As its starting point, I Would Like to Rage takes a recurring motif in the online role-playing videos of a streaming show called Critical Role.
The show follows the tabletop adventures of a Dungeons and Dragons group made up of voice actors who act out the emotions of their characters as their various adventures unfold. The one exception to this is a character with a special ability called ‘Rage’ who initiates it by calmly stating: “I Would Like to Rage.” The catchphrase has become a meme, but in its counter-intuitive politeness, filmmaker Chloe Galibert-Laine finds a hook to explore the prescribed ways that anger is permitted by the measure of societal norms.
Galibert-Laine is one of the foremost practitioners of the video essay form known as desktop documentary. Films within this mode use the familiar set-up of a laptop background as the scenery onto which their investigative drama unfolds, opening browser windows and typing on apps – often in the service of examining some facet of modern, online culture. In particular, Galibert-Laine’s collaborations with Kevin B. Lee in Bottled Songs 1-4 (2021) and work like Watching the Pain of Others (2019) are some of the most fascinating examples of the mode.
I Would Like to Rage is no exception, using a variety of text, photo, and video windows popping up throughout to dig into the way that wrath is presented online – almost exclusively as an outlet for the injustice suffered by male commentators. The film ponders how being denied access to such cathartic emotion can be felt by those who are discouraged from accessing it, merging that line of inquiry into a quote from the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal about how reality develops from performance. ‘Act it and rage will come,’ Galibert-Laine seems to deduce, and her playful attempt to follow this advice raises questions both about the oft-derided performativity of online sentiment and the level to which social regulations are so ingrained as to see us self-govern our emotions.
