(REVIEW) “Gothix” is a timely and moving documentary about the universality of cancel culture, tribalism, our need for belonging and, ultimately, how faith may hold the answer to navigating all of it. 

It’s probably not controversial to say we currently live in a weird cultural moment. On the one hand, aided by technology, and both cultural values and legal protections around free speech, people are probably more open to say what they want and reach a wider audience doing so than at any time in history. On the other hand, many high-profile people (including comedians like Jerry Seinfield) are increasingly sounding the alarm about “cancel culture,” where online communities organize to harass and deplatform people who they determine said or did something offensive or evil — but not illegal.

The documentary “Gothix” tells the story of popular Twitch streamer Vanessa Rosa (known online as “Gothix”) who, having achieved her dream of being a full-time internet personality, loses it all when she states a controversial opinion that makes her the target of a concentrated harassment and boycott campaign by her friends and peers. The experience nearly leads her to take her own life, but eventually she becomes a popular political influencer and — ultimately — develops faith in Jesus. The film recently won an award for best documentary feature at the Austin Liftoff Film Festival.

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What’s instantly compelling about Rosa’s story (and why it’s easy to see why someone made it a documentary) is how it subverts cultural expectations on multiple fronts. We traditionally see White males talking about “woke culture” or “cancel culture,” and we typically see young people as moving away from organized religion (with the highly reported rise of the “nones”) and becoming politically progressive (especially if you’re Black and female). But Vanessa was a Black woman and goth progressive millennial Twitch streamer who got canceled by her own online community for defending criticism of Black Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” live-action remake, then became an “anti-woke” “red-piller” and eventually a Christian. Regardless of how you feel about where she ended up culturally and religiously, you can’t help but be curious how she got there.

Director Graeme Wilson tells the story in a very straightforward way — yet uses very clever and well-executed creative choices to do so. In many ways, the style of the film is very much of the modern generation of filmmakers who has grown up with internet language without it becoming garish. Since many of the events from the documentary took place online, much of the documentary is pulled together by taking clips from livestreams, X posts, YouTube videos and previous interviews where these events were actually happening and arranging them to tell the story — making you feel like you’re on the internet where Rosa lived so much of this story. These are spliced with the documentary crew’s interviews with Rosa, which start out fairly traditional in the relative invisibility of the filmmaker and his crew, yet slowly starts to unfold for these filmmakers as an important part of Rosa’s journey, particularly when it comes to her arrival as a person of faith. This convergence of stories is understated, but by the end feels deeply intimate and powerful.  

Rosa didn’t start out a believer, having absorbed a lot of bad attitudes about Christians growing up. So when she wanted to find a way to express her spirituality and her need for belonging in high school, she was attracted to the Wiccan crowd.

“I wasn't raised religious at all,” she told me in an interview for Religion Unplugged. “In high school, I had always believed there was something out there, but in high school I fell into the whole Wiccan scene. I really think a lot of it was socially constructed because all my friends were sort of doing that. So I fell into that, and through high school, I slowly started to develop animosity towards Christians because I sort of believed a lie that Christians hate certain groups of people and I didn't understand the context of what those things meant. So by the time I became a Twitch streamer, I was very anti-Christian. I wasn't Wiccan anymore, but again, being a product of that environment, you're sort of exposed to a lot of people who are not religious. So I kept feeding into it, I guess.” 

She eventually found that the community of people she’d really like to join was the one who made their living online by playing video games live for other people to watch and interact with them as they play: Twitch streamers. 

“So I naturally go online and I start searching, ‘OK, who are the most popular streamers? What are they like? What do they do?’ Without even me explicitly trying to be a carbon copy of these people, I started to pick up on a lot of their mannerisms and I started to learn, ‘OK, what are the things that get me views? What are the things that upset people?’ So you over time start to mold yourself into this person that really wasn't what I was in high school. Maybe a more extreme variation of it. More specifically, through Twitch, I started to become a social justice warrior because I thought, ‘If I'm angry about this specific thing, people like me for that. They want to come in my chat and support me,’” she said. 

Just like with the Wiccan group, this community had a set of beliefs to which, in order to be a part of it in good standing, you had to assent. Rosa called this  “social justice warrior” beliefs, where you stand up for marginalized groups against those who might harm them either practically or psychologically.

“It sort of creates this dehumanizing aspect towards people who hurt feelings. So if, ‘Hey, that's a racist, that's a homophobe, that's a this and that.’ So when you know that these people are attached to these labels, you don't see the humanity in them so you can justify you being a jerk towards them because they're the oppressor,” she said. 

Rosa got a taste of this herself when she said online that she didn’t think it was racist if people didn’t like how Disney’s live action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” race-bent Ariel to be Black. Suddenly, her friends she’d made in that community turned on her, harassing her and pushing people to boycott her. This took a massive toll on her mental health and her ability to make a living. She even attempted to take her own life.

She recalled: “A lot of the people who were doing this to me were people that I trusted, people that were a part of my community, who supported me, who would come up to me whenever I'd go to conventions (and say), ‘I love you, Gothix.’ So it messed with my brain a lot. Also, I had put all of my purpose into content creation. I said, ‘This is the reason for my existence as the top content creator.’ I was putting everything into that field. Then when all this happened I'm like, ‘Well, what do I do now? Do I go back to corporate America? How do I recover from this? My friends don't even want to talk to me anymore.’”

