Years from now, when the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans (Leonardo DiCaprio warned us, and still we didn’t listen!), and when alien anthropologists come to sift through the ruins of Earth to learn about late-homo sapien culture, I can only hope they come across a pristine copy of Benten Films‘ LOL DVD and have the aptitude to understand what they’re looking at.

Of all of the movies lumped into the Mumblecore bucket, LOL comes the closest to making an accurate diagnosis of a certain contemporary real-life character type (the literal gadget fetishist?) that, if seen elsewhere in culture, has nowhere else been properly condemned. The aliens may not understand why these young humanoid males spend so much time at their circa-2006 wired workstations, but if they can find an English-to-Alien translator, David Hudson’s liner-notes essay should put it all into context.

At Self-Reliant Filmmaking, Paul Harrill notes that the LOL gang has come quite a way over the past 15 months, when Swanberg gave him “a self-burned, Sharpie-labeled copy of the DVD.” I have an identical copy on my own shelf, which was handed to me by its co-writer/co-star C. Mason Wells in December 2005, before the film had even screened at a festival. Two months earlier, I had spent some time with Joe Swanberg at the Chicago International Film Festival. I remember driving around Chicago with Swanberg, talking about how he was working on a deal to get Kissing on the Mouth, which had been rejected from a number of festivals, on DVD. He told me not to tell anyone, but he was planning to make a film with Andrew Bujalski and Mark Duplass. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I now know that doubting Joe Swanberg is a game for fools.

In addition to the 81-minute feature, Benten’s beautifully designed package contains almost too many special features; I found the casting interview with Tipper Newton maddening, although I’m sure it will find its admirers. But the cast commentary, in which Wells and Greta Gerwig separately discuss the impact the film had on their real-life romantic relationship, is worth the purchase price alone, as is the short film Hissy Fits, which features perhaps my favorite line in any of Swanberg’s films. Tim, the character played by the director in both the short and the feature, can’t connect to the internet and is on the phone with his ISP. After a bit of back-and-forth with the unheard support agent, Tim suddenly, forcefully shrieks, “If there was something important for me to do today, there just wouldn’t be a way for me to do it!!!”