www.RachelOrmont.com Will Disturb You - And That's Why it's Worth Watching
www.RachelOrmont.com is a siren song of a film that reaches out to you in long, undulating movements. In fact, I can’t recall the last time I saw a film that so well displayed those horrific moments in life when the surreal brushes so close to the real that you can’t help but shiver. It touches on meme culture, the psychoanalytic daughter-mother relationship, and the ever-so-detestable social media consumption machine that, by mid-film, one realizes may be inescapable unless you feel like chucking your phone in a nearby river. www.RachelOrmont.com brazenly projects the dueling, obverse evils of the now – sex positivity versus goonerism and desperate loneliness versus the unending desire induced by a phantasmatic relationship.
The film is written and directed by Peter Vack and follows the thirty-one-year-old Rachel Ormont (Betsey Brown) throughout her daily work as an assessor for the National American Assessment and Advertising Agency (NAAAAA). Now a little back story - Rachel was purchased by NAAAAA at four months old when her cash-strapped mother (Chloe Cherry) decided to sell her daughter to the agency. Simultaneously, the agency clerical staff decided that Rachel’s mother possessed a certain star quality and offered her a deal – her life and genetic rights to become a superstar. After a ten second window, Rachel’s mother accepted the offer and was turned into the iconic MOMMY. Fast forward thirty-one years and Rachel is a stunted, perennially-confined adolescent in the body of an adult, and MOMMY is already on her sixth clonal form – MOMMY6.0.
MOMMY6.0 is an amalgam of every modern pop icon under the sun. She wears big hair with tinsel strands, intense anime-verging-on-drag makeup, and vaguely SHEIN-coded L.A. baddie clothing. MOMMY6.0 is vivacious and plentiful, while Rachel is frail and inward. Rachel is an eternal child, physically and emotionally trapped in an oppressive world of spectacle by the goons at NAAAAA who force her to watch and definitively rate every new MOMMY6.0 performance. Rachel, who never knew her mother, is completely besotted by MOMMY6.0. In a conflictual dance between desire for love and desire for sex, Rachel constantly masturbates to images of the pop star. The assessor exists firmly in the now where, via social media platforms, the sole purpose of celebrity is to generate confusing kaleidoscopes of desire that are incorporeal and yet uncomfortably libidinal. In one scene, Rachel repeatedly gestures as if to literally eat the words that MOMMY6.0 sings, actually consuming the hierarchical dictum of celebrity.
This messaging is not singular, but rather is delightfully sprinkled throughout the movie. For example, Rachel possesses the affect of a twelve-year-old and yet is concerned about aging. After all, MOMMY6.0 looks perfect. But this is exactly what celebrity does, and Vack knows it. The function of celebrity is to perpetually download cultural neuroses to laypeople, so that they can spend more time obsessing over appearance and mannerism rather than material conditions. This and the trauma of losing one’s parent is exactly what Vack puts on display through Rachel, and Betsey Brown’s immense acting talent brings the whole psychosexual nightmare to florid life. Am I beautiful? For how long? Does my mother love me? Will she fuck me?
Eventually Rachel grows exceedingly frustrated by her physical distance from MOMMY6.0 and demands of the NAAAAA that she be allowed to meet the idol. Her request is denied, and Rachel is sent on an emotional spiral that culminates in her reassignment within the organization. Her new task? To sell a vibrator via constant livestream demonstration with the caveat that if she fails to keep the device inserted in her vagina, she receives an electric shock. While exhilarating and pleasurable at first for the virginal Rachel, she soon discovers the revulsion that so strongly countervails sexual desire. Rachel’s predicament is terrible and absurd, but again it so clearly grafts itself from reality. Thousands (or more) of very young women across the West exhibit their sexual lives on OnlyFans for their dog bowl-lapping patrons. While enriching financially, I cannot imagine the damage that gig sex work does to one’s soul. To be virtually passed around like a piece of meat, exposing the most intimate of your physical details to strangers for their attentive review... how awful! Or maybe I was just raised too Protestant. But, I think there is always a price that is paid in that arena. Rachel shows us that price.
Rachel resists using the wand and is eventually reassigned again, this time being adopted into a family of NAAAAA livestreamers. Rachel is bullied for her peculiarities by her new adoptive sister Darci (Dasha Nekrasova), a podcast host. It becomes apparent that even amongst her new adoptive family, Rachel doesn’t quite belong. Ms. Ormont is like the child in school that never really fit in. That child who dressed in an odd way, was just too skinny or just too fat, had permanently ruddy cheeks, and was always performing some fevered feat of fluids, like pissing here or shitting there (in fact there’s a full-frontal nudity scene where Rachel pees on the floor). Completely imperfect in almost every way and yet secretly the envy of every other kid. But why would Rachel be the envy of others? Because, in her alienated state she possesses a true, unabashed authenticity. Her alterity reveals the obscenity of what it is to be “normal”. That’s exactly why Darci hates Rachel and even goes as far to deceive Rachel by welcoming a catfish version of MOMMY6.0 as a podcast guest. Through Darci’s edgelord tendencies and crude online-isms, she submits herself to the spectacle of social media, whereas Rachel wants to pass through that spectacle, to know it.
One crucial narrative point I haven’t yet mentioned is that throughout the film there is a full auditorium of people screaming variations of 4chan jargon at the cast. It’s clear that the auditorium members are representative of vitriolic social media comments. They say the word “retard” a lot, talk about Jews a whole lot, and some poignant self-revelations even penetrate through the ruckus. This was perhaps my least favourite part of the film. It totally decentres you from Rachel’s narrative, and for what? To listen to some half-baked jokes cooked up by the rectitudinous idealogues of New York City’s do-nothing Dimes Square elite? Just like reading a real comment section on Instagram or TikTok, the constant auditorium interlude enfeebles the mind. Maybe that’s the exact point Vack was trying to get across, but it does still end up feeling like fan service to the alt-film contingent.
Eight paragraphs in and I’ve hardly talked about the acting, but I really should. I cannot commend Betsey Brown on her performance enough. Her anguish, her fear, and her hope as Rachel had me completely sutured into the film. Her total, hysterical conjuration of the character of Rachel Ormont reminds me of equally emotionally tumultuous performances, like Romy Schneider in L’important c’est d’Aimer and Tilda Swinton in Julia. The characterization is so full and fleshy that it will reverberate for years to come. Chloe Cherry is sweet and fun as MOMMY6.0. Unfortunately, Dasha as Darci is forced and difficult to watch.
With www.RachelOrmont.com, Peter Vack has created a schizotypal coming of age story whose raw truth will cause viewing audiences immense discomfort and regret – and that’s why this movie is great. Rachel Ormont is a true suffering loner of the emotionally impoverished Internet Age, and for that I think we can all see ourselves in her.