Who is the most online filmmaker? Is it Radu Jude and his Andrew Tate Snapchat filters or Eugene Kotlyarenko, with his cast of brainrotted and vocal-fried internet obsessives? For all their hyper-contemporary themes and neo-Godardian doomscroll structures, neither have escaped the format and presentation of a traditional film. Their work is still made for a darkened room and big screen. But a new chronically online gigachad auteur has entered the chat – one with a wholly 21st-century visual language and distribution method to match the neurosis of our time.
This October, Conner O’Malley (with co-director Danny Scharar) released his latest film Rap World via YouTube. Set in 2009, this mockumentary (read: primitive vlog) follows Tobyhanna-based white rappers Matt (O’Malley) and Casey (Jack Bensinger) and their producer Jamie (Eric Rahill) as they record a make-or-break album in one evening. It’s their ticket out of a one-horse town, a bildungsroman that’ll fund the purchase of “a hundred Corvettes”. But, the trio’s progress is continually thwarted by procrastination: an impromptu photoshoot with a firearm, a house party, a “smoke sesh/concept talk”. Throughout they cross paths with other gridlocked young people unable to escape the cold grasp of Coolbaugh township, played by a murderer’s row of niche internet comics including Caleb Pitts and Edy Modica.
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Like Stand-Up Solutions’ tech-bro-wannabe or The Mask’s failed improv guy, O’Malley’s characters are outcasts, the sub-hundred-follower set, for whom the internet age promised everything and left them with nothing. Rap World meets them post-financial collapse, an era branded with hope but belied by hopelessness. What else can you do besides hang out with friends and play Wii Sports?
The lost children of the internet are covered in more conventional films like Gia Coppola’s Mainstream, but what sets O’Malley apart is medium and form. His work is not made with the big screen in mind. It’s not a stretch to suggest someone might stumble across Rap World and believe it to be a genuine 2009 artefact until the credits roll. The form is also era-specific, all grainy, shaky and drowned in in-camera filters as if someone is experimenting with their digital video (DV) camera while bored. Nothing in the film is concerned with being ‘filmy’, the only concern is creating a faux document of early 21st-century malaise.
An apt – albeit unlikely – comparison is Aftersun, with both films using DV footage to capture tragedy in the lost and disenfranchised. But while Charlotte Wells’ film uses DV sparingly and as a conduit to the past, it’s a stylish quirk but not a necessity – merely giving the impression her film is more formally experimental than it is. O’Malley shows you can adhere to the form of a home movie and have pathos. The lack of a crystal clear Arri camera makes Rap World what it is, all the requisite tragedy can be captured on cameras the characters would use. 2023’s The Mask is equally as formally disciplined, mimicking a thirty-open-tab rabbit hole fall down different social media. Through a collage of TikToks, Instagram Lives and Facebook posts he creates a Schrader-esque portrait of tragic vigilantism. For O’Malley the visual language of the internet isn’t a helpful tool to apply modernity or style. It is the whole format.
Rap Worlds’s implicit political slant also feels more natural than Internet films with a capital I, which strain under the weight of their own importance. In an off-hand remark on a late-night drive to McDonald’s Matt (who is revealed to be thirty) confides that “I don’t think I want, or will even be able, to buy a house.” There is no dwelling on this admission, but the idea these three will never be able to escape their bleak hometown underlines every aspect of the film. Their financial situation gives them no vision beyond Tobyhannah, the dire American economy means Matt even forgoes buying cereal because “it’s too expensive” and if their album is a success they will remain ‘Tobyhanna lifers’ Casey claims. In a state of constant ennui, real life (Matt’s co-parenting and familial issues) is too real to confront, he and his crew retreat into half-imagined rap fantasies and eschew their government names for MC titles. Essentially, the internet made manifest.
This suburban despondence is as tangible and real as in any Mike Leigh film – it’s Meantime for middle America. In cultivating and adhering to realism, it feels like a riff on Leigh’s process that ensures actors can interact with any part of the set. It’s as if any moment a character could open a closet to throw on a skull graphic tee or find a Chronicles of Riddick DVD on the floor. O’Malley understands how essential realism is in the attention economy; the cultural dominance of farm-to-table short-form means videos filmed in bedrooms and on high streets are now far more relevant and eyeball-grabbing than traditional long-form comedic fiction. Any feature film has to compete with countless, leaner, TikToks. For every Anora, there are a million Hailey Welchs. Rather than trying to retro-engineer a funny internet video into film form, O’Malley goes full vérité making a film à la vlog. It even ended up where it would have had the protagonist distributed it: YouTube.
This sense of verisimilitude is helped by the amateurish production values from the fictional filmmaker behind the camera. Rap World is cut as if the editor is only ever a second away from losing interest in the scene, and the erratic uses of royalty-free music cues and on-screen text, which only serve to reiterate what the audience is seeing, establish a cutting style that’s so 2009. This is a character still grappling with the weight of iMovie’s VFX war chest before amateur content production was synthesised into the sleek Get Ready With Me or rapid-fire cooking video formats enabled by rapidly evolving iPhones and the in-app intuitive editing options offered by TIkTok and Instagram. Likewise, the dialogue has a proto-shitposting quality; O’Malley’s characters are the millennial patient zeros of constant media consumption and unable to communicate outside of it. You could pull any line of dialogue and it would make a great @dril post.
Rap World is not just accessible on a 21st-century platform, it adopts a visual language that suits the platform. It’s a film tailored to your iPhone. This is cinema made for the internet, not about the internet. But for all its Web 2.0 literacy, its greatest strength is the protagonist’s earnestness. All every O’Malley character wants is connection – a real one, not a WiFi password.
