Ana has a normal life. She is twenty nine years old and lives in the flat, broad farming country of western Norway. She shows me the view outside her window – quaint streets with dark brick houses, muddy footpaths through frost-kissed fields, long grass and hedgerows carpeted in dewy cobwebs. She works at a charity shop in the heart of her community, selling musty second-hand clothes to people from the village. Her boyfriend works a few miles away at a bigger town in a car showroom. Ana's life is charmingly straight forward and though she has been welcomed in to the sleepy little community in which she now lives, she stands out as someone who came to it later in life.
Ana was not always Ana. For 4 years, between 2008 and 2012, Ana went by the name Alex Winter. She was co-owner, co-operator, co-producer and co-star of a website that enjoyed a large cult following throughout its run. The website was Savealexsavejon.com.
“We were always close when we were growing up,” Ana says. “He was only eleven months older than me, and we looked so alike, we would tell people that we were twins and that's how the characters of Jon and Alex came about. We wanted to make an art piece and play these characters who were just exaggerated versions of ourselves. We made them twins, we gothed up a bit for it, then we started making the videos.”
Posting videos to Youtube under the account name AlexJon, the two built up a little following. There videos are dark and strange, featuring long shots of seemingly unrelated landscapes. They cut quickly back and forth, feature sudden shifts in tone and colour. They were posted erratically, sometimes three in a day, then not at all for months on end as the real life schedules of the siblings dictated.
“We did everything cheap,” Ana says. “The camera was second-hand and falling apart and half the features didn't work. We would buy bus tickets for the day and just ride around town, getting off at every stop and walking until we found something to film. Jon found editing software online and pirated it, sorry Adobe, and we taught ourselves how to edit.”
The videos were a hit. Posted with titles like 'Baby escapes', 'hanging tree' and 'new generation witch burning', the AlexJon channel built up a fan base. Alex and Jon were dark and disturbed figures – they revelled in horror and dread. Their videos had a sense of loneliness and isolation, the only people ever to appear were the siblings and they moved through locations that seemed devoid of life and almost separate from the rest of the world. Their audience fell in love with the strange twins and craved more and more content, begging them to make a feature length film or provide more. In response, Ana and her brother created a website.
“We wanted it to be about us – about these characters we had created. The videos we put up that got the most attention were always the ones featuring us. Our first video to hit some kind of milestone number of views, I can't remember what the number was, it was us taking turns to hold the camera and film each other walking along this really dark street between a series of underpasses. I was filming Jon and he suddenly started running and screaming and acting like we were being chased by something and I kept walking slowly and you could see him vanishing into the dark, then reappearing further along the path in the lights of the underpass, then vanishing again. Then I fell over sideways with the camera, as if I'd been attacked or passed out or something and we let the camera roll for like seven minutes showing nothing but this grimy underpass wall.”
SaveAlexSaveJon.com was launched with money donated by their fan base. However, the more time that the siblings spent as Alex and Jon Winter, the less seemed to separate them from their characters.
“For all intents and purposes, I lived as Alex Winter from 2008-2012.”
The videos on the website were distinctly different from the videos that had appeared on the Youtube channel. Though the sinister aesthetic and unsettling nature of the videos remained, the two featured more and more prominently and a narrative of sorts began to emerge. Jon and Alex were twins who had witnessed their parents' murder-suicide and retreated into their own little world as a coping mechanism. Their videos were a glimpse into their 'dark and twisted lives' which revolved primarily around acts of self-destruction and horror.
Save Alex, Save Jon was an interactive game. Among the regular updates, the two would post videos leading to dangerous situations and viewers of the site were prompted to either Save Alex or Save Jon, voting for who should be spared the horror of the situation.
“It started off relatively tame.” Ana says. We are sat outside an old-fashioned tea room in her village. Our conversation happens against a back drop of quiet chatter from inside, the hiss of a coffee machine, the gentle clatter of cutlery against fine china. “We would do what we always had, but we'd be looking for ways to hurt ourselves – loose nails, broken glass, anything sharp and we'd make a big show of...” Her voice trails off as she smokes. “We'd show this stuff and then the audience would have a week or whatever to vote on who got hurt.”
To begin with, the injuries and self-harm were fake. Ana and her brother spent weeks experimenting with a range of low-budget special effects in an attempt to semi-realistically fake a variety of injuries. At the time, reasonably priced digital cameras and software had led to a boom of amateur film making, so information on amateur special effects was plentiful – however, they were not intended for the gritty, close up, hand-held documentary style that Ana and her brother were specialising in.
“At some point,” she says with a sigh. “We just decided to do it.”
Ana invites me back to her house. She has built a life in the village and has no desire to make it more complicated. Within the privacy of her home, she rolls up her sleeves and shows me the criss-cross scars, the faded burns, the stitches.
