Reading, Watching, Listening 7/26/2024

A few words about Coreys

I often find myself perturbed by the internet. Though I do remember a time before the World Wide Web, it’s fair to say I was raised on the web just as it was being raised from infancy to adolescence. A glance at the madness of social media and one might wonder whether that adolescence has yet ceased, so childish is the world we’ve built for ourselves. Anger and alienation are very teenage feelings (we’ve all read Salinger), but what of suspicion, of narcissism, of turpitude? It’s possible there is no distinction between adolescence and adulthood. Maybe there never was, I cannot say. In the reality I know, the lines seem blurry; the flaws of our collective psyche manifest as The Way Things Are, spurred by the fracturing of ourselves between the real and the virtual, the lived and the imagined.

Earlier this month, comedian and filmmaker Conner O’Malley debuted his latest short film, Coreys. I was, of course, taken aback.

Finally watching it, I was even more disturbed by its doppelgänger story, a Lynchian journey through the split between selves online and off. O’Malley’s films are very funny—"I’m outside of time, I’m outside of currency," says the brash, crypto bro TikToker Corey—but they’re also terrifying. In Coreys, one Corey, a regular guy shopping at Target with his wife and kid, discovers on TikTok a second, identical Corey who is his antithesis. In a rush of mania, Target Corey goes to confront TiKTok Corey and the two merge into an Ultimate Corey whose prosthetic makeup resembles Dorian Tyrell’s demonic appearance when donning the mask in the third act of The Mask.

In Coreys, O’Malley unearths a truth about our relationship to the internet and social media. These virtual spaces serve as playground for the id, and that terrifies us even as we indulge those impulses every opportunity we get. Some among us indulge more, to the point of losing ourselves. I worry sometimes that I am losing myself, or that maybe I’m already lost. Snapping back to “reality,” like Target Corey does in O’Malley’s film, provides little comfort, because the virtual is real, both in material terms and as representation of our innermost desires. At least, that’s how it feels, despite my horror at what that might say about me as a human being living among other human beings.

O’Malley’s previous short was, appropriately, The Mask, a film about a man who dresses up like Jim Carrey in the 1994 comedy as he ventures out into the world, documenting his mad escapades for some audience online who barely pay attention, and when they do are by equal measure fascinating and shocked at his insanity. Of course, it’s all theatre of the absurd for a public satiated by the entertainment of humanity at its worst. Worse still, many of us are putting ourselves on display voluntarily, living on the high of the judgement of others, as though that is any kind of fulfillment. In O’Malley’s work, it is nothing but self-destruction, and there’s no real escape. Jesus christ.

Reading, Watching, Listening

• “The Dead Admonish”, by John Ganz. This week I’ve been making a bit of an effort to clear out my long list of saved articles. I started several and gave up. Others ended up a disappointment. Some were quite good. Ganz, who recently published the book When the Clock Broke, about the dark side of American politics in the ‘90s, also recently published this lengthy essay in Harper’s. It tells of his trip to Germany, to Cologne, where he seeks out the bookstore once owned by his family, before the liquidation of Jews. It also tells of his relative, Gottfried, who he’d understood to be a resistance fighter, a socialist, but knew little else about.

  All of Ganz’s immediate family managed to get out of Germany, but Gottfried was one of those who was killed at the hands of the Nazis. It’s a dense read, in which Ganz confronts the legacy of his family and his Jewishness and its connection to Germany. He reflects on the difficulties of ever making whole again something that perhaps never was to begin with. A trip to the bookstore, which still exists decades after his family was forced to give it up, paints a haunting picture of realities still not reckoned with in a country whose ultimate answer to the crimes of the past is still, in a way, repression. Ganz also offers sobering insights into the meaning and reality of Zionism for Germany Jews in the ‘30s, cast in the light of images from Gaza, which bear so many of the hallmarks of images of the Holocaust.

  “Unlike a Palestinian, I was able to exercise my right of return. And I was no longer who the German right wing had in mind when they talked about denaturalizing people. But what really remained for me there? The world my family lived in and helped sustain was gone forever. That was made evident.”

  There’s nothing easy in the history of murder and displacement, not even for its “righteous” victims, and with delicacy, depth and wit, Ganz explores this sad reality of being.

  And while you’re at it, subscribe to Ganz’s excellent Substack called Unpopular Front, in which he writes a lot about all kinds of things, but particularly fascism, its history and the fight against it.

• Oddity is the new film by Irish horror director Damian Mc Carthy, and I’m here to tell you that you should seek it out. A ghost story, taking clear inspiration from the work of the great M.R. James, among other sources, it’s one of the most fun and scary horror movies I’ve seen in a while. Structurally, despite its single narrative, it gives the impression of being a set of short stories in the James mould, with eeriness its overriding impulse, taken to a point of pure terror, but also pleasure in its construction. A big, obvious reveal right near the end got the best kind of guffaws from the audience I saw it with. Mc Carthy would be pleased, I imagine. The film is coming to Shudder, but is currently playing theatrically. If it’s screening near you, and you like horror, I recommend heading out. I’m sure it’ll be good at home, but it’s great in the cinema. What a great thing that Shudder has been making the effort to put films like this out in theatres instead of just going straight to streaming. A movie like Oddity certainly deserves it.

• “Closer”, by Tegan and Sara is a song you should all know, of course. I’m not breaking new ground here. Still, it came up on a workout playlist this week, and I’ve been listening to it practically on a loop in the days since.

  It’s a perfect pop song, and I thought I’d just remind you all.