Welcome to a new art form
On Conner O'Malley's 'Pipe Rock Theory'
The most charming theory for the origin of language (in a not too crowded field) is that our ancestors were only trying to mimic birdsong. If mimicry is where it all starts, then parody is so often where new art starts, singing that birdsong with your tongue-in-beak. Don Quixote parodying chivalric romance births the modern novel; Ulysses, at least 50% spoofs, the modernist one. What’s in the pipeline, then, from the parody that is Pipe Rock Theory, called on Vulture.com the greatest art of Trump 2?
That this video is a parody is not unreasonable to miss for its opening minutes. The modern deluge of online video masks Pipe Rock Theory as yet another clip to dab through of a vacuous podcast recording. In it, an American (O’Malley) in a cap that says ‘Blow Job’ asks another wearing indoor sunglasses whether he’s heard all rocks contain pipes.
Nowadays, when deepfake dragon ‘sightings’ supersede those of UFOs, it’s easy to buy these are two real men who believe rocks contain pipes which use “Vedic technology” to drain human energy for elite sexual kicks. Especially when Pipe Rock Theory mimics so well the sound and look - the slick derangement - of online video. Hence the vodcast banter being spelled out with stock footage and spy movie clips, all gussied up with manic graphics and Ludovico Technique editing. Speech throughout is auto-subtitled, the wrong homophones left in. O’Malley even gets right the inane screen orientation: the bro-hosts are shot in portrait; this then flips to landscape - horizontally letterboxed, above and below a blurred close-up of the central footage à la TikTok - in the first of many format changes, plot twists, and reality shifts: O’Malley, chasing a lead on pipe rocks from a fake teen, gets misapprehended by a camera crew of ‘Pedo Assassins’…
That it might’ve taken till now to get this is all fictional is what makes it magical. It’s neither a hoax that’ll forever stay coy nor open satire like in The Onion.1 Nor is it ambiguous like auto-fiction, where we can’t tell between the real, the embroidered and gossip.2 Its closest predecessors are genre-switching stories. For the vodcast doesn’t cut merely to the TikTok channel of the Pedo Assassins. After they fail to lynch O’Malley, because the rock they tried to brain him with crumbles to reveal pipes, they join forces to trace where the pipes are sending children’s “purity vibes”, whereupon we switch to a spy-cam worn by O’Malley as he infiltrates an Eyes Wide Shut-style ball where semi-naked escorts and Bono, Joe Biden, Michael Jackson take part in a filched energy orgy. Then comes the SWAT team bodycam footage, cable news coverage, each change in format a change in reality. They make Pipe Rock Theory our best case so far of a burgeoning art form.
What to call it? ‘Protean texts’? Sounds like a dull academic journal and besides, Pipe Rock Theory isn’t a chaotic flux; it unravels from the plausibly sincere into make-believe. ‘Emergent fiction’ is better if a tad like a fancy way of saying fake news. For what defines this art is the steady emergence of nonsense, mirroring the drift of those in our media cloudscape spooling away from reality. There’s Ramin Bahrani’s Vimeo film Plastic Bag which goes the other way: what seems like yet another parody meme of a Werner Herzog doc with a decent impression on voice-over dilates into an actual, artful short film voiced by the real Werner Herzog on the tragic immortality of plastic. Or there’s the ‘magical journalism’ of Sam Kriss, whose review of ‘Married at First Sight’ festers into a story about a contestant who lost his mind and his forefather who found the sea at the heart of Australia. Maybe Pipe Rock Theory and its ilk are best thought of as festering art.
It’s hard to see how this art could’ve worked before the internet. Bahrani’s film released at the cinema or on the festival circuit would’ve grounded our expectations of its run-time. Kriss’s review/story in a magazine would have to have gone under Essay or Fiction to avoid upsetting readers intolerant of ambiguity and so lost what makes it shine. And Pipe Rock Theory as a sketch on TV would’ve primed its audience to expect a spoof and so blunted the pointed way it slides from facts-stranger-than-fiction to only a bit more absurd fiction all along. Festering art needs the anything-goes, anyone-posts nature of the internet, its DIY accessibility, its siloed celebrity, its expected lack of editorial oversight and the piece-of-string length of its videos; only because of these ‘destructive’ cultural trends could Pipe Rock Theory pass. With so many of us falling down the internet rabbit hole, it’s nice to learn the tunnel out of the warren isn’t the truth but a perfect mimic of a rabbit hole. With all the fretting about generative A“I” art, it’s nicer to remember even destructive trends can be tapped and turned back on themselves by O’Malley’s sort of parody to generate true new art.
Another comparator might be ‘creepy pasta’, where people write scary stories on message-boards (or copy and paste them there, hence the name) ranging from likely to Lovecraftian, the online-post version of the found footage horror film.