'Skywalkers' and the Influencer Effect
The new Netflix documentary presents the veneer of authenticity.
One of the funnier things about social media is how it supposedly promotes “authenticity.” Influencers are deemed more trustworthy than a typical advertisement because they’re just another user on the app. Anyone could be an influencer, and therefore a person on Instagram is presenting themselves rather than playing a character as opposed to a celebrity who is typically a performer.
For me, someone who is good on visually-driven platform (so TikTok or Instagram as opposed to Threads) makes you forget about the camera. They don’t make you think about what equipment they’re using, how many takes they did, or who’s holding the camera. The artifice falls away, and they’re talking directly to you. That being said, if you ever try to make a video yourself (as I have), you’re constantly aware of how much effort goes into making a video. I can fire off posts on Bluesky all day without much effort; I feel like I have to hype myself up if I want to do even a brief TikTok.
But for those who have mastered social media and carved out a distinctive niche, can they really go from author to subject? That question continually rolled around in my mind as I watched Jeff Zimbalist’s new Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. The film follows Russian “rooftoppers” Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, a couple who climbs skyscrapers and other tall urban structures without any safety equipment. Through voiceover, their own footage, and what Zimbalist captures, we get a story about two people who love each other, and the friction that arises when you’re both involved in such a dangerous activity.
Let me say up front that I think the larger structure of Skywalkers is true. I think Nikolau and Beerkus love each other, and I have no doubt that they risked incarceration in some countries with draconian laws to climb the tallest structures. The film’s framing device of the couple trying to climb the mega-skyscraper Merdeka 118 is authentic, and the risk is real.
But I also think that the film is also heavily based on reenactments and staged dramatizations for the necessary connective tissue to tell a love story and keep the audience hooked into the heist element of planning. This isn’t simply a matter of Zimbalist and his crew being fortunate enough to be in the room. This is a matter of Nikolau and Beerkus planning out their climbs and possibly even staging their fights. The question the film raises with regards to its construction is if it’s okay to include these things if they happened in less cinematically tidy versions.
Documentary is not “The Truth,” but an artistic approach to form unscripted action into a narrative. The documentarian who captures hundreds of hours of footage will have to make choices in the edit about what makes it into a two-hour feature. What you end up seeing is as much a choice as what you don’t see, and that doesn’t make documentaries inherently false, but there are lines where the audience wonders if they’re getting fiction or nonfiction. How much polish can you put on before you lose sight of the form?
This gap becomes particularly apparent in Skywalkers because there’s no faking the footage Nikolau and Beerkus capture on their own cameras. Those are two real people on top of a real building taking an incredible photo where they could die if they put a foot out of place. There’s also plenty of footage of their regular lives showing how in love they are. These are the two pillars of the movie, and they are, as far as I can tell, true.
Where everything gets hazier is what happens in between. If we’re climbing a tall building and we have Nikolau and Beerkus in a two-shot, then that likely means there’s a third cameraperson who isn’t acknowledged. Isn’t the climb just as risky for this third person? Is this third person using safety equipment? Is the camera crew involved in the planning of the climbs where Nikolau and Beerkus require disguises to get to their destinations?
This capture extends to the romantic relationship. There’s a wealth of footage captured by Nikolau and Beerkus of their private lives, but the whole thrust of the movie is how their personal romance intersects with their work. There’s one scene where the couple has a massive argument in the pouring rain, and Beerkus tells the cameraman to shut off the camera. However, the couple continues to argue and we can hear them perfectly because they’re likely wearing lav mics. Is the argument so heated that both participants forgot they had on mic packs? Possibly. But then you’d also have to believe that two people who have been influencers for years forgot about content creation tools and their own images. So is the argument staged for our benefit? Is it a reflection of an authentic tension but rendered into dramatic outpouring for the documentary?
These questions swirled around in my head as I kept wondering if Skywalkers could be classified as a feature-length work of influencers. You can’t put a 100-minute movie on Instagram or TikTok. But you can put it on Netflix, and if the product you’re selling is Nikolau and Beerkus, then it’s arguably great way to get people to not only follow them on social platforms, but also buy their NFTs or perhaps offer them some kind of branding opportunity. The commerce of influencing overshadows the story the film wants to tell about how love itself is a risk. That message is true, but it also can’t paper over everything else the film is doing or the ways in which it’s doing it.
In this way, all the artifice surrounding Skywalkers ends up detracting from its authenticity because what Nikolau and Beerkus are presenting more than anything is risk. They don’t use safety equipment. They could be arrested if they’re caught. There’s real danger in what they’re doing, but the film they’re in is constantly providing the comfort of romantic narrative. Part of what makes documentary exciting is that the outcome isn’t foreordained through studio notes or a three-act structure. The subjects of Skywalkers take massive risks in their climbs, but their movie inadvertently shows how careful they are with the images presented.