They Called Him Mostly Harmless

I cannot with these internet sleuths, they are ridiculous, sitting at their computers, harassing real people and only thinly doing good things. Then they try to lay claim to discoveries that they are loosely connected to uncovering. Centering a documentary around these people gives them notoriety that they simply do not deserve. The story itself is interesting if you're willing to weed through the self-centered commentary by the sleuths and focus on the mystery. The ending is pretty good, but mostly goes to show how off kilter many of the tangents the "facebook group" took were, just doing too much.

As "They Called Him Mostly Harmless" (2024 release; 89 min.) opens, it is "July 23, 2018", and someone calls 911 to report they found a dead body on a trail in southwest Florida. No name, no credit card, no photo ID. Who is this person? In a parallel story, we are introduced to Christie, who loves to do some internet sleuthing in these types of missing John or Jane Doe cases... At this point we are 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from documentarian Patricia Gillespie ("The Fire That Took Her"). Here she reassesses the strange case that is the disappearance of someone nicknamed "Mostly Harmless" on the Appalachian Trail. But in fact, the documentary is just as much about the digital sleuthing communities that are out there to "help" solve unsolved cases like this one. Let me just say that it ain't a pretty picture: petty infighting, name calling, (in)competence, you name, they have it. A reporter from Wired Magazine also gets involved, and the contrast between the reporter and the sleuthing communities couldn't be starker. At just an hour and a half, this documentary clips by in no time.

"They Called Him Mostly Harmless" premiered on HBO several weeks ago, and is also streaming on Max, where I caught it the other night. If you are a fan of true crime documentaries, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

The only thing that I'm really taking away from this documentary is what a loathsome narcissistic P. O. S. Christie is. She doesn't really seem to care at all about the case, she just wants to be the one to solve it. I know exactly what kind of person she is; she gets off on power, on being in charge. Basically, an entitled Karen. The one comment that defined her, made after she shot her mouth off about 'cracking the case', wasn't anything to do with any kind of regret about making a mistake in identifying the hiker, it was about how the mistake would make her look. What an awful human being. Christie, I hope you're reading this. Do better. Be better.

If you've ever seen one of the interminable Netflix true crime docs where they cram 30 minutes of information into 3 hours, you have seen this documentary. The balance of this thing comprises people who don't leave the house talking about their online obsessions with people they don't know. The rest of the documentary is people opining, speculating, and drawing lines where there is no evidence. It's such a spectacular bore. You'd be better off reading a Wikipedia page and the. Getting on with the rest of your day. It's the documentary equivalent of this review, where you just keep going because you have space they're requiring you to fill.

The internet sleuthing dimension got in the way of a really compelling story imo. I don't mind that they talked about the search and the communities cultivated online (emphasis on "cult"). But I wish the producers didn't focus so much on those elements. A nice tight one-hour doc about a man whose isolation led him permanently into the wilderness- and whose identity was only discovered through new technology, crowdfunding and the will of strangers- would have been solid. Instead, too much time was spent on the strangers. The more "serious" it got the more I laughed, and the film lost its punch in the process.

I still think it's worth watching, tho. I won't jump on the hate bandwagon lol. For one, I had never heard anything about his story before and it left me with plenty of food for thought. While this man did something very few (if any) of us would ever do, his life was still surprisingly relatable. How much of that has to do with what you know about him, and how much of it has to do with what you don't?

I thought the quote the producers found from Adams' book was a gem, and really captured the central theme of the project: "Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future." Such a pointed reminder for everyone involved: be it those of us watching at home; characters who participated *from home; and maybe most notably "Mr. Harmless" himself, who could never find his way home at all.