Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date. O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.
I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!] But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.
O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”
In another sense, though, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” could be viewed as out of step with the current moment. O’Malley’s comic portrayal of Walt Disney Co. as a quasi-rogue state endowed with a nuclear arsenal doesn’t quite jibe with the news out of Florida, in which Disney’s “woke capitalism” figures as the main antagonist to DeSantis-led authoritarianism. But I think O’Malley’s satiric spirit is more in tune with the fine sense of the ridiculous evinced in a recent Medium post by economist Umair Haque. After quoting from the Disney lawsuit against DeSantis, Haque comments, “That’s as accurate a definition of this new wave of American fascism as there could be – and it’s striking that it’s left to a corporation to say it well. To challenge it openly…Think of how badly that reflects on America, really – the picture it paints of broken institutions.”
There are all sorts of ways to paint a picture. The heedless, demented assurance with which O’Malley’s narrative – and O’Malley as physical performer – jerks toward a bad end releases an implicating irony that, bizarrely and obliquely, speaks of broken institutions.
xxx
Follow Ben Kessler on Twitter @koolfresh