I know the exact moment when Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin swept me off my feet. It’s when Mats Steen, a gamer in his early 20s from Oslo, ‘unlikes’ the Facebook pictures of his fellow gamers.
The gamers’ guild is meeting up in person, and Mats isn’t able to join them. So, at first, he likes the pictures of them laughing, drinking, doing silly things. But then, overcome with envy (and probably helplessness), he ‘unlikes’ those pictures.
It’s the ultimate mark of respect from Ree and his crew to their protagonist, Mats – a young man grappling with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a debilitating disease that has imprisoned him to a wheelchair.
While the documentary does intend on being an ode to Mats, it doesn’t make the mistake (like many films in the genre) of not keeping in mind the line between an ‘inspirational’ life story and hagiography. It’s important to remember the subject’s flaws as a man, to take inspiration from him. Hence, by showcasing his protagonist’s petty and bitter moments, Ree affords Mats his humanity.
The Remarkable life of Ibelin borrows its name from Mats’s alias in World of Warcraft, a multiplayer computer game that he inhabits as a private detective named Ibelin Redmoore. He was introduced to this game by his parents, when they realised he couldn’t be outdoors. Even as Mats’s condition worsened, he never quite stopped gaming, thanks to the special equipment that allowed him to use a computer with his functioning fingers.
What starts off as a hobby slowly morphs into an obsessive, vicarious way of living. Role-playing in the game, Mats invents a virtual life for himself, whose magnitude the family doesn’t understand till after his passing.
In a world where virtual identities are spawning cautionary tales around us, Ree’s documentary takes the premise of a differently abled person connecting with the world through a computer, and emerges with a fairy tale. It’s sweet, it’s curious, it’s emotional; but it always earns our tears.
Watching this in India, it’s hard to shake off the film’s nearly utopian, first-world setting. Almost as if the documentary’s world was a computer-generated simulation unto itself. Where everyone acts in the best faith, there’s almost no deceit (except Mats hiding his condition from his fellow gamers, because he doesn’t want their pity) and how almost everyone acts in the most clear-eyed way, never giving in to the temptation of melodrama and unnecessary tears.
The film begins with the announcement of Mats dying, but it’s what sparks off the family’s discovery of his other life.
It’s magical how Ree and his crew reconstruct Mats’s offline and online worlds with the help of archival footage from another documentary using a voiceover of his blog posts (which are read out by an actor), the family’s home videos, interviews with his family members and some friends from the gamers’ group, and with that also animating Mats’s life in the game with the help of a 42,000-page transcript (which a fellow gamer avails to the family and the filmmaking crew), allowing them to visualise Mats’s virtual life.
The end product is a film that doesn’t just feel like a paean to an extraordinary life, but one that revels in forensically examining mundane details of an ordinary life. What many of his family members didn’t realise is that an ordinary life is the only gift Mats wanted. And even though he didn’t realise it, he had got that, albeit under trying circumstances.
According to his father’s estimates, Mats spent close to 20,000 hours in the game. What at first glance feels like a flippant way of passing time in (what onlookers might term) an uneventful life reveals itself to be an engrossing, rich life filled with many anecdotes.
Mats may have only been able to communicate using his keyboard, but that didn’t stop him from flirting with girls, using his wit to win over people and connect with people through their most challenging circumstances by simply being a listener. One of the most remarkable things about Ree’s film is how it forces us to re-examine our notions of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’.
Ibelin meets Rumour – revealed to be a girl called Lisette living in the Netherlands – his first crush. Mats might not have had a shot at a normal dating life during high school, but in the game he can infuse his personality and wit into his avatar. It turns out this a charming concoction, because Rumour almost immediately takes a liking to him.
There comes a time when Lisette’s parents are worried about her falling grades, because of which they take away her computer (as a result Rumour disappears from the game for days). Mats writes a wisely argued email to her parents, pleading to their rational selves, getting them to reconsider their decision. Lisette calls Mats a ‘real’ friend – which is one way to describe a pen pal.
Mats also helps a mother-son duo overcome their distance. Xenia has trouble reaching out to her son, Mikkel. When she asks Mats for advice, he suggests she make him a part of their guild. As the mother and son start playing together, their connection grows. What starts off with gestures of affection within the game slowly translates to real life.
Is love in the virtual world real then? Mikkel recounts how Mats gave him the confidence to go up to people in the game’s world – something he imbibed into his real life. He confesses it’s only because of Mats that he went from being shut in his room, to tolerating people.
Is this only a trivial computer game then? Does it have no real-life consequence? Is the bond restricted to when we’re in a virtual world, fighting an enemy? Ibelin asks us to recontextualise what we consider real and what may be truthful – even in the depths of a fantasy.
But Mats is no saint, Ree’s film makes sure to remind us. There comes a time when Lisette feels betrayed by him. He’s shown to be a womaniser in the game, a sign of his growing restlessness as Lisette lives it up on her social media feed. He uses the game as an outlet – venting his frustration, being rude to fellow gamers, living as hard as he possibly can.
The guild’s head, Kai, even offers to talk to him in person, which he expectedly rebuffs. The pressure partly comes from keeping his medical condition a secret, which makes his friends increasingly suspicious and concerned. When he comes clean to the guild through a blog post, there’s a stunned, stoic silence. Everyone is too shocked – but they do tell him that nothing will change.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin becomes an elegy for outsiders, misfits, unconventionally-abled people. Not everyone might have the same skill-set, looks or mannerism – but does it make their story less important?
Mats spent a large part of his life confined to a wheelchair and in front of a screen. So, did his life amount to nothing? He lived under trying circumstances – but he had crushes, made new friends, mediated fights, took part in them, tendered apologies, was accepted and respected for who he was – not how he looked.
By the end, we see something Mats might not have been able to. Despite its challenges, Mats did get his wish of a respectful, ordinary life; where he left the world better than he found it.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is streaming on Netflix.
