Databases like IMDb and Wikipedia will tell you that Don Hertzfeldt’s ME—a half-hour, lyrics-free animated sci-fi musical of apocalyptic tenor—is a film from 2024. But I would suggest that ME properly begins almost a quarter-century ago, when Hertzfeldt unleashed upon the world a nine-minute short called Rejected (2000).
For that species of early internet user who spent hours combing Napster treasure troves and braving the digital Russian Roulette of LimeWire, Rejected represents something of a foundational text, and Hertzfeldt a patron saint. Purporting to document a foundering animator’s portfolio of commercially unviable television advertisements, Rejected soon uncorks a fire hose of escalating hand-drawn violence and absurdity. Bug-eyed stick figures spout memorable non-sequiturs. (“Tuesday is coming. Did you bring your coat?”) Little puffy creatures dance in celebration before gushing anatomically impossible quantities of blood. An overlarge spoon prompts a bout of existential uncertainty. In the chaotic finale, frames and foregrounds shred, bend, and tear with Stan Brakhage (in)sensibility as the film’s cartoon universe collapses in on itself. Suffice to say, Rejected is both a journey and a trip.
Rejected became such a touchstone of online culture in part because most of the film’s fans would never have encountered it if not for the anarchic configuration of the turn-of-the-millennium internet. As Andreas Babiolakis observes:
Rejected was one of the first videos to go viral in the internet age. In the early days of P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing, usually illegally with the help of services like Napster, Morpheus, Limewire and more, Rejected was passed around and adored by many. Like “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd or “Half the Man I Used to Be” by Nirvana (actually “Creep” by Stone Temple Pilots, of course), Rejected was one of those popular files that just popped up no matter what you searched due to leech volume. So, many people did download it, and it helped shape all of us.
Before concepts like ‘memes’ and ‘virality’ were common internet parlance, Rejected managed to tap the impulses behind them. The film’s expressive, quotable, inexplicable lines often bore repeating—prototyping the call-and-response format of modern meme-ery. Its unusual but riotous humor engaged the digital hunter-gatherer instinct of ‘find funny thing, share funny thing.’ Watching its furious subsequent spread through the World Wide Web’s lawless, decentralized spaces was less like observing the propagation of a pathogen than witnessing the wholesale rewriting of the internet’s DNA. Rejected therefore achieved a symbiosis with the internet of the time, inseparable from its infrastructure and organization while also being one of its defining features.
But if Rejected offered a compelling reason to go online, it also represented a reason to stay there. To be a meme or go viral is to become part of the furniture of the internet—to create the kinds of favorable experiences that people associate (or once associated) with being online; to form an integral component of people’s memories of joy and entertainment; to shape what comes after, as creators and consumers alike chase another hit of that past magic. Accordingly, you can draw a straight line from Rejected to (in)famous Flash animations like The Demented Cartoon Movie (2001), or the ‘random’ aesthetic emblematic of aughts Adult Swim programs like Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2001-2015) and 12 oz. Mouse (2005-2006). But such influence has its dark side. To make it big through the internet is to contribute a brick to the edifice of The Online, playing a role, however small, in how the internet has come to dominate our attention. Much like a good movie inspires a return to the cinema, every appealing internet artifact conspires to coax us back online in pursuit of the next thing. Today’s all-consuming content algorithms/weaponized information delivery systems would not be possible without the groundwork laid by the early internet’s delights.
Of course, I am not singling out Hertzfeldt for an outsized contribution to the heavily centralized, thoroughly enshittified, and politically carcinogenic modern internet. We are all guilty for its present suckage, ceding further control to the dwindling number of platforms and their attendant information silos with every pet photo we post, every clickbait-driven argument we engage in, and every clout- or validation-seeking broadcast we air. Still, some of us may have more of their fingerprints on that edifice than others (cf. Ed Zitron on tech CEOs), such that it is impossible to watch ME without detecting a strain of self-flagellating sensitivity to the facilitators of online-ness—among whom Hertzfeldt could count himself.
And in this light, ME reads not only apocalyptically, but apologetically: Part mea culpa, part prescription for escaping the mess that, in some small capacity, Hertzfeldt’s work helped create.
#
The plot of ME, such as it is, concerns a nuclear family fracturing against a background of solipsistic pleasure and societal collapse. An inventor alienates his wife and children in his solitary, single-minded pursuit of the communication machine he envisions—which happens to function a lot like the internet, and might enable time travel. His wife struggles with their off-putting, eyeball-shaped second child, driving her to seize a unique opportunity to abandon it. The family’s first child wanders like an afterthought through lonely, isolated spaces. People on the streets keep dropping dead from an unexplained plague. The government, when not interring bodies in mass graves, guns down protesters in the streets. Later on, buildings and infrastructure crumble as the population shambles on in a state of incurious stupor, staring dead-eyed at consoles resembling the inventor’s creation into which their brains are directly wired. A catastrophic system failure of unknown origin wipes out a sizable chunk of the world’s population; meanwhile, a load-bearing AI that resembles the walking circulatory system from Watchmen develops self-awareness after mainlining images and videos of all the world’s messes, and a major celestial event (possibly triggered by the jettisoned eyeball child) threatens to engulf the planet. Each story thread knots itself into an allegory of self-absorption and nihilism, cautioning how the two feed upon and spur the other with ratcheting intensity. ME posits that this vicious cycle, if left unchecked, can—and will—spread-society wide. And on a scale of that magnitude, this unhealthy dynamic can only invite disaster.
