At VIFF, I'm Just Here for the Riot takes a nuanced look at the fallout of the Stanley Cup mayhem of 2011
Kat Jayme and Asia Youngman’s new documentary humanizes figures who met with social-media-fed vigilantism and snitching
I’m Just Here for the Riot screens on October 2 and 8 at the Vancouver Playhouse, and October 5 at the Park, as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival
LET HE WHO IS without sin cast the first brick.
This is one of the themes we find in I’m Just Here for the Riot, a new documentary by Kat Jayme and Asia Youngman about the events following the Vancouver Canucks’ seventh game loss in the 2011 Stanley Cup. The city was possessed by a kind of madness on that balmy June night, immediately seizing the attention of the global news cycle. Sociologists and half-baked media pundits will never go out of work trying to figure out why. Cascading social ills, booze, poor planning, the madness of crowds, the observer effect of new technology and priming by the media, which wouldn’t shut up about the 1994 Stanley Cup riot in the lead-up to the fateful contest—who really knows? Jayme and Youngman wisely place their focus elsewhere. As Youngman observes, this was “the most documented riot in history,” and the film certainly doesn’t skimp on the breathless footage captured that night. But the real story here is the aftermath.
“This was one of our goals,” says Jayme, in a call just prior to a screening in Calgary. “If you were there and you watched things unfold, it was black and white: these people were terrible and there was no leniency, empathy, or understanding of the situation at all. But if you watch the film, I hope some people are conflicted. We wanted even the harshest critics to question themselves. You know, ‘I wouldn’t have done that, but I wasn’t there that night.’”
Former VPD chief Jim Chu is on hand to crystallize the mood on the day after, telling the filmmakers that “if you’re dumb enough to do something stupid because someone wants to take a video of you, then you’re dumb.” Circular logic aside, plenty of people shared the sentiment, and law and order subsequently received a lot of help from a shaken public. It was a citizen-built online database that aided the police in their subsequent arrests. In retrospect, however, the events of 2011 were like a test platform for the worst aspects of social media: vigilantism, tribalism, snitching, mobbing, groupthink, contagion. A mirror image of what happened in the streets, ironically enough. Twelve years later, where are we?
“I think it’s gotten way worse,” says Youngman, joining Jayme in the call. “Way worse. I think this is just an early example of what was to come and what is currently happening. It’s like there’s a new villain every day, there’s a new person that we’re all trying to cancel, until there’s another news story and we all forget who we’re trying to destroy. And I think there’s this disconnect when we’re going on our computers and our phones and writing things about a person we don’t know, or speculating based on a photo, or what somebody else has said about them. It’s so common now and it seems like people don’t stop to think about who this person is, or the backstory, or their life experiences leading up to that point, or what they’re going through.”
This ground was ably covered in the 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by journalist Jon Ronson, who invited the filmmakers to New York for his contribution to the doc. In the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, scapegoating on a societal level is ritualistic, and Jayme notes that history reveals a pattern of public shaming followed by remorse, until the cycle repeats. In the case of the 2011 riot, significantly, shaming gave way to criminal sentences.
“A lot of them were really young people, and they made a mistake,” says Youngman, who was 19 at the time, was downtown right before things blew up, and openly wonders what could have happened if she wasn’t whisked home by friends. “Do they deserve to have their whole life ruined for taking a hockey stick and hitting something, or taking a water bottle from a drug store? Sure, it’s not great, but there are worse things that can happen in the world and I certainly did some dumb things when I was younger. They just weren’t documented and posted online.”
The film’s great achievement is in humanizing figures who were presented to and eagerly received by the public as piñatas. For some, like Mallory Newton, whose brief moment of infamy lends the film its title, the crime was simply being there for a snapshot that went viral. (Not only that: it was also doctored by mainstream news outlets.) The case of Alex Prochazka, meanwhile, introduces all sorts of subtleties to the picture. A contrite and soft-spoken figure, Prochazka was a 20-year-old mountain biker whose professional future vanished along with his sponsorship deals thanks, again, to a single image. Doing nothing out of character, the extraordinary experience of Alex Prochazka is that he was both rewarded and punished in a single lifetime for being an adrenaline junkie.
“There was a part of our interview with his mom that we didn’t include in the film, and she talks about that,” says Jayme. “She wasn’t excusing it, but she said Alex’s job is to fly through the air on a bike. That’s who he is.” In the end, viewers should be impressed that the filmmakers persuaded anyone to appear on camera. Jayme, in fact, was fresh out of film school when she took a camcorder downtown on July 12, 2011, hoping to capture a little history as it unfolded. “Nobody wanted to talk about it,” she says. Reviving a “dream project” as a fully-fledged filmmaker 10 years later with a new friend and collaborator, Jayme discovered that sensitivities haven’t abated.
“We had to build trust,” she says. “I give all of them credit because it was a very brave thing for them to come forward. What was really heartbreaking to learn about during our research were those who are still being affected, whose lives are still being negatively impacted 10-plus years later, especially when they were just starting out, had just graduated high school, or were at the start of their university careers. And again, Asia and I didn’t want to deflect and not hold these people accountable, but it was sad to learn that it was still affecting them, still having an affect on their lives and their career choices. That’s really shitty.”
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