Stream Queens and Meme Dreams
A conversation about www.RachelOrmont.com with director Peter Vack
Bleeding Edge presents the Canadian premiere of www.RachelOrmont.com on January 22nd at Paradise Cinema at 7:30pm. Featuring a Q & A with director Peter Vack. BUY TICKETS HERE!
In 2017, filmmaker and actor Peter Vack brought Assholes to SXSW. In an environment where festivals had been accused of going corporate, or used as launching pads for established filmmakers rather than places to discover new cinema, Assholes offered a defiantly independent vision of two anatomy-obsessed popper-addicts (one of whom is Vack’s real-life sister Betsey Brown, playing a fictional version of herself) partaking in increasingly disgusting behaviour. The title, you see, is more literal than audiences may have expected. The film was declared “one of the most disgusting movies ever made” by Indiewire but also won the Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award “in honor of a filmmaker whose work strives to be wholly its own, without regard for norms or desire to conform.”
A few years later and both Vack and Brown had become prominent figures in the NYC’s much-discussed Dimes Square art scene. In addition to starring as a Prince Andrew obsessed nymphomaniac in Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-First, Betsey Brown also directed herself and her brother in the controversial Actors, a spiritual sequel to Assholes in which Vack, playing a version of himself, transitions to a woman to aid his flagging acting career.
It was around the time of the self-distributed rollout of Actors that Vack started production on his directorial followup, www.RachelOrmont.com. Starring Brown as Rachel, the infantilized property of an advertising agency who grows up in captivity, with only a computerized personality, @poorspigga, as a friend, Vack’s film imagines the internet and social media as an auditorium full of people screaming at each other, a nifty visual interpretation of the toxic dynamics that became all the more heightened during a worldwide pandemic that left many people trapped in their homes. the film also co-stars porn star Chloe Cherry as a pre-packaged corporate pop star called Mommy 6.0 and Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova as another chronically online personality that Rachel interacts with. Compared even to Vack’s previous film, www.RachelOrmont.com is a visually disorienting, hyper-stimulating work of art that draws from a culture of meme-making and provocation. Toronto filmmaker Nate Wilson (The All Golden) contributed to the film by provided meme-ified subtitles, adding text to the screen and heightening the feeling that this is part film, part shitpost.
It was during the filming of these scenes that Mike Crumplar (a.k.a. Crumps), a New York Substacker who had previously criticized Actors, wrote a newsletter that came to define the Dimes Square arts scene. Apparently accosted on camera by Vack and Brown for his criticism of their work, the newsletter described the experience as his own “Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual.” Anyone looking for footage of this event in the film may be disappointed, but we discussed that event, and many other things, with the filmmaker.
Bleeding Edge: So watching the film, it feels like a pandemic movie, in terms of the cultural references and the formal conceit of it all, but I remember at the end of Assholes, your character references the making of this movie by name. So I'm just wondering if you could talk about the road to getting this movie made, and how the idea of it has changed over that time?
Peter Vack: I think you actually mean that in the beginning of Actors, my sister's film. My character says that he's working on a project called RachelOrmont.com and that he has decided he'll play the title character of Rachel, which is part of what catalyzes that character making a cynical transition. So, yeah, it was a long road to getting it made. In 2014, I made a short film called Send, starring Julia Garner, and in that movie, the internet was conceived of as a theatre space where content was posted on a stage in front of an audience. While that movie was in post, in late 2013, I started writing a feature that would continue that conceit. And it was RachelOrmont.com, but so much happened between then and now.
In the beginning of the process, I was really coming at internet culture as an outsider. I just had this intuition that the idea of the internet was underrepresented in cinema. Since then, there's been much more representation of online communication and online culture, but at the time, there was far less. Also, I was not yet a fan of post-internet art. In the making of the movie, I became a fan of post-internet art and internet art, so that also influenced the making of it. When I was writing the early drafts, I read this book by Jaron Lanier called You Are Not a Gadget, that was about some of the problems he saw with Web 2.0–being like social media websites–and my early stabs of the script were very theoretical. So some of the story carried through, but it went through so many revisions. In that time, I also made Assholes, I wrote my novel [Sillyboy], I acted in so many things. So it was always a project I kept returning to and then discarding because it felt like something that wouldn't get made. It almost got made in 2015, but what's interesting to note is that in 2015 there wasn't even such a thing as "going live," but the characters in the script were live-streaming themselves. I remember having to explain to producers because I really thought, Well, in the future, this will happen. But I would be met with a blank stare, because, really, the true mechanics of the internet had to catch up to some of these ideas for it to work.
