TIFF 2024: ‘Vice is Broke’ is Too Enamored With the Infamous Company’s Legend to Tackle its Messy Truth

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 9, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 9, 2024 |

In May 2023, Vice Media, the legendary media company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. While the brand still exists, it is a shadow of its former self, with a website that no longer publishes new content and a private equity firm as its new owners. It was an indignant downfall for one of the defining forces in 21st-century media, the bad-taste kings who blended high-concept ideas with a cooler-than-thou approach to everything and everyone. The rise and fall of Vice is truly the story of digital media, the horribly familiar tale of the weird upstarts who go mainstream then are sucked dry by corporate demands. At least, that’s the easy narrative. To truly talk about Vice is to delve into everything that word defines, as well as a mythos that cracked under the weight of its edgelord hate.

Eddie Huang, the chef and author of Fresh Off the Boat, worked for Vice Media for several years and is still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid residuals. So, who better to tell the story of Vice than someone who was part of that life? Well, probably anyone else because at least they wouldn’t be so wedded to their own fantasy of a toxic brand.

Vice is Broke opens with a brief summary of Huang’s contentious time in the public eye and a piece of advice offered to him by the legendary Anthony Bourdain that essentially amounted to, ‘don’t suck the d*ck of the powerful for fame.’ In that spirit, Huang sees Vice’s downfall into bankruptcy as a sign of someone who didn’t listen to Bourdain. ‘It didn’t have to end like this,’ Huang says, before talking to various people who worked at the company over the years. What started as a free magazine for the Montreal indie scene became the arbiters of cool, thanks to people like Amy Kellner, Lesley Arfin, and Jesse Pearson. The gonzo anything-goes approach to talking about everything, from female ejaculation to cocaine to ’90s hip-hop, was undoubtedly a product of its time. But there was freedom in that culture, Huang and many of his talking heads assert, a kind of liberation from the industry norms that allowed you to find your voice.

It’s a fun fantasy, sure, but then it comes into conflict with Gavin McInnes. The co-founder of Vice is now best known as the racist edgelord hate machine behind the Proud Boys. How did he go from A to Z? Well, he was already at Z, according to his former friends, who talk with a kind of discomfiting but tainted nostalgia about his provocations. Sure, he told racist jokes constantly and got his penis out at parties, but it was funny. He was just being edgy when he wrote sexist, racist, and hatemongering columns for the magazine. It was fun and games, and as one former writer asserts, McInnes is sooo funny. When Huang sits down with him for an interview, I failed to see the humour, especially when Huang tried to insist to McInnes himself that he was potentially a satirical prankster trying to take down bigotry from the inside out. Even McInnes says ‘no’ to that. Huang is so desperately committed to a narrative he had crafted before starting Vice is Broke that not even McInnes bragging to his face about how he thinks trans people are mentally ill can disrupt it. And yes, he does keep in a moment where McInnes gets his penis out. Edgy.

In Huang’s eyes, McInnes is gross, sure, but he stayed true to himself, man, unlike the company’s other co-founder, Shane Smith (the third co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, is weirdly absent from this documentary.) Smith is described as a P.T. Barnum type, an ad man who wants to be as cool as his Hitler-loving colleague and who doesn’t care about maintaining the true essence of Vice. The most compelling parts of the documentary lie in Huang’s detailing of how Vice evolved into a multi-pronged monopoly and how too much of a good thing came to bite them in the ass.

Those oft-mocked Vice documentaries about shocking subject matters like cannibalism in Liberia or drugs in Colombia grabbed viewers’ attention but fell into othering and stereotypes that largely impacted people of colour (the Liberian short is contrasted with Bourdain’s own vibrant and empathetic visit to the country - wow, I miss Anthony Bourdain, don’t you?) Real journalists are brought in to do truly excellent coverage of war in Ukraine that wins Emmys but none of them get credit because Smtih hogs it all. Brand deals offer good investments but then they start doing propaganda for vaping and cozying up to the Saudi government after they assassinated a journalist. Details of how the company faked ad click numbers prove especially intriguing but could have used more space. When Rupert Murdoch invests in Vice, it’s hard to think of them as the underdogs of anything.

Huang has fun parodying the Vice documentary style with his work here. Talking heads acknowledge the camera set-ups and weird situations they’re shoved into for the sake of a quote (why is Taylor Lorenz on a swan boat?) The funniest moment comes when Huang talks to one person while dressed as the Asian Guy Fieri, the food personality his producers wanted him to copy. Really, whenever Huang opens up about his own tendencies to be a loudmouth with a self-sabotaging streak a mile wide, his devotion to this damn company makes more sense. He can be self-aware about his own problems, so why not bring more of that into the wider narrative? It would make a hell of a lot more sense than comparing Gavin McInnes to The Life of David Gale (although that is also one of the weirdest and most random film references I have ever heard, so props for that, I guess.)

In many ways, I sympathize with Huang’s conundrum. Anyone who works in digital media knows what it’s like to love a site, watch some tech bro loser buy it up, and slowly be sapped of everything that made it special until it’s a husk that exists for dead links and AI clickbait. Vice’s downfall is sadly not special. I could name so many website and magazines that had to suffer like this, that left behind thousands of laid-off and unpaid workers and now offer nothing but the same crap you can find on a million other sites. It sucks. It never stops being crap, and it just doesn’t stop. It’s the norm now, the rule and not the exception. Will refusing to sell out, however that is defined, stop the bleeding? Huang certainly hopes so and wants Vice is Broke to be his evidence. It would make more sense if he was more willing to see his beloved company as more than a nice idea. After all, it spent decades letting everyone else know that many of its ideas were rotten to the core.

Vice is Broke had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.