Rachelormont.com was a movie Friend and I saw cold on its one weekend of limited release. It is a uncanny valley, gonzo-type punk rock exploration into the pornification of celebrity culture and the celebrification of porn culture, featuring a chameleon-like Betsey Brown in the titular role as Rachel Ormont, an aspiring influencer in the not-too-distant future when companies can purchase people and their likenesses for perpetual contracts to create entire lifetimes of content through the exploitation of poor young people. The cameos are pretty all over the place: Chloe Cherry, who made the rare crossover from porn to television in recent years, plays Mommy 6.0, a mega-influencer who inspires Rachel to set out on her quest to unite with her parasocial love in the first place.
There are a lot of things about this movie that make it dense to the point of complete obscurity, which also makes it mostly unmarketable, timely, and obtuse: Betsey Brown’s Rachel speaks in a heavily affected baby voice which appears to be from growing up entirely on the internet and letting her brain get fully cooked by pornographic representations of the self. This decision necessitates subtitles which largely seem amateurish until the style of those subtitles shifts to reflect some of the zanier corporate control over the subtitles. Rachel’s character walks the line on serving as commentary for what a regular person acts like when exposed to damaging conceptions of self versus a parody of an intellectually disabled person, which seems like it’s sort of the point? The parody and the thing it’s parodying are hard to disentangle from each other, which is why the pornographic and the critique of the pornographic are so tightly entwined in this movie as well: full frontal nudity, penetration, but also biting allegory for the life of the camgirl complete with kinky shock collar and a mise-en-abyme of infinitely filtered versions of her cam experience. The voice isn’t in itself offensive, per se. It feels a lot like the work being done in Room or Flowers for Algernon. We see Rachel wearing a full lycra suit for green screen touch ups, but also her mediated ego-self as presented in social media on a stage with audience members standing in for viewers on the internet, shouting comments in almost cinema verité style.
It’s after the second or third reference to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, the theater of the insane, and punk rock that I find myself getting nervous about how much of what makes rachelormont.com enjoyable to write about is that its so empty that it lets you fill it with social theory that isn’t otherwise there, or to what extent it’s so rich in its storytelling without commentary that it demands to be editorialized, because it does really feel like the director and his stars have a story to tell and they are not stymied by whether you think they are pretentious or provocative or both.
If I were attempting to add some structure to this movie, I would say that it starts out as a pornified Room meets the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” then shifts into a Flowers for Algernon story as Rachel gets let go and reintegrate into the “real world,” followed by a cross between Clockwork Orange and some improvisational gonzo verité story, answering the question “What would happen to Alex if he were a camgirl while using the Ludovico technique?”
