Before he came out to introduce the film at the Toronto International Film Festival Eddie Huang was labelled as a multi hyphenated talent. Between being a chef, being a director, writing a book, and during his time with Vice being a reporter of sorts he’s certainly made a name for himself. In his new documentary ‘Vice is Broke’ Eddie tries to perform an autopsy on the media company and dive into how exactly it came crashing down.

He opens the film with talking about the early days of Vice, being a magazine in Montreal and talk about two of the company’s founders Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith. The two had a schism as Vice was becoming the giant that we know it as today, Gavin wanted to keep the company edgy at any cost, to the point where some it’s articles most closely resemble the most toxic 4chan column, racism and all. Shane on the other hand wanted the company to make money, while keeping some of the edge that made the organization cool to begin with.

Eddie does a great job of sitting down with past members of the Vice team and trying to sort through their times with the company. The setting is always different, the opening is him outside a bar sitting on a stool, in other interviews he’s visiting people on rooftops, in their apartments smoking a joint, one former Vice teammate is interviewed in a swan boat. This move keeps all these interviews very personal, and allows Eddie’s natural charm to pull more of the story out of his friends.

The most shocking interview is with Gavin McInnes himself. Eddie never worked at Vice at the same time as Gavin, so has less of a personal connection with him than many of the others. Gavin left Vice and later founded the far right organization The Proud Boys. The interview is tense at first, but Eddie’s thesis is an interesting one. He claims that Gavin cannot actually feel the way he does “about all of it.” That his racism and prejudices are a bit to unmask other actual racists.

It makes sense for a guy, particularly a non white guy, to refuse to believe that the man that founded a company that Eddie found so much joy at, is a virulent racist. I’m not sure I buy Eddie’s take personally, but it lead to a solid interview where Eddie was able to have a non accusatory conversation with Gavin. I can kind of see where Eddie’s coming from, Gavin is odd for sure, but he’s charismatic and charming to a degree. It’s hard to believe that someone like that can be capable of forming a group like The Proud Boys that is so full of hate. Gavin reminds me a lot of the things I would read in /b/ in 2005, the “random” forum of 4chan. He’s edgy and funny, he says things specifically to shock. 

Many of the former reporters talk about working with him. None of them have horrible things to say about their time working with Gavin, they talk about shocking jokes he played, or things he said. But none of them speak ill of their time at Vice. Maybe that’s how they’re dealing with their trauma, but it felt more like speaking of a time when you were young and dumb and liked idiot jokes.

After the Gavin interview the documentary starts taking a broader look at the failures of Vice as it became larger and larger. How Vice broke the mold in the way we think about reporting. Fact checking was not a thing they had a lot of knowledge of, so it wasn’t something they did very much. It created for faster, more intimate story telling. But also meant that the publication was coming into any story with a lot of personal tilt.

Shane Smith’s version of the company still had a lot of edge to it. It was disruptive, and after being acquired by A&E networks became eventually became valued at 4.4 billion dollars. And yet it would all come crashing down a few years later. It was a flash in the pan, they were not able to keep feeding the beast that is capitalism. A beast that requires constant growth if anything is going to survive under normal conditions, let alone something that skyrockets in such a fashion.

At the end Vice is Broke leaves me feeling concerned about the future of media and journalism at large. If these institutions are going to have to be profitable, the click based market does not feel like a way for them to survive. At least not while people at the top are selling other people’s stories for billions, while their staff is still waiting to get paid thousands. The end of the film is a scene from when Eddie worked at Vice. He’s talking to a Peruvian salt miner and he tells him how much a jar of the pink Himalayan salt goes for in the grocery store. The miner looks stunned and tries to tell him that that’s ok, he likes his quiet life, he’s a humble man. But there’s a look of betrayal in his eyes. If any of us are supposed to survive in this world, how can these corporations keep treating us like this?

4/5