“This Is the Room Where You Learn to Do Nothing” A Review of www.RachelOrmont.com – Sean Kilpatrick
November 17, 2025
A symbol stripped of context veers toward poetry and must now live a sensorily deprived lifestyle, begging to ferment in exile, abject with disjuncture, isolated from the mind – unless the internet has bred an expression from its melopoeia: some meme that can’t yet wail and needs to be licked alive, too frail for a page, the sloppy seconds on our screen. The Chauncey the Gardiner people (of today and tomorrow) deserve is kept dildoed in a shock collar, allowed out to tamponade her macro-torn Skene as the subject of a talkback comment card struggle session, moderated to approval, shaped by what we say, the company’s hypocoristic pet leashed from one system to the next, money versus Marxist hive becoming the same currency, cervically served social diminishment. Peter Vack’s Rachel is everyone’s lallation stymied on command, as done-for as the rest of us, but uniquely extreme in her (and our forthcoming) parasocial hermitage. Bad Boy Bubby raped The Wild Child in front of Kaspar Hauser and the baby came out too curious for its own good. This is somehow our upvoted dystopia. The fleas we pick off each other are given worse capillaries to suck, placed below the belt. You won’t eat the bugs and like it because they’ll return the favor and like it more.
Rachel is forfeited at birth by a woman whose sold-out clone becomes the cooing avatar of autonomy. She’s been sequestered in her wet, complete with an exercise yard and a Tamagotchi-esque AI gal pal. Mommy 6.0 is their favorite god, a thumbs-up theurgy. Rachel echoes the encephalopathic tuneage she’s psy-opped to believe (the genius of her situation, as depicted, is the horror of her description of herself as bumpy, meaning physically real, hence ugly, and her Mommy (made umbilically clitoral by misconception) as flat, meaning a perfect beautiful image in light on a screen, an angel that mimics love – a demon), until she is terminated from internment by an LED obelisk that offers threatening choices. Offline to Rachel is a bag lady’s urban gibber during a sequence that, like Vack’s film Assholes, feels impossible and dangerous to shoot in public, and is a Kinski-level mania of a performance from Betsey Brown, a method one abstraction beyond the novelty of vox populi terrorization comedy (like MDE in verse) – as she urinates through a gliding speech pattern, the cribs of limbo spilled into hell, the most chilling line of the film jostled out of her on the subway, Beckett’s nightmare condensed: (of the touch-grass hobo reality she awaits being relieved from): “This is the room where you learn how to do nothing…”
www.RachelOrmont.com is the most disturbing millennial conundrum yet rendered and it made me stop laughing at the idea of younger generations considering themselves raped via Wi-Fi, that discordant convolution of tunes Hedy Lamarr laid herself across. They can’t turn their shit off like I could. To them, the internet is not a bothersome tool full of pranks and tits. It’s like having a touchy uncle for a roommate, and he hums through your pockets anywhere outside, pinching you by the glans till rickets sets in. A menacing lactate with no valve for release, choked on mom, a scared insularity that’s ultimately a hollow love of your own design, the wet nurse that hates you (the death of art portrayed here most artistically, thank god it still exists in small corners of our signal), mere flesh made flat and omnipresent – you get your nutrients when the beast excretes.