“PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife,” Cool Blue Car and other sinister short comedy works (dir. Alan Resnick)
Few film artists, let alone comedians, capture the dead-eyed decadence and disappointment of contemporaneity like Conner O’Malley. With his producing partner Joe Pera he has crafted one of television’s best comedies, Joe Pera Talks With You, which counters the incessant busyness and self-absorption of modern life with a slow and steady eye for banal human detail, finding joy and grace in simplicity, all the while using the patent ridiculousness of Pera’s grandpa-chic mannerisms to wring unexpected comedy out of Michigander mundanity. He recently joined the writing and producing staff of another of TV’s recent masterworks, How to With John Wilson, which, even in its considerably more satirical and urban milieu, emerges with a similar vein of gentle humanism.
Meanwhile, on his own time, O’Malley revels with evil glee in all the possible contrasts to those works, blending the vernaculars and aesthetics of a homegrown content glut of perverts, pundits and would-be influencers and vomiting out videos and short films steeped in a special kind of sinister postmodern parody. His characters are loud, sloppy, angry, and grotesque — even on the rare occasion he aspires to replicating actual human behavior, it is recognizable only in how it reveals an all-too-human masculine id rotted — or perhaps cultivated — by the broken culture that allows it to self-perpetuate.
One of O’Malley’s best short films, last year’s Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses For Free Pulled Pork, was a platonic ideal, encapsulating all of his skills as a behavioral performer and improviser of hilarious dipshit non-sequiturs while imbuing his short form narrative with an alarming, impressionistic digital terror. Selfie-stick cinematography melts into AI-enhanced nightmare imagery and back, the seemingly harmless middle-American YouTuber shtick growing more and more menacing until it devolves into a depiction of a demon ruling a kingdom in the purgatory of liminal American spaces.
This tone is all too familiar to Alan Resnick, who’s been directing and starring in short films throughout the past decade that share Wisconsin Dells’ off-putting digital surreality, inherited in part from his forbears at Adult Swim, where much of his work is distributed. Also like a lot of O’Malley’s work, Resnick’s characters have a tendency to make demented self-help proclamations in slightly askew Middle American milieus.
Their shared sensibilities at last coalesced this year with two collaborations, one of which, PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife, is a direct follow-up to Wisconsin Dells, and with Resnick at the helm, O’Malley dives full-bore into erratic digital psychedelia. His character, stranded in the desert after a misbegotten DIY demonstration, is caked in animated artifacts (among other viscera) and stretched and squeezed across the frame as he is taken on a demented vision quest when Resnick’s character makes him eat sand. It’s a beautiful and strange collision of two visions, all the more amusing for it occurring both behind and in front of the camera, like Resnick’s weathered guru and veteran of 4am Adult Swim timeslots is imparting his twisted kitsch comedy secrets onto his Vine-bred companion. True to O’Malley’s “Richard Jule Cinematic Universe” m.o., it concludes in a Staples parking lot.
Their other collaboration, “I Didn’t Know I Was Dead,” applies their experimental digital approach to a more sparse and literary end, with O’Malley embodying the tortured protagonist of a bleakly comic Kafkaesque monologue recorded by Negativland founding member Richard Lyons during his struggle with nodular melanoma; the video, set to the ambient experimental stylings of the group, was produced and released in recognition of the anniversary of Lyons’ death in 2016, on his birthday. Resnick’s associations with DIY experimental multimedia, particularly with the Baltimore group Wham City, makes itself evident here, and with some of his other small scale 2022 releases, like two short experimental pieces implementing imagery generated via the recently viral Dall-E AI program.
Resnick continued his working relationship with Adult Swim in 2022 with a short film contribution to their series smalls that acts as a kind of tempered companion to his work with O’Malley, Cool Blue Car. Also set in a desert and focused primarily on two individuals talking to, at, and past one another, it’s the most formally conservative and direct of Resnick’s films for Adult Swim, adjacent to its the horror-tinged predecessors in tone but with minimalistic imagery, a primarily locked off camera, and increased focus on faces and performance. It’s largely a protracted surreal exchange between a man (played with deadpan excellence by Jared Larson) washing his titular cool blue car and a deranged woman who emerges from the vast empty landscape and demands he rent it to her (played by go-to deranged woman, increasingly prolific alt comedy star Patti Harrison). It’s odd, amusing work that, with its off-screen exchanges and vast outdoor setting plays like it was probably a broadly improvised COVID production. Even while retaining Resnick’s signature tonality, an uneasy mix of absurd comedy and discomfiting quasi-horror, it displays a sophistication of style that angles toward his increasingly professional artistic aspirations. Give the man a movie.
Conner O’Malley’s too-hot-for-YouTube PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife is available on Vimeo. Alan Resnick’s work is all available on either his YouTube channel or on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel, website and streaming app.
Originally published at https://medium.com in a breakdown of 2022’s best film and other media on June 30, 2022.
