Dìdi: Myspace, a Mother’s Love, and Other Relics of the Past

Does childhood stay the same, even as everything else changes? Dìdi (2024) is a semi-autobiographical story told through masterful cinematography and the graphics of the late-2000s interweb. As the director of what’s bound to be the first of many coming-of-age films set at the turn of a new millennium, Sean Wang submerges the audience in the nostalgia of rising internet culture at every opportunity. From outdated slang typed on AOL Instant Messenger to eyesore Myspace pages, viewers are confronted with the familiarity of the time period through the novelty of seeing it on the big screen through the perspective of childhood. However, the film’s biggest accomplishment is its ability to prove that though the human experience has become increasingly interwoven with the internet, one’s emotions and need for human connection are still timeless. 

Dìdi follows Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American, as he trudges through the end of summer vacation before his first year of high school. With his sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), soon off to college, his house is suspended in a state of stressful disarray. However, because his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), is busy enduring the scoldings of his grandmother, Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua), while her husband is overseas for work, Chris is left to his own devices. The film is divided between real-life camera shots and computer visuals, so the audience gets to know Chris both online and offline—how he wants to be seen and who he really is.

On the internet, Myspace simplifies Chris’s life into bullet points and graphics, and only the best of his and his friends’ memories are preserved on his YouTube channel. While his channel may be the dumping ground for anything from skating tricks with bad lighting to shakily recorded pranks on his neighbors, it’s clear that the creative outlet for his amateur films means a lot to him. The audience watches him type out his texts, delete them, and repeat, working through his emotions in real time while attempting to appeal to Madi (Mahaela Park), his longtime crush. This makes for a comical scene as Chris repeatedly lies his way through their conversations, claiming to share her love for Paramore and A Walk to Remember despite never having heard of them, only for Madi to humiliatingly call his bluff later on.

Though, at times, the numerous online interactions between characters quicken the pace of the film by compressing crucial plot points into short lines of text, they create a fitting, rushed atmosphere, capturing how quickly things progress in internet life. The feeling of urgency with each line is best captured when Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang), Chris’s closest friends, hold him down after taking his phone. Fahad impersonates Chris, sending a flurry of texts to Madi—and securing a date with her in a matter of seconds. On the internet, Chris is as cool as he’d like to be. His real self is much less forgiving.

Chris’s Taiwanese household is not portrayed subtly within the film—Chinese characters litter his family’s calendar, and his family members casually switch between speaking Mandarin and English. As Chris engages with his culture, however, he wishes to distance himself from its burdens. He resents the way his identity only ever seems to drag him down and negatively distinguish him from others, such as when Madi tells him he is handsome “for an Asian,” which leads him to start pretending to be half-Asian to his friends. His feelings of inadequacy are only reinforced by the comparisons made between him and Max (Jayden Chiang), a family friend who seems to outperform him in every way that matters. Chris is consumed by his insecurity, and he isn’t alone in this.

Chungsing, despite her efforts, never manages to live up to the impossible expectations placed upon her. She reaches out to her son and mother-in-law, taking an interest in and showing her support for Chris’s hobbies while taking care of the house so as to ease the burden on Nai Nai. In return, though, they only recognize her for what she lacks. Chris diminishes the responsibilities she takes on despite making her life even more difficult in the process, while Nai Nai criticizes her parenting skills, failing to recognize Chungsing’s efforts as a single parent due to her husband’s absence. She constantly feels as though she’s not doing enough for her kids’ futures, which is epitomized in a cringe-inducing scene in which Chungsing must take her daughter’s acceptance to UC San Diego being regarded as “decent enough” by Max’s mother. Max’s mother uses Chungsing’s struggle to break into the painting industry as a cautionary tale when she discovers that Chris is interested in pursuing a career in film. This pushes Chungsing to a tipping point in which she signs Chris up to attend the same tutoring class as Max despite Chris’s many objections, straining their relationship even further. 

Conventional family dynamics normally portrayed by the media are upturned by the Wang household—Chris’s feelings towards his loved ones are nothing short of complex. He resents and clashes with his sister, calling her expletives and messing with her things—but he steals her clothes and tries them on as often as he can before she leaves. He can’t tolerate the presence of his mother, seeing her existence as a threat to his passions and free will, but he is there for her when his Nai Nai belittles the sacrifices she makes for their family. Although their interactions within the film are oftentimes clipped, if not outright hostile, the actors’ respective skills and the chemistry between them work to create a heart-wrenchingly relatable environment. Izaac Wang’s careful impassivity in the moments when no one is watching adds a layer of insincerity and instability to the performances Chris puts on for his friends and online, and Joan Chen’s frustrating yet equally captivating silence is notably impactful.

The theme of unstable identity permeates throughout the film. Time and again, the people Chris surrounds himself with shape his personality, even as they phase in and out of his life. Fahad and Soup call him “Wang-Wang”; with them, he’s a third wheel who captures all of their moments of adventure and humor on film but never exhibits any of his own. When Chris attempts to break down his own walls, he recounts a crude story to some girls involving him and his friends desecrating a squirrel’s corpse—a social faux pas that gets him iced out from the friend group. 

Eventually, Chris befriends a group of skaters; with them, he’s given a chance to explore the side of himself that had previously only existed online, introducing himself as the cameraman they’ll need to record their skating tricks. Chris erases all traces online of the amateur videos he made with his friends in an effort to maintain the professionalism he desperately wants to exude, committing time to improving his actual filmmaking skills. However, after snapping at his mother in an effort to appear cool to them, his new friends express distaste for his behavior towards her and stop hanging out with him. Chris is pushed further into social isolation with every failed attempt at fitting in with the crowd, with only his unfiltered anger and child-like immaturity to blame. The film underscores this through digital graphics that uncomfortably simplify his emotional turmoil: out of discomfort, Chris blocks Madi instead of communicating with her after she attempts to be sexually intimate with him, and his camera loses focus at a pivotal moment in recording one of the skaters’ tricks, conveying a foreboding feeling of failure that resonates through the audience.

By the end of the film, Chris hasn’t learned the secrets to mastering social interactions, nor has he managed to fully understand himself, but neither has his mother. Chris breaks down after an intense fight with his mother, running away from home. When he returns, he has a heart-to-heart with her. Chungsing confesses that the insecurity Chris feels within his own home isn’t completely unfounded and that she has often thought about what could’ve been had she never married, never had kids, and pursued her art career more strongly. However, she reaffirms that despite her dissatisfaction with her career, she’ll always love Chris for who he is. Just like that, Chris ceases to view his mother as a mere void to swallow his anger and the anger of everyone around her, but rather a real person with real emotions who may understand him better than anyone. 

One step at a time, Chris learns to be himself. He joins his new school’s art club, finally bridges the gap between him and his sister before she leaves for college, and forgives his friends and family for their shortcomings. There’s no picture-perfect ending for him, as with every other teenager’s life, but there’s growth—which never truly ends.