Dude World

Harmony Korine and Conner O'Malley, breaking brains and mashing buttons.

A couple weeks ago I hit the movie house with my boy Mike Baker to watch — nay, experience! — the limited release of Harmony Korine’s latest, AGGRO DR1FT.

“Breaking away from the traditional parameters of cinema, AGGRO DR1FT explores the onslaught of digital ephemera and interrogates modern life through the vernacular of video games. Shot entirely through an infrared lens, the film follows a Miami Beach hitman as he embarks on the relentless pursuit of his next target.”

Sure!

The game bit is accurate, but we’re dealing with a philosophical inversion of Hardcore Henry’s first person shooter POV, or the frenetic PlayStation vibes of Neveldine & Taylor’s Crank.

The latter is almost twenty years old and still one of the most anarchic and relentless action films ever made; watching it feels like being in a game.

AGGRO DR1FT is more akin to stumbling upon a stranger’s Twitch stream, all wandering NPCs and ambient cutscenes.

Film at Lincoln Center calls the latest from the mind that gave us Kids, Gummo and Spring Breakers “retina scorching;” the New York Times declares that “Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.”

I disagree with the scorching and searing — AD’s neon cinematography isn’t that far out. Neither are its CGI devilmen, masked little people waving machetes, and Travis Scott.

I have seen music videos before!

Which is not to say the quirks come without their charms. Araabmuzik’s ‘80s influenced score — all trap tension, zero release — is phenomenal. And I very much respect Korine and leading man Jordi Mollà as artists and neighbors in their fifties who insist that a childlike connection to fucking around is essential to their creative practice.

I’m not sure if I’d call the results an art film — it’s not not one! — but it is destined to be played on mute in nightclubs and dorm rooms for years to come.

Reviews calling AD tedious aren’t wrong, exactly. This is the cinematic equivalent of drone music — numbing and repetitive by design, but also a portal to elsewhere. (Shout out portals.)

For a movie where sparks literally fly out of Shrek-tinted stripper crotches, AGGRO DR1FT’s most transgressive idea, intentional or not, is that all its “crazy stuff” — casual violence, luxury goods, the hitman / outlaw archetype in popular culture — might even be boring, which is a way more radical area for investigation than its indifference to narrative structure and regular-ass cameras.

As Polygon put it, “what makes all this fascinating [is that AGGRO DR1FT] is accidentally a more insightful look at an incel’s fantasies than most of the movies that actually attempt to portray incel life.”

Filmmaker and comedian Conner O’Malley has long mined that liminal space as his primary source of inspiration.

His absurdist takes on the internet damaged, Monster Energy-fueled everybro — lonely, desperate, and spiraling — are amongst the best American satires of the past decade.

Also: deeply not for everyone!

Korine’s veneer of artistic pretense / institutional respectability is nowhere to be found here; Gagosian is not going to screen Outlet Mall Special Ops. But both creators are tapping the same red, white and blue vein.

If AGGRO DR1FT is an auteur dipping his infrared toe into the waters of gamer logic, O’Malley was born in it, molded by it. From a great Vulture Q&A:

You have so many Halo references in your work. Are you a gamer? Fortunately, no. I do not have gaming disease again. My hand-eye coordination is bad. It’s also why I’m not good at sports. Halo to me is… I remember being over at somebody’s house in a basement that’s half flooded and two people playing Halo and everybody’s smoking weed — like 15 guys in a room watching two guys play Halo. I think it speaks a little bit to attention span, where watching two people play Halo all night was like, Yeah, this is fine. It’s equal to watching a movie, just staring at the TV. I feel like that age of Halo for guys our age is very evocative. You look at boomer directors, and they’re obsessed with fucking in cars as teenagers. And our generation is obsessed with playing Halo with 15 men in a basement.

I loved 2022’s Hudson Yards Video Game, which starts out as a bizarro riff on advertising jargon and corporate architecture before morphing into an oddly affecting, Tool-soundtracked journey into an existential void.

How do you follow the void? AI of course — first with the (currently offline) “Jeremy” chatbot and now with a new, tech-skewering special, Stand Up Solutions.

My recap will pale in comparison to just watching the thing.

O’Malley and Korine’s catalogs can be wildly off-putting by design. But neither of these provocateurs should be taken at face value in the first place.

I think about this quote from Martin Mull in the new Steve Martin doc:

[Steve] was aggressively stupid, and aggressive stupidity… you can’t ignore it. When you insist on something that is wrong, [it’s like saying] ‘here is an asshole,’ who is going to act like one — but he wants you to know that he knows that.

One could argue that Korine is a smart person cosplaying as a dumb one, dealing in ironic “EDGLRD” detachment and Gen X button-pushing, while O’Malley — or at least the character(s) he portrays — embodies that dynamic in reverse, a flyover state wingnut striving for some kind of connection well beyond his reach.

Choose your own adventure as far as what it all “means.”

Perhaps they’re just dudes of their time.