“This was a broken piece of glass we found at an abandoned block of flats. This was a rusty iron key we found at a bus-stop, heated over a bonfire. This was from a screwdriver I think.”
The voting system inspired a strange partisanship in the fan base of the website. People had a favourite who they would vote to save every time the opportunity arose. People began creating badges, banners, viral images emblazoned with the message “Save Jon” or “Save Alex.”
“I got the worst of it,” Alex says. “I think maybe some of our fans were just getting sexually aroused by seeing a woman hurt. People voted to save Jon more often than save Alex. So Alex got hurt a lot.”
By 2012, Ana and her brother were living together in an apartment outside Oslo. Both had quit their jobs and were dedicated only to their website.
“We were role playing at home, on our own. I don't know why. We lived as Alex and Jon 24-hours a day. On the vary rare occasion that we'd see our parents, we'd act normally but we talked about it as 'acting', like a joke we were playing on our mother and father.”
Folie à deux, a French term meaning 'the madness of two', refers to a shared state of psychosis between two individuals. Paranoia, delusions, hysteria and even hallucinations can be transmitted from one individual to another, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of mental illness. Perhaps most terrifyingly, Folie à deux can strike at people with no history of mental illness and no other symptoms of psychosis, particularly in a situation of shared isolation.
“Yes, that is exactly what it was,” Ana tells me, without blinking. “It's been talked about a lot since then, but yes, we were developing this bizarre life around ourselves and excluding everything else. I don't know when I stopped thinking 'this is a character I play and this is an art project' and started thinking 'Alex is me and this is my life.'”
There are two types of Folie à deux. Folie imposée occurs when one stronger personality imposes their beliefs through force of will upon a secondary or weaker personality. Without the primary personality to enforce the beliefs, the secondary personality usually reverts to their prior state without medication or therapy. Folie simultanée occurs when both parties within the shared delusion contribute equally, shaping their own and each others hallucinations or paranoia in tandem.
“It was the second type,” Ana tells me. “Afterwards, people were desperate to paint me as some kind of victim of my brother, but that was never the case. We both believed, we both lived the life, we both became our characters. I thought as Alex, he thought as Jon and as time went by the borders between even those two personalities began to deteriorate. We became this almost amorphous entity that was Alex and Jon. Some times I would wake up and dress in his clothes and I would be Jon that day, or he would be Alex and we would just live those lives on those days.”
On November 2nd 2012, Ana and her brother uploaded the last video to the website. It was named 'Midnight drive'.
After two seconds of darkness, the camera shows the glowing orange dashboard of a car. Alex can be heard giggling from behind the camera as Jon revs the engine repeatedly. The footage cuts to a show pitch black fields outside the vehicle as it speeds along a bumpy dirt track. Alex's reflection can be seen in the windowpane she is filming through. In the background, a news broadcast is playing from Radio Norge. After a few moments, Jon switches the radio off and they drive in silence for three minutes.
The next shot shows Alex walking ahead of the camera dressed in a long black coat. She complains briefly about the path, one of the rare times that either of the siblings speak Norwegian in their videos. Jon struggles to hear her and asks her to repeat what she has said, she turns and stares dead-pan at the camera with wide eyes. The two freeze for seventeen seconds and then Alex rushes at the camera screaming.
There is a two minute long shot of trees in the distance, their leaves waving wildly in the wind. At one minute, thirteen of this shot, Jon starts singing Gloomy Sunday – a song known as The Hungarian Suicide song. He forgets the words and trails off.
The next shot is more walking, this time with Alex and Jon side by side, swapping the camera back and forth between them. They have a short conversation about the woods where they are headed. Alex explains that a witch lives in the woods and Jon replies that it is a devil. They argue back and forth for a while until Alex says she hopes the devil devours Jon. Jon says that he is the devil.
The footage suddenly cuts mid-conversation back to the car. It is parked at the side of the road beside a field, seemingly where the two have been walking towards the woods. From the back of the car, Jon takes a spade, a length of rope, a large black tarpaulin, several books, a map (which he tosses into the wind) and a knife.
The video returns to the previous scene of the two walking towards the woods. As they come close to the tree line Jon suddenly begins bolting for the woods screaming 'I am coming Satan!'. Alex can be heard screaming after him. He slows down and comes to stop only for the camera to go tumbling forward as Alex tackles him from behind.
The camera cuts to show Alex holding Jon against her chest with his head beneath her chin. There is a long cut across his forehead.
“Look what my darling sister did to me,” he says in mock sadness.
“Shhh shhh don't cry!” Alex laughs, stroking his hair.