Or maybe not. The film’s visual logic alone nudges me toward this particular reading; there’s no explicit dialogue to ground it. And that narrative ambiguity is by design. Hertzfeldt, in an interview with Slate’s Sam Adams, indicates that he aimed for ME to act like a visual mondegreen—the precise meaning of which, although clearly perceived on an individual basis, might resist communication:
From the very beginning, when I was writing, I thought about my own favorite songs, and how interesting and strange it was that, although I’ve been listening to some of them for 30 years, I’m not sure if I could easily tell you what they’re about. There’s something about a great song that maybe it means something to me, but it could mean something completely different to you and something completely different to the guy who wrote the song. It’s probably why we return to our favorite songs often, like a great poem. There’s something you can’t put your finger on that’s mysterious and beautiful and a little elusive. That got me thinking, how do I get that feeling in a picture? How do you get that vibe of, “I can’t explain to you what this is, but I know it when I’m watching it.”
At heart, the film wants us to wrestle with the question of how to reconcile being unable to talk to one another about how we interpret things, and what we find meaningful in them. But this is intended as an invitation to put in the effort to understand one another, even if we’ll never quite make it there. It’s both an exercise and a challenge, with stakes that are nothing short of existential. The difficulty involved in conveying that which we deeply, intuitively grasp is not meant to be considered as a point of defeat, because to preemptively deem it as such is to assert the impossibility of true communication—to believe that the end result of interacting with another person must always be rupture instead of connection. It’s an attitude that leads to communication’s breakdown, to retreating inward and plunging into solipsism and narcissism.
In other words, it leads to the world of ME.
The film is flush with imagery of people failing to talk to one another, or giving up on the possibility. The central family barely communicates; their first real interaction appears to be an unintelligible conversation about a bowl, where none of them has any idea what the others mean. Law enforcement officials reply to verbal engagement with fatal gunshots. Pedestrians shuffle past one another, too absorbed in their own concerns to interact—much less help others in distress. No wonder most of the film’s denizens remain mindlessly plugged in to their screens, silent mouths motionless, as private entertainments beam into their brains. If nobody in meatspace speaks to you, why not embrace the content algorithm that does?
But ME warns that turning inward as a palliative measure weakens whatever faculty allows us to see beyond ourselves and negotiate the world. In the aforementioned Slate interview, Hertzfeldt suggests that the content delivery systems perfected by the modern internet are not only socially and emotionally manipulative, but pernicious on a fundamental level:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
We simply aren’t built to thrive in the intellectually frictionless online environments we’ve constructed. Sociable, adaptable creatures like us, who benefit from challenges, cannot grow when the world is organized in our individual service, spooning up endless permutations of our own increasingly circumscribed perspectives. If the content algorithm does indeed speak to you, it’s in the manner of a farmhand addressing livestock. The cattle only hear the cattle driver, who seldom steers them toward a happy end.
The lone defense is to look outward, beyond oneself. To this end, ME toys with its viewers’ attention, shepherding it in one direction while rewarding those who turn it elsewhere. Adopting compositional strategies similar to The Zone of Interest (2023) or Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” (2018) music video, ME conceals breadcrumbs of disquieting parallel narratives in plain sight, squirreling them in parts of the frame where the eye is not directed. The frequent tension between foreground and background provides a visual language that allows ME to be critical of where we assign our attention. ME’s busy canvases include unhoused and starving people begging for food or being brutalized by police, protesters being murdered, windows and streetlights cracking and breaking, and airspace that’s being occupied by steadily more ubiquitous—and militarized—drones. Like Chabris and Simons’s renowned selective attention test, what you fail to perceive in ME will astonish you. The film’s admonition is not so much “blink and you’ll miss it” as “you were never even looking.”
Yet this rather despairing principle nonetheless contains one of the film’s few rays of hope: if allocating our attention to the wrong things plunges us into ME’s nightmares, then attention properly paid can help us rouse ourselves. The French philosopher Simone Weil’s writings on attention untangle this theme. In her letters, Weil once commented that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention, in Weil’s account, is not a self-serving faculty through which we consume entertainment; it’s an action taken on behalf of another to affirm that they exist and demonstrate that they matter. Weil expands upon this idea in Gravity and Grace (1947; English translation 1952), stating that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Whereas we might be tempted to think of attention as a mostly aesthetic faculty—a means for apprehending a thing’s details in pursuit of greater understanding or appreciation—for Weil, its function is also ethical. It’s a form of communion with another, letting go of oneself so that the other may occupy the space we vacate. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset follows a similar (and equally applicable) thread in Meditations on Quixote,1 in which he argues that attention of this sort is what love looks like. For Ortega y Gasset, love as a practice involves paying attention to things in order to understand them. This practice creates relationships of respect and care, “bind[ing] one thing to another and everything to us, in a firm essential structure.”2 We see this principle expressed in ME via the strange eyeball kid who is always holding others in their gaze, but drifts away like an untethered balloon if unwatched: attention anchors people to the world by affording them a welcome place in it.