So even though it was a long road, I'm glad that we waited so long, because also in that time, I became a content creator myself. I'm pretty deep in the world of making memes, and so that added a whole other level of personal experience that I could bring to it. The thing about making a movie about the internet is that it's an impossible task because the internet is different for every user. When it was time to make it, I thought, well, the best I can do is just hope to get something of my personal experience with the internet, and that's why I included so many very niche references to 2020 online culture like the Trad Cath references, the Milady references, Angelicism references, Dimes Square references. These are admittedly all very personal fixations of mine, but I felt that because it was impossible to represent the internet as something for everyone, the best I could do was, in certain moments, to be as specific as possible, to capture the flavor of what one chronically online user or my own feed might look like in the year 2022.
BE: Yeah, I was gonna touch on the @themasterofcum Instagram account and whatever other Instagram handles that you're in control of at the moment. Do you think there's overlap between your career as a filmmaker and your career as a shitposter?
PV: This movie is the overlap. When we were in pre-production, I would draw a Venn diagram and I would say here's one circle: “cinema.” This other circle is “memes,” and I want our movie to land somewhere in the middle, but it was a long and challenging road to make the movie feel that way. And part of what really brought it there in the end was working with Toronto filmmaker extraordinaire, Nate Wilson. When I saw the text in The All Golden, It was right near the end when we were deep in post, and I had in mind that we would subtitle the movie for a couple reasons: Betsey's character in the beginning is a little hard to understand. So is the character played by @poorspigga. Also, some of the language we use is hard to parse because it's hyper-niche slang that not everyone's familiar with. So there was this idea that if we subtitled the movie, it would ease all those things. And also the film is pretty bleak, so it adds a level of legibility and of sweetness that is like the sugar that helps the medicine go down. But we didn't have anybody to do that, but there's some really spiritual aspect of filmmaking where things fall into your lap at the right moment. Right when I needed to find the right designer was when I met Nate, saw The All Golden and felt like what he was doing with text was so innovative. It wound up being a match made in heaven. It has become one of the gestures that has defined the film, and it is the gesture that does directly speak to meme culture, because we were able to use fonts that we use in meme culture.
BE: There's also the very recent development where young people now watch everything with subtitles, which kind of surprises me...
PV: They do! Part of what that is, too, is the other element in the frame promotes concentration. We are in this over-stimulated, multi-screen reality. People have joked on Letterboxd that this movie should be split-screened with, like, Subway Surfers content the way they would do on TikTok. But in a way, I would love to see someone make that. I think it is our challenge as filmmakers, that this isn't the 20th century, and we aren't the only game in town. We have to find ways of making our frames exciting and stimulating so that they truly do take precedent over the phone screen. So the text on the screen, it's a fun gesture, but that's another purpose it serves for the ADD mind, which I definitely have. Being able to read helps you lock into focus even more.
BE: So this formal idea where everybody's in an auditorium and they're engaging with each other face to face, but in the confrontational way that you might find an online message board. What inspired that idea?
PV: That idea has been with me for a while. It was in my film Send and my background is in the theatre. I was an actor before I was a filmmaker, and before I did television and movies, I did theatre. I have a great love for the theatre. You know, it's like the oldest art form that we still have. It's a place where people have always come together to grapple with what is going on in society and with humanity. Part of the problem cinema has right now is that it is very formally confusing or challenging to figure out how to represent online communications, and it's why so many filmmakers don't even attempt it. But if we are going to have cinema remain a valuable medium, we have to find ways.
So even way back when I thought, well, there is something so theatrical about posting, because you really are crafting your identity the same way an actor would craft the monologue on stage. It's not like chatting to your friends. It is more like declaring a soliloquy in front of an audience. And you're not just focusing on one or two friends or calling a friend. You are potentially having all your friends and all your enemies and maybe your family members and then maybe some strangers be in the audience. But what I didn't realize in 2014 because I wasn't as deeply entrenched in chronically online culture and content creation myself, is that the comments are as valuable, if not more valuable, than the content. You can't really separate out content from comments, and we all know that great content produces interesting comments, or really sometimes horrible content produces interesting comments, but the two things are really holding hands. So that was a discovery I made in life, in the time it took to make the movie.
One other thing I'll say as a parenthetical, but it's very important, and it's part of why I'm so grateful the movie didn't happen before 2022, is because 2022 was an interesting year. People being chronically online became more mainstream. Meme culture became more mainstream. People had to go online because the only way they could stay connected. So some of these things that felt like subcultural activities became more mainstream cultural activities. Also, my profile as a meme-r increased. My producers, the Ion Pack, had an odd, very online audience. Dasha [Nekrasova] has an extremely online audience. So when we were casting this wide net of Come be an extra in this movie! Play a member of a personified message board! When I said that to a room full of people in 2022, they came! All I said was, Hey guys, so what we're doing here is, you're embodying a message board. Go! And I gave them some prompts, but people were ready to go. If we had made it in 2017 I'm not sure they would have come with as much material. I remember one guy said during the process, which went so many different places and was so fascinating and harrowing and emotional and funny and obscene and beautiful, and it really contained everything. He said "This was almost like an exorcism, because we all have these personalities in us, these online demons that we were able to purge."
