Marcel the Shell is post-internet
The movie uses internet nostalgia to advocate for life beyond the web.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a perfect 89 minutes. It’s in select theaters now and opens throughout the US on July 15. —Kate
If you want to win the heart of a Gen X-er, just put a popular song from their youth in a movie or TV show (and then, in my experience, let them explain it to you). Music nostalgia isn’t unique to the over-40 crowd, of course, but for Millennials, it's internet nostalgia that tends to evoke emotional reactions. I fell prey to this myself when I heard the words “compared to what” while watching the new movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
“Compared to what,” “toenails from a man,” and “because it’s worth it” were just a few of the many Marcel The Shell quotes my high school friends and I nonstop parroted to one another when the original stop motion video came out on YouTube in 2010. A year later, creators Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp followed it up with a sequel, and the final internet iteration dropped in 2014. Each video is around four minutes long—basically a feature film, compared to the 15 seconds TikTok has now accustomed us to. The videos are shot in a mockumentary style, following the life of a shell, charmingly voiced by Slate, who makes a life in a human-sized house filled with human-sized things.
The A24 feature film adaptation goes deeper into Marcel's universe, showing his point of view as his videos going viral, which allows for countless nods to the original shorts (and countless theater patrons like me smiling knowingly at our companions). It’s not just about how we quoted the lines to each other over ten years ago, but the way they became our Facebook statuses or were reblogged all over Tumblr. Marcel was a moment on a very different internet, and seeing it on the big screen felt like a validation of its impact.
But the film’s story isn’t what you’d expect from a piece of internet content. In fact, Marcel The Shell with Shoes On rejects the fulfillment the internet purports to provide, instead emphasizing the importance of surrounding yourself with real-world family and friends.
The driving plot of the movie is Marcel’s search for the community he lost when the original human inhabitants of his house moved out. Everyone but Marcel and his grandmother Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini, whose children’s own nostalgia for the character is what convinced her to do it) were accidentally thrown into a suitcase and taken away. Marcel and Fleischer-Camp (who plays himself) hope that internet fame can help reconnect Marcel with his lost people, and for a brief moment, it seems like the movie will suggest that followers on the internet can serve as a different kind of family. But that notion is quickly curbed.
“This is an audience, not a community,” Marcel remarks as he scrolls the YouTube comments on his videos. Marcel's fans find his house and show up outside to take pictures, make videos, and cause havoc without much thought for the privacy and feelings of the shell they say they’re celebrating. IRL, their relationship is still one-sided, because the nature of the internet means Marcel is only ever positioned as something to be consumed.
If this theme dominated the movie, it would risk being preachy. While the movie does have a sweet few scenes of Marcel enjoying what’s good about the internet (YouTube tutorials, essentially), he puts the new toy down as soon as he realizes it doesn’t replace the thing he’s actually missing. From that point on, the internet isn’t really touched on again, which itself is an effective tool for making the case that human (shell?) connections are what life is really about.
Ten years and a pandemic needed to pass for Marcel’s story to be told on the big screen. The internet isn’t new and shiny anymore. We now know what it is, and especially what it isn’t, capable of replacing.
Marcel the Shell is about loneliness, but also about how the most remarkable thing in life is being a small part of something bigger. The internet can be really good at making you feel small. But the simple act of watching a TV show—or movie, or internet video—with people you care about can make even a shell feel big.