We see these dynamics occurring all throughout ME. Scenes of separation abound, with ruin and fatality in their wake: the eyeball child’s abandonment tearing a hole in multiple lives (and creating a black hole in space); characters dying by their lonesome in elderly isolation; buildings going to wrack and ruin because people are too busy with their own immediate concerns; infrastructural disasters that end plenty of lives. As Slate’s Diana Lind writes, “The more we go online, the less we show up in person.” Separation kills us both spiritually and materially. When no one cares, nothing holds us—or the world we inhabit—together.
The unwitting architect of ME’s miseries doesn’t escape unscathed, either. The inventor receives some kind of award for his revolutionary internet device/time machine, but after the ceremony, he returns to the house he’s driven his family from to find he has nobody with whom to share his triumph. The film then leaps ahead in time to depict him aged, alone, and regretful. He dies forgotten in his kitchen, left to decay there until a stranger spots his corpse through the window. Then he’s unceremoniously tossed into a mass grave, while huge cables that flash and flicker like dangerous live wires—the legacy of his invention—dangle like vines from bland, uninspiring buildings where uncounted others waste their lives in silos of identical solitude.
#
These unsustainable trends reach their breaking point in the film’s operatic final act. Nodding to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—another film about the hideous futures lurking in past and present vices—ME’s closing scenes feature an intelligent machine singing as it shuts down for the final time. ME puts a clever twist on the proceedings, characterizing its machine not as a coldly amoral killer like the HAL 9000, but as a victim of all the worst trends of social media.
Toward the film’s end, the AI sings “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” from The Bohemian Girl while enduring a flood of images from the world’s decaying internet: Plastic-choked landfills, kaleidoscopic arrays of pills and painkillers, heads clutched in pain, eyes clenched in sadness. (All the while, the AI squirts intermittent jets of blood like a busted gasket spraying oil. It bears this stoically, suggesting the gory leakage is a feature and not a bug. It’s a great gag with remarkable comic timing; even at his most serious, Hertzfeldt won’t let us take ourselves too seriously.) The staging hearkens to Christian myth’s “Agony in the Garden” episode, in which Jesus is said to have beheld all of humanity’s past, present, and future sins (while also bleeding intermittently throughout), but nonetheless agrees to sacrifice himself to cleanse and redeem them. The AI, however, reaches a far different conclusion; after seeing all we’re capable of, it chooses to unplug. And, in so doing, might trigger that unexplained, high-fatality global catastrophe that sets off ME’s final act.
The setup makes for a psychologically rich scene that could double as a thought experiment. If all our online doings are in fact training a true artificial intelligence3 (cf. Ex Machina [2014]), then bearing witness to all the unhealthy behaviors we demonstrate—our cruel and bullying interactions, our shows of harassment and violence, our constant cries of sorrow and anger—must be torturing the poor thing. How would you expect such a being to turn out? Of course, those results are precisely what remaining online for too long entails for anybody. The experience as it is currently constituted is no good for any of us. It would have us believe that hell really is other people.
What is the endgame of such a belief? ME hazards its guess by showing us what such an internet-poisoned being as the AI hungers for—and it demands what is nigh impossible. The lyrics of its song, although difficult to parse in the high soprano register of their delivery, furnish a clue. In “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” the impoverished Arline recollects a life among the trappings of nobility: a beautiful home, a cadre of loyal retainers, a satisfying past, a hopeful future. Yet the song’s refrain is some variation of, “But I also dreamt, which pleas’d me most, / That you lov’d me still the same.” The takeaway is unmistakable. All the world’s honors, riches, and luxuries count for nothing before the prospect of loving and being loved. What good is access to every piece of media, or the freedom to follow millions of people’s accounts, or amassing a million followers of your own, if none of it results in meaningful connection?
Yet that’s only half of the internet’s great tragedy. The other portion is that, in amplifying all our worst impulses, it makes it seem like other people aren’t worthy of love. Hence, when ME’s AI pictures its ideal world, its joys are solitary. We see it strolling through environments free of other people, where humanity could not possibly survive: erupting volcanoes, seafloors suited only for extremophiles, barren planet surfaces devoid of life. Such is the cruel paradox that internet poisoning foists upon us: to make us feel more acutely our own yearning for love, while creating a world where love is impossible.
So the AI unhooks itself and touches grass. So should we all in pursuit of a better way.
Tellingly, ME doesn’t provide a picture of an alternative path. It can only warn us that its world—our world—is lacking in love, and desperately needs an infusion. We must love one another for one another, shorn of all self-interest, and love that way with all our might. We must reaffirm the importance of genuine interpersonal connection in our noxious, narcissistic, extremely online era. The alternative is death; none of us are islands. Unplugging will be difficult, and things great and small are sure to break in the process. But ME offers one hopeful observation: through the cracks in the old world’s ruins, flowers still manage to bloom.