The next shot is of Jon digging beneath the roots of a tree. He is shirtless and shivering from the cold. He mutters something in frustration, then launches the spade as hard as he can at the earth. Before it ricochets away, the shot cuts and there is silence. The padded thump of the wind buffeting the camera's microphone, a sound that has been present for most of the video, is suddenly absent. The black tarpaulin has been spread across the hole and is tied at the top and bottom to form an open cocoon. The knife Jon took from the car is embedded in the ground before the camera so that it looms tall and in shadow. Jon and Alex stand perfectly still, side by side, in the makeshift grave.
The words Save Alex Save Jon appear on the screen and then the video cuts to black.
“Midnight Drive was our highest viewed video,” Ana tells me. We are now on her porch. She smokes another cigarette into the cool Norwegian afternoon air. “People were talking on forums about what it meant and if it was real – were we really headed in the direction that the video suggested. There were always people who would moan about how the videos were all fake and how it was edgy teenage angst bullshit. There'd also been people who had try and reach out to us and explain we didn't need to do what we were doing, but after Midnight Drive, the audience went nuts. Half of the reactions were people asking if it was real, if it could be real, if anybody had contacted the police. The other half were these vile diatribes about how sexy it would be to watch me die.”
From the moment the poll opened, the audience flocked to saving Jon. There were others voting too save Alex, but it became clear that Alex was likely to lose.
“We never discussed it once the video went up. Once Midnight Drive had been posted, it was just taken for granted that one of us was going to die. We didn't care. I don't even know if I remember thinking about it. I was Alex and Alex didn't care if she lived or died, so I didn't care either.”
Thousands of people voted. After two days, 67% of votes were for Save Jon. After three days, 71%. As the deadline approached, nearly three quarters of the votes were condemning Ana to her death.
“I went to bed the night before the polls were going to close,” Alex said. “And I could hear Jon awake. We slept on opposite sides of the same room, on mattresses on the floor. Jon was restless, and he kept getting up and moving about and editing. I just went to sleep. I knew that in the morning, I was going to be told it was time for me to die.”
When morning came, Ana awoke to find her brother passed out at the corner of their room in front of the laptop they were using. He had begun creating some basic imagery for the final video, the video that would end in her death. The two checked the poll results, there had been a landslide shift. 51% of votes were for Save Alex.
The video of 'Jon's' suicide was never posted to the internet. There had been enough interest in SaveAlexSaveJon.com that the website was placed on momentary locked hiatus by their service provider whilst they investigated the content. Ana and her brother drove out to the same stretch of road where they had parked up in Midnight Drive. They walked silently through the fields and up to the forest where the tarpaulin remained undisturbed.
“And it hit me hard without warning,” Ana says. Her eyes are shimmering with held-back tears as she talks. “It had rained and the tarp was full of all this gross water and for some reason that was what broke me. Just like that, I wasn't Alex any more. But Jon was still Jon. I begged him not to do it, pleaded with him, tried to wrestle the knife from his hands but he was stronger than me and resolute. When I refused to film him, he ripped the camera from my hands and filmed himself as he stabbed himself over and over again in the stomach and chest.”
The story of Ana's life after Savealexsavejon is a complex and upsetting one. She was held in custody for a time, though the Norwegian courts found it hard to determine what they had that she could be tried upon and what role she served within the death of her brother. She spent several years at a mental healthy facility, but she still counts those days as wasted.
“They could have given my bed to someone else,” she tells me, rolling her eyes. “The moment I saw that trench where my brother was going to kill himself, I was sane.”
She rarely sees her parents now, though they talk on the phone occasionally. She has changed her look, her name, her lifestyle completely. To look at her now, there is nothing of Alex in Ana. The website is gone, as well as all of the videos and data from it. Rips from the website are hosted on the deep web. Jon's suicide is used by shock websites and thrown up on 4chan fairly regularly. Ana has come across it herself whilst browsing unrelated material.
“It's surreal. The camera sees it one way, but they way I saw it was from a different angle. It's somehow not real. Now I'm not Alex, Jon is not my brother. My brother died at the same time as Jon, but it's not my real brother in the video.”
Ana didn't know about the code until long after the website was already down. She found it on an old zip-drive that had belonged to her brother when she was deleting all the material from the website. Even having found the file in his collection, it took a while for her to work out what it was.
Jon had made a bot – a simple series of coded instructions that triggered a certain response. The bot crawled SaveAlexSaveJon.com and determined the number of votes for 'save Alex' and the number for 'save John'. If there were more votes for 'save Jon', the bot voted to 'save Alex' repeatedly, until it determined that save Alex was in the lead.
Submitted November 01, 2019 at 02:33PM by NicodemusW https://ift.tt/36hGPZQ
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