Review: Wrinkles the Clown Is a Meta Commentary on Trolling in the Digital Age

Wrinkles the Clown, the alias of a Southwest Florida man whose identity remains unknown to this day, started out offering his services—mainly consisting of scaring children in order to dissuade them from doing something “naughty”—by plastering stickers on lampposts with his photo and phone number on them. A parent may threaten to call Wrinkles if their child does something they’re not supposed to, or even hire him to make a surprise appearance under the child’s bed. A short-lived frenzy around Wrinkles was triggered by his mysterious sightings, akin to Bigfoot’s or the Loch Ness monster’s, which may or may not turn out to have been a meticulously planned marketing stunt.

A documentary like Michael Beach Nichols’s Wrinkles the Clown, about a scary clown whose call to fame rests solely on his having gone viral, might seem as gimmicky as its main subject’s notoriety—yet another film trying to tap into the popular vacuity of internet life, forcing the logic of the meme into a cinematic structure to no avail. In some ways, Nichols’s portrait of the man behind the coulrophobia stunt is indeed an unsustainable exercise in repackaging the fragmented and fickle nature of social media spectacle into long form. That’s until halfway into Wrinkles the Clown, when we realize that the director, too, has been pulling a prank on his own audience. When the gimmick within the gimmick comes to life, the gimmick becomes, rather, a meta commentary on the documentary’s subject matter: the infantile pleasures of clowning and trolling that proliferate online but certainly precede digitality.

It’s difficult to be more specific about the mid-act about-face of Wrinkles the Clown without spoiling its most redeeming quality. Let’s just say that when that shift occurs, Wrinkles, whose face we haven’t yet seen except in extreme close-ups, turns out to have been a red herring. Nichols’s tactic lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles, finally enabling us to reflect on issues such as sadistic enjoyment, the end of authenticity, the inherently fictitious nature of even the most pseudo-realistic representation, and, most ominously, how medieval our methods for “educating” children still are.

Wrinkles the Clown ultimately becomes a commentary on the ways in which fad-obsessed digital culture reduces spontaneity, authenticity, and chance into a set of aesthetic, and synthetic, conventions. Drama is no longer a question of emotion, but of standardized mise-en-scène, like clown makeup. The world that makes Wrinkles a star is the same one that allows for the Kardashians to claim that their TV series is “real and unscripted” with a straight face. It’s a world desensitized to falsehood, where all is controlled and choreographed, especially feelings like fear, and that defense mechanism borne out of it: violence.

Interviews with parents who hired Wrinkles as a way of sugarcoating child abuse with a whimsical sheen, a sort of replacement for spanking, can be disturbing but not surprising. More fascinating are the children who adulate Wrinkles as a way of performing their own cruelty. One boy is obsessed with wearing Wrinkles’s wig, candidly fantasizing about using the clown’s image to attack other kids. “Hello, Wrinkles, I need you to come to my house and kidnap a little girl,” says another child on a voicemail to the clown. Other children keep calling Wrinkles’s number only to hang up as soon as he answers, overwhelmed by the adrenaline of getting caught and punished. Yet other little kids leave Wrinkles voicemail messages professing their love for him, or telling him that he’s their role model.

Courting punishment, of the other or the self, are hardly extraordinary fantasies for children to have, as they form the very core of one of Freud’s most iconic essays, “A Child Is Being Beaten.” But in Wrinkles the Clown, cruelty as the go-to currency between adults and children feels reciprocal, as if it was cruelty itself that linked them as members of the same race.