Hey Nostradamus: Conner O’Malley’s American Dream

A few days the 2024 United States presidential election, as the Democratic party debated the urgency of developing ​“a liberal Joe Rogan,” the commentator Max Read wrote an insightful analysis of the social-media infrastructure shaping the multiracial coalition of largely apolitical young men who had just delivered a popular-vote victory to Donald Trump:

“TikTok (and YouTube, and Instagram, etc.) construct their users as speculators – independent, atomized, founder-entrepreneurs, open to the market and eager for chaos and risk, from which they might profit. A person whose orientation toward the world has been shaped by the social-media feed might imagine themselves as a daring, nervy gambler, riding big swings in odds and sentiment to reap financial (and social) rewards. […] It’s not ​“speculators” that TikTok and its peers produce so much as an endless population of suckers, self-regarding dummies making themselves available at any moment for a WallStreetBets pump-and-dump or a crypto scam or a wellness supplement or a moronic parlay bet, their money sliding easily into the pockets of the people running each category’s casino-equivalent. Who would you expect these guys to vote for?”

On the Triggernometry podcast – a right-wing show sponsored by various quack nutritional supplements – the influential American comedian and political commentator Andrew Schulz explained this more succinctly: ​“When I was younger, Democrats were cool. They were getting their dick sucked left and right. […] Now the president got three baby mamas. [Schulz is white.] He’s getting pussy left and right. He’s cool. He’s the one saying, ​‘Say whatever the fuck you want.’”

The pathology of American masculinity is also the source of its pathos. A listless atavism emerges from socioeconomic stagnation and ressentiment, to be weaponized by dull-witted misogynistic opportunists hawking entrepreneurial shortcuts – NFTs, day trading, sports betting, prediction markets – gorged on steroids, and driven to permanent distraction by the dopamine drip of the infinite scroll. No one has seen further into this heart of darkness than Conner O’Malley.

O’Malley has been a writer for Seth Myers, a supporting player on both Tim Robinson and Joe Pera’s cult comedy series, and an actor in cutting-edge narrative features like I Saw the TV Glow and Maddie’s Secret, but his home is the short-form video (originally Vine, now YouTube and Instagram Reels) the natural domain of speculators and suckers. There, his variations on an aggressive, off-putting yet also frequently pathetic dumb-guy persona – often defined by the shouting of incomprehensible slogans and misremembered cultural references – reflect back at the braying hustle culture that inspired it, and, in their profound strangeness, convey the strangeness of stumbling into a wormhole opened up to you by the algorithm.

Coreys, from July 2024, concerns an American man hollowed out and colonized by lifestyle marketing and technology. O’Malley plays Corey, a checked-out husband on a Target run, adrift in consumer culture like the narrator of The Clash’s ​‘Lost in the Supermarket.’ Ignoring his wife and small child to desultorily scroll on his phone, Corey stumbles onto jaggedly edited clips of an influencer with his name and face (also O’Malley), partying in a Las Vegas hotel room (all these people live in luxury hotels) with his ​“angels,” and declaring himself ​“the personification of ​‘I don’t give a fuck.’” Despite Las Vegas Corey’s insistent, desperate hedonism, the fascination for Target Corey is obvious; the sucker in the suburbs is sickened and disturbed by a vision of himself as a speculator in the casino. As clearly as primatologists, we see a simian jockeying for accumulation and status, mediated through venture-backed apps and the stylistic tics of their most sociopathologically successful users. 

O’Malley’s videos feature the wild plot twists and whiplash juxtapositions of a short-attention-span culture; watching them can be as abrasive as sitting next to a person on the bus flicking through Reels without earbuds in. What I’ve described above is only the pre-credit sequence of Coreys (which is, incredibly, only 12 minutes long). It soon descends into a frankly 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 a psychedelic interlude. The garish folding-tesseract effect was executed with generative AI, a tool most beloved by Elon Musk’s fawning reply guys, which is apt for a short in which an average loser is absorbed into a vicarious obsession with cutthroat futurism, like the superrich’s race to escape the Earth or evolve a specicidal superintelligence. (“We’re in tech,” two strangers tell Ultimate Corey. ​“Oh, that’s all going away,” he replies.)

In new videos like Pipe Rock Theory and Irish Zionism (his latest) O’Malley returns to the vertical aspect ratio of his early Vines, 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 a livestreamer 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 Theory and Irish 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, a fair-skinned ginger who flushes readily, is a great shouter, never more so than when monologuing into a front-facing camera). The clips are interrupted with AI-generated fake news and accompanied onscreen text – O’Malley, who hilariously uses a Gaelic 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 classic Tom 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 a drummer in full martial regalia during a 2010 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 a campaign of terror against Iranian schoolgirls. It was in 2018 that O’Malley tweeted ​“I’m 62 years old, I live in Tampa, I eat corn and beef everyday, I always have a titleist 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 a guy just dreaming of 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 in Rap World, the best American film of 2024.

55-minutes long, set in 2009 and shot on vintage equipment, Rap World is a mock home movie about a group of friends working dead-end jobs in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, who spend one wild night attempting to record a rap album in one of their mothers’ living rooms (with frequent digressions to prank the McDonald’s drive-thru, crash a house 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 an allegory for Bush’s War on Terror – but the vintage digital cameras also give it the look of a piece of vaporware. The film is a return to a more innocent time, and a less camera-conscious style of imitative masculinity compared to the high resolution and practiced direct-address of Coreys. 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 a number 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 a sweetness to the characters’ aspiration and delusion. 

But at the same time, the recession-era historical context, doubled with the Rust Belt location, gives Rap World a sense of premonition – it’s the birth of a class of suckers. The film is set at the start of a spiral 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 the male mortality crisis. 

In Rap 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 of Rap World, or Coreys or even of the ​‘Power of God’ Vine comes in. It’s a terribly 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 you want.”