'Dark Net' Review: Digital Desires Explored To The Extreme
Half-enlightening, half-super-creepy, Dark Net is a new, eight-part documentary series about some tucked-away crannies of the internet, premiering on Showtime on Thursday. The first half-hour, hoping to get you hooked, explores sex — or as the frequently irritating voiceover narration dubs it, “digital desire,” noting over a soundtrack of musical ominousness, “Love — you can find it, and you can lose it — inside your screen.”
The premiere focuses primarily on three true stories. In one, a woman who’s broken up with her boyfriend discovers that he went to revenge-porn sites and posted images of her that multiply into the thousands and make her the target of intense online harassment. In another, we meet a young couple who live in different states but who maintain an exceedingly energetic bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism (a.k.a. BDSM) relationship, all of it conducted via cellphone and social media. (Says the narrator rather too proudly, “Drew can’t even get a hard-on without her permission.”)
And in Japan, we are introduced to a man who has fallen head-over-heels in love with Rinko, a female animated character developed by LovePlus, a dating simulator. He is essentially having a committed relationship with an avatar — a very solicitous, passive, and youthful-looking female — and could not be happier, much to the bemusement of friends we witness quizzing him closely on this situation over dinner.
Subsequent episodes include a very disturbing half-hour titled “Exploit” devoted to child pornography. The Dark Net half-hours are slickly made — made, it would seem, for the tech-savvy audience it chronicles and thus featuring a lot of rapid editing, jumping back and forth from one storyline to another to prevent the viewer from being bored for a millisecond. Nevertheless, the content tends to be heavy on example and light on analysis and interpretation. The show could stand to slow down a bit on the ways — as the often too clever for its own good narration says — “we upload our very selves to the place we call the cloud,” and ponder the implications of all this internet interaction.
Dark Net airs Thursdays at 11 p.m. on Showtime.
