Just as your pulse begins to slow from watching that documentary on fonts, along comes a film about a subject nearly as thrilling: search engines. Google Me — which sounds like either the title of a terrible romantic comedy or the lamest setup for a porno ever — follows Jim Killeen, a struggling 38-year-old actor originally from Detroit, as he meets other people with the same name he discovered by typing “Jim Killeen” into that famous search bar. These include a swinger from Denver, a retired New York cop, an Irish priest and an Australian corporate exec (and, judging by this picture, “Jim Killeen” might be the whitest name on earth).
The film will premiere tomorrow on YouTube, the DVD hitting shelves with surely meteoric force on Tuesday. According to this profile in the Washington Post, what the director discovered from this odyssey “was not a better way to be a Jim Killeen, but an inspiring (if “Breakfast Club”-y) truth about being human. Says Killeen: “People are fundamentally good. They will invite you over to their houses. They will meet you halfway.” OK, that’s nice to hear, since I don’t know if too many people would want to see a movie where the ultimate conclusion is, “Y’know, humans are kind of assholish.” But this quote, about what triggered the journey, makes me question if the teddy bear-like Killeen went into this project with a heart too big for these cynical times:
“I wanted them to be doing well in life,” he says. “I wanted them to succeed. They were members of a very special club.”
Obviously, Mr. Killeen lacks a basic understanding of the digital age. Yes, it has made the world smaller. Yes, it has made it possible to connect with people we may have never known previously. Before the Internet, mankind was comfortable hurtling through space, each individual occupying his or her own solipsist universe, satisfied with the fact that, as far as most of us know, there is no one else out there like us. Now, though, with the single click of a mouse, all of us can come to the crushing realization that we are not as unique as we used to believe. We are, in the words of Tyler Durden, “the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” And we’re being ranked by robots.
As amiable as they may appear in person, these other Jim Killeens are not Jim Killeen’s friends. They are his opponents in the game of life. That Post article acknowledges that Google is a universal status symbol; it is the only measuring stick we have which stretches across cultural boundaries to prove who is truly worthy of the air they’re breathing. Myself, I am currently the third greatest “Matthew Singer” on the planet, behind a Duke University grad student whose published works include The 2002 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Bolivia and Trends in Opinion Research in New Democracies: Professionalization and Quality Control? and a guy who worked as a crew member on the set of Empty Nest (the situation with my informal name, Matt, is more disheartening: I went through 14 pages of search results and I have yet to show up). If the Dukie and the production staffer showed up on my doorstep unannounced one day, I probably wouldn’t invite them in for dinner — the Panamanian electoral system and Richard Mulligan aren’t exactly my ideas of scintillating subjects of conversation — but I would definitely be cordial. That doesn’t mean I’m not viewing them as competition — and hoping, secretly, that they aren’t doing well, or at least doing mediocre, because nothing shoots you up the Google ladder more than a headline-grabbing flameout (of course, considering that one of the superior Matthew Singers apparently hasn’t worked since the late ’80s is still seeded higher than me makes me wonder what the hell I have to do to overtake this guy). I don’t think this makes me a bad person, though it sadly might make me a virtual yuppie social climber. But that’s how it is these days: It’s an increasingly crowded world with diminishing wiggle room. You either jockey for position with vigor, or get banished to the Invisible Web.
Of course, Jim Killeen probably knows this. After all, what better way to become Google’s top Jim Killeen than making a movie about Google?
Can we get that stuffonmycat.com documentary now, please?