I prompted people to do lines that were like a shitpost, lines that were like a brag, lines that were like a sincere admission, I tried to stoke conflict, so many things, just to try to get as much from the audience as possible to attempt to capture something of this chorus of voices that is discordant that you see online. The only way to do that, or even attempt that, was to trust that group of people and I was lucky enough that at the time that we made it, because it was my followers, Dasha's followers, Ion Pack's followers, they were there. They were possessed by the right voices, and they were ready to play and experiment with this character of the message board user, in a way that I'm not sure would work so well now, because maybe we're a little past it, and it wouldn't have worked so well before it. So again, I don't know what to make of it other than just good luck.
BE: I think a lot of people are at least aware of the the Crumpcident from the production, and maybe even know about the movie because of the whole debate that it created, but the way you're talking, it almost sounds like that that incident happened as part of the design of how you filmed that scene.
PV: I'll give you a little more context around that, because Crumps, his article, got so much attention, and for a period of time, I did feel a lot of people misunderstood what we were doing. I think even Mike himself misunderstood what we were doing. Mike and I are friendly now, by the way. The hardest thing to capture, I realized two days into shooting with the audience, was like a personal grievance of sorts, because that is usually something that people need to be shielded by the screen to engage with, or shielded by an anonymous identity to engage with. And no one had that luxury. I think Crumplar thought at the time that we were diabolical and premeditated and that just wasn't the case. In fact, he wasn't even that much of an enemy. He was just an online character that had most recently come out negatively against my sister's film. It wouldn't have been truthful to just have fans or acolytes, we had to also invite people we thought were very much against us creatively. Because when you post, you post not only to your fans, but also to your haters. He was the closest that we could get at that time to that character, which is why we had him.
At a certain moment, after we had done a scene with Ivy Wolk where we did about 60 or 70 takes, I realized that if anybody was going to risk a very personal confrontation, it would have to be me, because no one else would do it, because they weren't safe in the way that you are safe behind the screen. So I did say, Michael, why did you give my sister's movie this negative review? I felt like you did a bait and switch. It seemed like you liked it. Did you, in fact, do this journalistic thing of like, luring us in as friends only to do a hit piece? And I did provoke my sister to engage with him. None of that material made it into the movie because it derailed the story, but it was very interesting. It remains very interesting footage of people having a very hard discussion about things that are very personal to them, disagreeing and not coming to agreement. In a way, it does remind me of what happens every day on X.com where people are quote-tweeting each other, vehemently disagreeing, not really listening to each other, very much stuck in their own opinions.
The way Mike framed it was very good for his narrative, but he would have you believe that the whole movie was about a public humiliation for him. And for a time, I think people believed that's what it was. As time has passed, I think people understand that it wasn't quite that. We were trying to simulate an internet pile-on for a movie. And we did, and Crumplar did, very valiantly, bear the brunt of that. But interestingly enough, his article created a real internet pile-on for me and my sister, which was not seen as in the realm of art or creativity, but was seen as genuine. People that believed him at face value at the time felt that he was genuinely calling out fascists, which is, you know, that's a fiction. People believed that he was a journalist at that time, but I think what he does is actually much closer to auto-fiction than journalism. So I just think it's interesting that even in trying to represent this thing creatively in a cinema, for whatever reason, it actually inspired the real thing on the internet. For myself.
BE: The whole fascism thing was very present in the debates of the time, this idea that Dimes Square is populated with fascist artists or whatever. With a few years of hindsight, that debate seems to have died down, but do you have a grand take on it, or any thoughts that you'd want to share at this point?
PV: That idea felt similar to the way some people believe in QAnon. I think it's really exciting for people to believe there is a very intense evil lurking behind the surface. It almost speaks to a fantasy people have that they want to believe that things are more villainous than they actually are. I think there's an aspect of any artist that is quote-unquote “fascistic.” You have to be very dedicated to your vision in a myopic way, but to take that quality of a filmmaker that reminds you of a fascist dictator, and to call it literal fascism is a huge mistake, because there's nothing about an indie movie that's going to actually influence policy. There's nothing about this movie that even seeks to influence policy. We don't actually have any fascist sympathies whatsoever. But I think that the internet does something to us, where it infantilizes us, which is in the film, it arrests us developmentally, and it creates in you a desire to see patterns that aren't there, to almost become a conspiracy theorist, because we're just getting these curated glimpses at people and and we're just getting the sign without the substance behind it. But I'm not exactly against the internet, either. I think the internet can do great things. I've seen some of the most creative voices flourish online, and beautiful art happens, and great community, great connections that wouldn't happen otherwise have happened for me because of the internet. But the negative is you can project really distorted and grotesque things onto people who you don't know. And I believe that the fascist panic of that time was part of a grand sort of mass formation psychosis projection.