Rosa’s story highlights the messy dynamics of how online life and work life intersects with both social and celebrity cancel culture. When does online social or celebrity accountability turn into cyber bullying?

“When people hear cyber bullying, they think, ‘Just turn off the computer.’ It's not that simple if you make a living on the internet,” she said. “That's why I get so concerned where a lot of people are trying to encourage others, ‘Yeah, yeah. Get a job online.’ I feel like that's just creating the perfect environment for cancel culture because as these people were doing, they were reaching out to my sponsors, they were trying to get me canceled from a lot of my paid contracts. … I switched over to YouTube at one point, and they would follow me to YouTube. It's like, it doesn't matter where I go, you just want me to not exist on the internet ever again is what it seemed like.”

When she recovered enough to get back into streaming, Rosa started to do more political and cultural content. It was then that she got embraced by the politically red-pill community of online groups disaffected with social justice politics like her. 

Rosa wasn’t naive. She knew that her new communities that she was entering have their own taboos, that if she violates them, that she could be set out on her own there as well. Even so, the fact that freethinking was part of the red pill identity meant that there was more room for disagreement than what she had before.

“it felt good to inspire people: ‘Hey, I felt this way and I didn't think I was allowed to think this. You gave me a different perspective. You helped me come out of my shell and speak my mind.’ It was really good to see that my suffering has aided in some way, but I also from the get was very cautious to get attached to these people because I saw how quickly people on the left can just switch on you when I was on Twitch,” she said. “They can just switch on you. So it's like, ‘Well, you guys — eventually, I'm going to say something that you're not going to like.’” 

It didn’t take long to find such differences with that community, whether it was hating the fact that she was anti-abortion, or whether it was a deeper bitterness than she found off putting. Then she started getting challenged by some of the Christians in her chats. 

“One day I was doing a live stream, and I started to notice a lot of Christians coming into my chat, which was very interesting because I didn't think much of it, but I did notice it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Wow, there's a lot of Christians following me.’ Then one stream this person chats and they're like, ‘Where do you get your standard for morality?’ I'm like, it stumped me. I was like, ‘I don't know.’ That's when I started to really get the wheels turning. ‘How do I know that I'm right about literally anything and they don't know? How does this work?’” 

Then, when Wilson saw one of her videos, he reached out to make a documentary about her. She agreed.

“He flew out to Rhode Island, and during that time he shared the gospel with me,” she said. “I was warming up to the idea of God and the Bible because of how depressed I had been. My logic was like, ‘What do I have to lose? I've got nothing going for me right now. There's no point.’ So I thank God for all of these situations that I went in because otherwise I feel like I would've still been stuck in my own ways.”

Her mental health then dramatically improved. (Something that shouldn’t be surprising since it’s well known that the regular practice of religion radically improves one's mental health). Yet even here, she said she was aware of the danger surrounding cancellation from some circles. While most of the Christians she’s met have been great, there are definitely some whom she describes as “legalistic.” 

She added: “I'll get a lot of people (who ask), ‘When are you going to grow your hair out? When are you going to remove your tattoos? When are you going to do this? Why are you acting like this?’ It's eerily similar to the left in a way where it's like they have become the God, in a way, because if we were to sit there and open up the Bible and say, ‘OK, where are you getting all of these demands from, this idea that if I wear black I'm somehow invoking demonic spirits onto my YouTube channel? Where's this coming from?’ It sounds like a cultural thing.”

In many ways, this story is about how every community you join can cancel you for something. This story will be very familiar to religious people — whatever side of a debate they’re coming from. Many religious people have experienced being ostracized by their communities for saying the wrong thing. Author Aimee Byrd recently wrote about being harassed and canceled by her conservative Christian community for pushing back on what she thought were sexist ideas about the role of women in church. Meanwhile, others have looked everywhere for a community that would accept them and finally found that love and belonging within a religious community. 

So how does Rosa deal with the fact that she could be canceled at any time? She said, for her, it’s a relationship with God

“What I have learned to do is to fixate my eyes on Jesus because otherwise you're going to fall back into the trap of trying to please everyone, which is what I started doing,” she said. “It's like I became a Christian and I'm like, ‘Oh, I got to please all of the Christians,’ and that's impossible.” 

While in many ways the documentary intrigues by subverting many of our expectations, in other ways, for Christians, it’s a tale as old as time. You search for the meaning in places other than God, in other people, in work and find that those can’t satisfy. Then you turn to God and find what you’ve been looking for all along.

“God has to come first above all things. Before I even turn on my computer I have to open up the Bible because otherwise I have my priorities messed up,” Rosa said. “Before I make a video I have to have to get in prayer. I have to lean on God to understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing as opposed to me just trying to figure it out, which is exactly what I was doing before just like, ‘Ah, this might work.’ But the difference now is that I actually have someone to help me and to guide me, and I should lean on him instead of just doing everything on my own.” 

“Gothix” is available to stream exclusively on LOOR.TV. 

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.