When Kindness Becomes Content

I came here to make a fim recommendation based on something viral I'm seeing on TikTok/IG....

Former Nickelodeon actor Tyler Chase has been circulating on TikTok & IG this week. He’s homeless and struggling with addiction and mental health. And now; because social media has noticed; people are finding him, giving him money, feeding him, booking hotel rooms, filming pep talks, posting updates.

What’s unsettling isn’t that people are helping him. That’s great (and necessary).

What’s unsettling is how much of the help is being filmed.

I don’t think this means anyone involved is cruel or acting in bad faith. Truth be told, I’d probably do the same. But it does raise a question; what happens to care once it needs an audience?

Watching this unfold on social media has made me think of the 2021 Iranian film A Hero, directed by Asghar Farhadi. Without giving much away, it follows a man who makes a genuinely moral choice. The act is quiet, private, and personally costly. It only begins to unravel once it becomes public; once it’s documented, narrated, and judged.

What makes the film so provocative isn’t whether the man is good, but how goodness itself changes under observation. I think it speaks more broadly of the human desire to be perceived and how much this has been exacerbated by a culture shaped by tech, self-surveillance and social media, where even sincere care can be quietly transformed into performance.

Again, I am not posting this from a high horse. I couldn’t be more entangled with self-surveillance and self-documentation on social media lol. I am probably worse than 90% of people reading this right now lol.

But yeah, watching the viral Tyler Chase videos unfold made me think of A Hero, and I highly recommend watching it. You can stream it for free on Prime. It’s a film that has stayed with me since first watching it in 2021.

This morning while reflecting on the Tyler Chase virality and on the film A Hero has me reflecting on how being good and being seen as good are not always the same thing. Which then makes me think of a series from last year; that I also found incredibly provocative; The Curse; created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie (starring the two, plus Emma Stone).

While more cynical than A Hero; In The Curse, the characters are so preoccupied with how they’re perceived that Fielder and Stone (who play husband and wife) can’t even be honest with each other about their actual motivations. In fact, they can’t even be honest with themselves.

Once care becomes content, it invites arcs; redemption, progress, hope. Those arcs are comforting to witness, but they quietly place pressure on the person at the center to live up to the story being told about them. In the case of Tyler Chase; I will say that addiction (& recovery), of course, don’t move in straight lines. They resist narrative.

The film A Hero isn’t anti-kindness. But it is skeptical of moral spectacle.

If this moment with Tyler Chase also feels uneasy to you; not because people are helping, but because of how public the help is; then I can’t recommend A Hero enough (or The Cruse for that matter). I think both sit with a question worth holding onto....

The question of the moral ambiguity of performing purity under public surveillance. When goodness is documented does it stop belonging solely to the person receiving it? Compassion entangled with visibility and care entangled with narrative ownership. Who benefits most from kindness being seen?