BE: Could you also talk about the three projects you've done with your sister: Assholes, Actors and this. What is it that keeps bringing you back to this collaboration with her and do you plan on continuing it past this movie?
PV: Betsey is really my favourite actor alive. When that person's your sibling, it's a big plus. She is in a league of her own when it comes to fearlessness in her work and lack of modesty in her work. When I made Assholes, actually, I didn't realize how good she was, I just thought I was interested in making a movie where the relationships were mostly real. So the sibling relationship was real. We were capitalizing on our real relationships. But she really showed me something about her work as an actor that I couldn't unlearn. Betsey and I both have a fascination with boundary-pushing, transgressive material, and it's becoming harder and harder to ask actors who you don't know very well to do that, because we are in a more sensitive time, so these asks have become even harder. So it is a shortcut if your sibling happens to be somebody who shares your creative ethic, is willing to give their all to a role, and you also don't have to run the risk of transgressing on someone's boundaries. It becomes a very obvious choice.
It's the greatest thing when you can work with family. We love each other so much, we respect each other so much. It's like the greatest gift of all time to get to be creative with your family. I think it's something that raises eyebrows, because we are comfortable with obscene and perverse material. There's a projection that happens. What they're not seeing is we're able to do that because we actually are so close, and we're so open with each other, and we see each other as equals and adults, and we don't have these deep grievances that we haven't worked out. We're artists who respect each other, so it's such a privilege to get to work together, and the familial love and the familial closeness allows the work to go deeper, right off the jump. It gives us a sort of shorthand that would take years to develop with other collaborators. We're just so lucky. Will it always happen? I don't know. I think perhaps this could be the end for now. I think Betsey and I both have plans to not do exactly this in the future. I know both of us just are so grateful that we've been able to do this with each other.
BE: Prior to making Assholes, you were on an Amazon series, and you did some more mild-mannered indie movies. Why do you think your own filmmaking output, and Betsey's as well, has tended towards the more extreme?
PV: I think it has to do with our upbringing so close to psychoanalysis. Our mother has been a psychoanalyst for almost 50 years now. That's not to say that we were constantly discussing taboo material in the family. We weren't, but there was this feeling, an idea that we all were in psychoanalysis, and I have a psychoanalyst that I've had for a long time. And there was this sensibility that things shouldn't be off limits, and that taboos can be discussed and looked at without fear or shame. So I think that growing up in this environment, Betsey and I just see art as a place to express the extremes.
I was saying this last night in a Q&A, someone was asking about the "edgelord-y" moments, and I said, we did let things be very “edgelordy” on set, and the movie has some edgelord elements. I think what is not always understood, because an edgelord expression can be like a magnet that draws everything to it, we weren't doing it just to be provocative. When I'm working with actors, with creative people, I want them to feel like what I could express, the range could go all the way to edgelord, perversion, provocation, or all the way to sincere, open heart, utterly beyond moved to tears, to excitement. I want people to feel like nothing is off limits, because I want to get the range of expression and work. It can seem to some like it's this reaction to a bland culture, and in a way, it is, but it's also just growing up with this mentality that art is a place where you can say the unsayable.
But psychoanalysis doesn't always prepare you for people not understanding that, and for the consequences of other people not wanting that from art. When you make art that deals with taboos or transgressive material, what you immediately realize is that some people want that, but some people really don't, and that's just the reality. As an actor, I love to work, and I'll do anything. But I think our impulse to make these movies isn't so much based on the work we've done as actors outside of our own work, but more just with this sensibility that we've grown up with.
BE: Your parents, they're in all of these movies. What do they think about it and what kind of feedback do you get from them?
PV: Our parents are very supportive. I think that there's an element to these works that is a subtle satire of very supportive parents, and you're only able to subtly satirize supportive parents because of their support. So that's an interesting riddle. They love to act. Do they love the movies? I think they find the movies disturbing because there are disturbing elements to the films. If you're a parent watching the movies that your kids make that have these dark elements, I don't think any parent is thrilled about that, but on set, it's very fun, because they love being a part of something that we're all doing. They're very talented actors. They're brilliant, and they love, just like any actor, the opportunity to perform. But are these their favourite movies? No, of course not. My mom does not like watching these movies, but she doesn't like extreme cinema. That's a taste thing.
BE: Do you have anything coming up, like, what's in the works for PV, the filmmaker, at the moment,
PV: Nothing really worth talking about yet, honestly. Buy my book! Sillyboy! If you've seen RachelOrmont and you like it, tell your friends!