The Chance Juxtaposition of a Sybian and a Selfie Stick on a Flatscreen TV: Peter Vack’s www.RachelOrmont.com – Conor Hultman
January 20, 2025
In The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a savage satirical novel about artists and their vanity, Nathanael West has one of his frustrated wannabes vent their grievances with dilettante audiences in an imagined play:
In this play I shall take my beloved patrons into my confidence and
flatter their difference from other theatregoers. I shall congratulate
them on their good taste in preferring Art to animal acts. Then,
suddenly, in the midst of some very witty dialogue, the entire cast will
walk to the footlights and shout Chekov’s advice:
“It would be more profitable for the fanner to raise rats for the granary
than for the bourgeois to nourish the artist, who must always be occupied
with undermining institutions.”
In case the audience should misunderstand and align itself on the side of
the artist, the ceiling of the theatre will be made to open and cover the
occupants with tons of loose excrement. After the deluge, if they so
desire, the patrons of my art can gather in the customary charming groups
and discuss the play.
www.RachelOrmont.com, the new feature film by Peter Vack, conjures the parodic mania and deep contempt of West’s vision. However, this film is set apart from the modern sea of irony products on two scores. One, the cinematic quality, largely by virtue of the editing and lead performances, is entertaining beyond its satiric value. Two, unlike West’s proposed scat play, Vack’s film holds a well of sympathy for its audience, if hidden. The contempt is reserved for culture.
I don’t know how or when this movie will be released for wide distribution, but several things about my viewing at the Roxy Cinema in Tribeca made the experience special. Before the lights dimmed, there was text projected on the curtains informing me I was in a coma, and my doctors were infiltrating this communique into my dreams to draw me out. In lieu of an opening short before the feature, a la Merrie Melodies or Pixar, there was a certain famous copyrighted animation, with foreign language subtitles, overlaid by a stock 3D virtual idol, YouTube ASMR, and trap beats. This was bizarre and amusing, but in retrospect, it was a useful primer for some of the more salient aspects of the film; for example, how incessant spliced content from a gangbang of angles is the adult’s replacement for a mother’s comfort.
This is not a subtle film. Or, an altogether coherent film. But that didn’t matter. Neither would a summary. www.RachelOrmont.com is a collision of classic dystopian stocks, fine-tuned and updated for the particular hardware of our contemporary hell. The tragedy of John’s mother from Brave New World, with a splash of Forster’s The Machine Stops and Zamyatin’s We. The visual language is what sells this irreality. The lighting is harshly contrasted, spotlights everywhere remind you of turning on a device in a dark room. The costumes and set design are appropriately garish, from corporate-enforced goon caves to unhinged web shows. Most impressively, the common experiences of instant messaging and comment sections are dramatized in a way that works both narratively and cathartically. This should become a new standard for how to visualize online communication in film. The editing, an explosion of sound effects, quick cuts, and graphics, is a pleasure for its own sake, besides being the point. My lazy blurb would be: Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace if directed by Gaspar Noé. In three words: Pure aesthetic assault.
Special mention should be made for the three main actresses. Betsey Brown expresses the heroine, an isolated and stunted womanchild, with a babytalk that has an impressive range. She pulls off the character on a knife’s edge of face and bodywork, going to comic extremes that still contain a kernel of relatable humanity. Chloe Cherry, her absent mother turned digital popstar, plays an anesthetized deadpan that’s perfect. Dasha Nekrasova plays a demented persona of her reputation, at turns caustic, slouchy, sexy, maniacal– and enough costume changes to ultimately reveal her true role, a protean circus ringleader, fulfilling the function of a whole tragic chorus in one torturer.
The irony at play, ad nauseam, is in service of a great sympathy. Not a moral prescription, not a bland critique, but real sympathy. For all the AI caricature and cynicism, www.RachelOrmont.com has a heart of condolences for your blasted human condition. I don’t like movies. I hardly think they’re art. Cinema has a warping, degenerative effect on the mind; more insidious than pornography, movies have infected the very language of our dreams, the visual metaphors that people think and fantasize and structure their hopes and lives by. To return to West, this sickness has nowhere been diagnosed better than The Day of the Locust, with its haunted crowd of cheated losers incited to burning all of Hollywood, starting with Grauman’s. Instead of liberating us, the internet has only succeeded in making one long movie that runs everyday and can hardly be avoided. In conversation with Dean Kissick after the screening, Vack said that his film came from the traumatic experience of being exposed to hardcore pornography online at too young an age. Incidentally, the unsimulated hardcore pornography at the center of this movie is the least traumatic, or even pornographic, thing about it. This will be my only movie review. That being said, I want to see www.RachelOrmont.com at least two more times, if not more. It’s Schedule I levels of fun. If this is the only film to be pulled out of the dust by future aliens, they won’t have to ask any questions about what happened to us.