Christmas Every Day

Here’s a 13-minute documentary that’s worth your time. It follows a pair of sisters, 11 and 12 years old respectively, who are pursuing/being pushed by their parents into careers as “influencers” — that is, people who advertise products on the Internet, in this case products for tween girls. The products in question appear to be largely makeup, clothes, and workout equipment.

With their parents’ permission, I began filming the sisters’ daily lives as influencers; in this short documentary, “Christmas, Every Day,” they shift between performance and reality. Peyton and Lyla, who were 11 and 12 at the time of filming, see themselves as instilling confidence, positivity and a girl-power attitude for other girls — ideas that I wanted to explore within the broader context of modern consumerism.

Whether as creators or viewers or consumers, children are spending more time online at younger and younger ages. What kid wouldn’t want a stream of likes and gifts, waking up to the feeling of, as Peyton and Lyla’s parents put it, “Christmas, every day”? What does it mean to be participants in a larger social media system that encourages and even demands certain behaviors from its users, especially women and girls?

In a time of immense wealth disparity, influencer culture has created a more fantastical kind of American dream. (Perhaps that’s why nearly one-third of preteens say becoming an influencer is a career goal.) Seeing the field’s potential for a steady income — not to mention the prestige of an ever-growing follower count — some parents encourage it. I sought to go behind the scenes of this new creator economy with curiosity and a focus on the girls’ experiences, aiming to allow viewers to come to their own conclusions.

A particularly fascinating moment is when the sisters’ parents talk about how being influencers — that is, people at the top of the culture-wide Ponzi scheme pyramid that requires ever-more people to buy ever-less essential things, in order to keep the consumer capitalist machine humming along — will allow their daughters to escape for the drudgery of 9 to 5 jobs, by being “their own boss.”

“It’s Christmas every day for them” the girls’ father says, since every day an assortment of “free gifts,” as they say in the biz, arrives at their door, ready to be shilled via the wonders of the Internet.

I assume Daddy isn’t familiar with William Dean Howells’ once-famous short story of that name, and that the filmmaker is.