Once upon a time, a young, intelligent, art-minded person detested the sycophant. Antagonism towards the obsequious birthed the archetype of the sardonic, apathetic, misanthropic ‘hipster’ of the indie sleaze era. Now, poptimism, the ‘brat’ summer, the Swifities and/or Stan culture dominate the same cultural void as an adversarial byproduct of the 90s-00s disdain for anything popular. Poptimism is an overcorrection; a collateral contempt for the abnormal and the avant-garde in an otherwise media-obsessed generation.
Reactionary poptimist subcultures come with a preordained set of likes and dislikes the same way navel-gazing hipsters did—Swifties hate Kanye because of 
and the hipsters hate Taylor Swift for her monocultural dominance and pick-me prose. Or, the Barbz are toxic and boygenius fans gatekeep in bygone pussy-hat era histrionics. It’s all precocious; baby toys at l’oeuvre. Pretentious young adults love to be better than—or equal to—their media; rigidly defining themselves by a set of like-and-dislike signifiers like a moralistic dogma. The parasocial worship these communities of media-obsessives adhere to quickly devolves into an adversarial disposition towards the idol, and the art—the fans want a say and the detractors know better than the artist themselves. Media-driven identities force a superiority complex upon the participant, especially in the creative types unconsciously envious of their object-of-derision/affection’s success; like Jia Tolentino says “opinions used to be a jumping off point to find a deeper meaning, now they are an ends-to-a-means” (paraphrased).
Consumption Superiority Complex
I, too, suffer from this media supremacist affliction, as one leaning more towards sardonic hipster than vibey poptimist. For example, I once quarrelled for hours with a girlfriend after she misidentified Ought as Radiohead. I was 24, and she was wrong. I thought I was being polite and informative, but, really, I was being conceited and pedantic. In truth, none of this tiff had to do with music, but instead the foreknowledge I insistently injected into her appreciation of the music (though, still, not Radiohead). On top of that, my pal Nolan recently reminded me that in 11th grade I proclaimed to “objectively have the correct taste in music”, compared to anyone else we know, or something to that effect. I remember saying this, but I do not remember why; maybe because my grades were bad and I didn’t have anything else exceptional about me or maybe one of the guys had incensed me with an “anything but rap and country” shibboleth.
These days, I try to hold to the Taoist proverb “he who studies too much doubts what he knows” (paraphrased) whenever I feel these tendencies bubble up—as much as my previously published treatise on the Rolling Stone 500 may suggest otherwise. That is to say, I understand the combative critical spirit of youth, but I do not condone it. Take the proclamation that The Fabelmans is poorly edited—a reaction from a younger friend of mine so hubristic I’m writing about three years later. Maybe it resonated because it reminded me of my own precocious past; of opinions I wish I never spoke aloud. But, it’s one thing to not enjoy a baby boomer’s self-mythologizing and hardly-difficult coming-of-age swan song, and it’s another to think you know better than the guy who made Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, furthermore, to be completely unable to articulate what made the editing bad; if my memory serves correct, their exact quote was a vocal-fried “it’s just bad”.
I get it: being at odds with the masters is a way of negotiating with culture; it’s an exercise in contrarianism as much as it’s a way to bring a monolith back down to earth. On the other-hand, I once received a single star Letterboxd review of John Ledingham and I’s film The Promised End in which the viewer derided us for protecting our minimalist conceit and self-indulgence “under the guise of experimental cinema”. I found this to be painfully shallow and drenched in a superiority complex in which one takes pleasure in tearing down our movie in disregard for the fact that The Promised End is essentially one-to-one communication. I’m right here, man, forty people have seen my movie and I distributed it myself. i.e; you can easily tell me it sucks, and it hurts my feelings directly in the process.
Never was The Promised End marketed as experimental; it’s just slow. He summarizes its content, undermines it with a categorical error, and decides our labour of love is a 2/10. This review signals a desperate need to be above or at least equal to us. I’ve since befriended this reviewer and have learned to appreciate their honesty and their writing en-masse, but my point still stands. Plus, he showed up to our next one, gave it two stars this time around, and is in the process of reading my book. Patronage is, ultimately, better than empty brown-nosery.
Death by Irony Poisoning
That aside, I’d like to address ‘irony poisoning’, a term coined by irony-king himself Nick Mullen and misattributed to the New York Times, in relation to the combative arm-chair criticism of contemporary media enthusiasts. Irony poisoning is a neo-nihilist modus operandi that seeks only to destroy; to cringe, to laugh at, to be above it all. I, too, understand why one would scoff at earnest vanity projects by multi-hyphenated star-writer-director (like my films). The “Who do they think they are?” response. The desire to reign supreme over our media is, in part, the Letterboxd effect wherein users are rewarded for quippy sarcasm, narcissistic confessionals, and 100-level polemics above meaningful insights into ways-of-viewing. The superego inevitably drives the media junkie to desire equity or supremacy with what they watch; they’ve earned it through cinephilia, education, creativity and/or some intersection of special interests. The precocious want to be on par with Spielberg as a result, although, certainly, few are, and they’re incensed that Tommy Wiseau’s, or John and I’s, or even Coppola’s egotism saw The Room, The Promised End and Megalopolis across their respective finish lines.
