Conner O’Malley is the internet’s most Online… | Little White Lies

Con­ner O’Malley is the internet’s most Online filmmaker

29 Nov 2024

Words by Finlay Spencer

Collage of numerous individuals dressed up in a variety of costumes and character outfits, including superheroes, movie characters, and other pop culture figures. The image is vibrant and eclectic, showcasing a range of colours, textures, and expressions.
Collage of numerous individuals dressed up in a variety of costumes and character outfits, including superheroes, movie characters, and other pop culture figures. The image is vibrant and eclectic, showcasing a range of colours, textures, and expressions.
The com­ic-cum-film­mak­er is Mike Leigh for the dig­i­tal age.

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.

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.

Silhouettes of 3 people in a dark room, lit by green light from an unseen source.

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.

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