O’Malley’s videos feature the wild plot twists and whiplash juxtapositions of ashort-attention-span culture; watching them can be as abrasive as sitting next to aperson on the bus flicking through Reels without earbuds in. What I’ve described above is only the pre-credit sequence ofCoreys (which is, incredibly, only 12minutes long). It soon descends into afrankly Lynchian odyssey of split and merged identity and nightmarish visuals, as the two Coreys merge into one (the “Ultimate Corey” sports tumorously looksmaxxed facial prosthetics), after apsychedelic interlude. The garish folding-tesseract effect was executed with generative AI, atool most beloved by Elon Musk’s fawning reply guys, which is apt for ashort in which an average loser is absorbed into avicarious obsession with cutthroat futurism, like the superrich’s race to escape the Earth or evolve aspecicidal superintelligence. (“We’re in tech,” two strangers tell Ultimate Corey. “Oh, that’s all going away,” he replies.)
In new videos likePipe Rock Theory andIrish Zionism (his latest) O’Malley returns to the vertical aspect ratio of his earlyVines, now with the extra washed-out color grading and graininess of the spam TikTok accounts that post badly cropped AI-narrated movie clips. “Clip farming” is the practice in which alivestreamer will do something intentionally outrageous with the intention of going viral as an out-of-context snippet; O’Malley, who was doing outrageous out-of-context things while these freaks were still getting their parents into debt on Roblox, understands this ecosystem almost too well.Pipe Rock TheoryandIrish Zionism videos are full of GoFundMe scammers, slouching manosphere podcasters espousing do-your-own-research credulousness about obvious conspiracy theories, advertisements for sketchy side hustles (Hollywood blanket tours?) and red-faced men airing out their post-COVID brainworms (O’Malley, afair-skinned ginger who flushes readily, is agreat shouter, never more so than when monologuing into afront-facing camera). The clips are interrupted with AI-generated fake news and accompanied onscreen text – O’Malley, who hilariously uses aGaelic font for the transcribed speech in Irish Zionism, understands that this particular media convention – like karaōke for people who aren’t even paying attention – makes us all look like we move our lips when we watch clips on our phone (to paraphrase the classicTom Shales burn).
There are Conner O’Malley videos everywhere for those with eyes to see.Here, for instance, is drunk Fox News morning-show host Pete Hegseth nearly killing adrummer in full martial regalia during a2010 axe-throwing segment gone horribly wrong. This O’Malley-esque bit of macho theater turned litigation hazard has become all the more absurd and oppressive now that Hegseth is the self-declared Secretary of War overseeing acampaign of terror against Iranian schoolgirls. It was in 2018 that O’Malleytweeted “I’m 62years old, Ilive in Tampa, Ieat corn and beef everyday, Ialways have atitleist hat on,and Iran is the biggest threat to my freedom,” all of which, Florida, golf, protein, bombing the Middle East, is now simply American reality. As an elder millennial whose political sensibility was formed in the Bush years, O’Malley understands the ambient militarism of everyday American life – the free-floating grievance and boundless aggression of aguy justdreamingof being cut off in traffic – and is well-positioned to understand its inevitable embrace of shameless grift. The story starts in the Great Recession of the late 2000s, as O’Malley makes clear inRap World, the best American film of2024.
55-minutes long, set in 2009 and shot on vintage equipment,Rap Worldis amock home movie about agroup of friends working dead-end jobs in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, who spend one wild night attempting to record arap album in one of their mothers’ living rooms (with frequent digressions to prank the McDonald’s drive-thru, crash ahouse party, and ingest substances).
O’Malley has said that the 2009 setting was originally chosen so that the dialogue could riff on the era’s definitive “dumb guy” classic,The Dark Knight– also claimed by conservative commentators as anallegory for Bush’s War on Terror – but the vintage digital cameras also give it the look of apiece of vaporware. The film is areturn to amore innocent time, and aless camera-conscious style of imitative masculinity compared to the high resolution and practiced direct-address ofCoreys. Mostly it’s shaky, bleary, extremely choppy party freestyles. (“Tobyhanna” is rhymed with “eatin’ Benihana” and “see you mañana.”) O’Malley made the film with anumber of his friends and regular contributors, including co-director Danny Scharar and co-writers and costars Jack Bensinger and Eric Rahill. The collective spirit, both behind and in front of the camera, gives asweetness to the characters’ aspiration and delusion.
But at the same time, the recession-era historical context, doubled with the Rust Belt location, givesRap Worldasense of premonition – it’s the birth of aclass of suckers. The film is set at the start of aspiral of white male downward social mobility, evident in the characters’ lack of economic prospects, their abandonment of domestic responsibilities, and even the narrative’s eventual (and horribly hilarious) acknowledgement of themale mortality crisis.
InRap World, the characters’ doomed energy has not yet been fully absorbed into the K‑shaped recovery and spat out into today’s economy, where it can feel equally as if the Great Recession never ended and that everyone on your phone is wealthy. This is where the pathos ofRap World, orCoreys or even of the ‘Power of God’ Vine comes in. It’s aterribly sad and lonely thought, that nothing matters, that the social contract is so thoroughly dissolved that there’s nothing left to say but “whatever the fuck youwant.”