way of conversing and doing politics that, paradoxically, always puts us at a disadvantage in the face of fascism and desperation.

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