Promotional movie poster. The film was co-written and produced by WCC instructor Joseph Varkle. Courtesy of IMDB
By Claire Convis
Staff Writer
Joseph Varkle is an English Instructor at WCC who has been working on a film called “Cuck” since early 2017. Varkle co-wrote and co-produced the film, working alongside director Rob Lambert to bring this project to the screen. Award-winning actor Zachary Ray Sherman stars as Ronnie in the film.
The film follows Ronnie’s life as a loner who lives in an urban slum with his mother. Rejected from the military, Ronnie is a very angry, sexually frustrated young man who isolates himself and spends nearly all of his time on the internet. As Ronnie allows a glowing screen to consume him, he becomes seduced by an alt-right hate movement online. Ronnie dives further down a dark hole until eventually he becomes radicalized.
“We feel why he’s doing it, but we’re also sort of almost disgusted to be in this close of a space with him,” said Varkle, noting that the film’s director Rob purposely created the film with a claustrophobic-like effect. “We’re kind of trapped with this [Ronnie] guy for an hour and 45 minutes, and it’s not easy sometimes,” Varkle said.
Varkle stated that the original goal for the film was to create a fly-on-the-wall character study. “We didn’t initially seek to make a political film about it,” said Varkle. “We originally wrote the first draft of the script before Charlottesville, and then Charlottesville happened and we looked at the profile of the car attacker and he’s exactly the same as our character.”
On Aug. 12, 2017, a 20-year-old man deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful people who were protesting a white supremacist rally in Virgina. This hate crime murdered one person and seriously injured dozens; the attacker was a lone white man with a history of racist and neo-nazi beliefs.
Varkle said that the development of the Ronnie character was influenced by the similar background that is apparent in the cases of many shooters and culprits of hate crimes. The repeated pattern is an angry, isolated young man who lives in a toxic environment and is very eager to blame others for his problems rather than working within himself to resolve his own issues, Varkle said.
“One thing that we really were eager to show in the film is this idea that there are certain areas of the internet that do groom these types of hate behaviors,” Varkle stated.
These dark corners of the web have a way of seducing those who have a “desperate need to prove themselves or to rail against something,” said Varkle.
‘Cuck’ is drawn from the Shakespearean word “Cuckold,” used for a man whose wife is cheating on him, and it has recently become an insult used by Alt-right hate-groups. The word is meant as a put-down of masculinity and political culture, because in the terms of the alt-right, a “cuck” is any man who supports feminism or votes democrat, or doesn’t conform into the version of what a white-supremacist man is supposed to look like.
The hope for bringing these difficult topics into the public sphere is that the film will help spur discussion, Varkle said. “As the saying goes, ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant.’”
The Cuck trailer has already received backlash from certain corners of the internet, and from some public figures as well.
Varkle said one of the goals of the film is to shine a light on the types of people who are hiding behind screens and usernames on the internet. “There’s a lot of tough talk, but at the end of the day, it’s usually a very vulnerable person acting out of weakness, desperation and anger, so we want to bring this to light,” Varkle said.
The film has received mixed reviews from the New York Times and other publications.
Cuck is now available on Amazon, iTunes and VOD. Varkle said that the film team hopes to bring the film to the Michigan Theater for a screening as well.