In regard to Wiseau’s reception, The Room has transformed from mysterious billboard hanging in LA, to ennuied hipster punching-bag, to outright irony-bro classic. I’ve seen its decimation first-hand. I worked at a theatre and a screening of The Room was the only time I’ve kicked someone out for being too drunk. The Room is certainly a baffling failure, beyond my own “word-vomit”, as the reviewer called it, and Coppola’s billionaire-class liberalism, but it’s the product of untreated mental illness and ESL difficulties rather than sheer narcissism. I, again, don’t knock anyone for feeling above Wiseau, but I do condemn the conceited worldview it begets—a closed mind whose critical heels are dug in so deep and paved over with the most pretentious concrete that they are unable to be moved by the backhoe-attrition of an outsider.
Irony begets prejudice—to decide one does not like ‘x’ therefore they will not even engage with ‘y’—and, even worse, causes one to hold themselves to an immeasurable standard in which they ultimately produce nothing, or very little, or create works so mulled over and beyond reproach that their voice is muted by the time it’s done. Moreover, to enjoy nothing earnestly ever again; to lose sight of art’s capacity for enchantment, to dismiss the vernacular as ‘amateur’. The ironic, contemptuous gaze is nothing short of meek and insecure; a consequence of the ambition Catholics warn us of; the true meaning of pretentious; a worldview that pits the viewer against the viewing; paralyzing arrogance. All the same, a one-sided equity is partisan and paradoxical.
Motern Mentality
Admittedly, my friend and close collaborator John Ledingham and I are huge fans of egosplotation cinema, particularly those outside of the Hollywood industrial complex. Bradley Cooper’s Sondheim vanity project Maestro isn’t all that exciting since he’s got Netflix/The Hangover money to cushion the blow, whereas a Neil Breen, seven films deep and headstrong in his alien ideology, is a curio supreme. Misguided DIY attempts at filmmaking akin to Wiseau, Breen, and After Last Season are the products of real people making movies outside of the industry, and sometimes real people fail in ways impossible for an out-of-touch elite. “What were they thinking?” is a great jumping off point for interrogating motivation, but “who do they think they are?” is trifling. An ironic distance applied to something homemade is simply pretension at its most Oxford English Dictionary apt, and to do so towards something more knowing than it initially appears surely will make a fool of you. Such is the case, often so, with the reception to Motern Media mastermind Matt Farley’s oeuvre.
Matt Farley is not Neil Breen. Matt Farley is not Tommy Wiseau. Matt Farley is not The Shaggs, not a Song Poet, not Florence Foster Jenkins, and not Wild Man Fischer. Nor is Matt Farley a Milli Vanilli, a Dirt Nasty, nor a cynical avant-garde nutjob-come-genius like Damon Packard or Henry Cowell. Matt Farley does not hide his “fundamentally toxic” proliferation under the guise of comedy. Instead, Matt Farley is the greatest and most true artist of all time.
Matt Farley is responsible for thousands of viral songs about poop—which have, over the years, gotten him fly-by-night virality including coverage on NPR, the New York Times, and Tik Tok—but that’s simply his gimmick; his day job. I know Matt primarily for his 12+ films with Charles Roxburgh. In the past few years, in part thanks to The Important Cinema Club podcast and Letterboxd, Farley and Roxburgh have reached cult-status with what I’d estimate to be probably three thousand rampant fans; a number estimated based on Twitter followers, Letterboxd logs, and off-hand remarks on his Motern Media Infomercial Podcast. Yet, Farley’s solo novelty songs have garnered the attention of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, including but not limited to Charlie Puth, Billie Ellish and the Kardashians.
Unfortunately, his type of recognition does not necessarily sustain long-term patronage nor beget further curiosity. When I spoke to Matt on the phone for the first time—his number is freely available—I mentioned how The Huffington Post didn’t acknowledge his film work, and he said he had some “really big, maybe the biggest press” coming next week, which turned out to be The New York Times. We both hoped that they had done their due diligence regarding the rest of his oeuvre—the ‘No Jokes’ part as he likes to call them. Unfortunately, they didn’t really get into the movies nor the ‘No Joke’ songs, although they didn’t undermine his work ethic either. Much of the major press Matt gets comes with a smug undertone—one that wants to paint him as a grifter, as a bad faith actor, as a “fundamentally toxic” fool instead of an adept pragmatist with an unbridled lust for creating.
In late 2024, Farley’s film work started to gain industry traction. Local Legends: Bloodbath! debuted at the annual pre-TIFF Dankfest alongside alt-comedy darling Connor O’Malley’s Rap World programmed by Midnight Madness’ own Peter Kuplowsky—one of Motern’s OG champions. I sent my Torontonian friend Jeremy Ugro to attend and he said it was “literally your dream, bro”, and suggested the people who stuck around for Matt were already fans of Matt; kind of back-handed, but nonetheless true. It felt like a watershed moment; like Motern Media—Matt’s catch-all production name for his projects—was about to reach a level, and a type, of attention it finally deserved. Feeling the hype, Matt seized the zeitgeist and released Bloodbath! on Vimeo while it had the Dankfest momentum. Unfortunately, it failed to move more than a hundred or so copies, as he bemoaned on his podcast some days later. I found it disheartening and hard to believe that John and I, two guys 3240.6 miles away from Matt’s homebase, comprised almost two percent of the Motern diehards willing to shell over a measly twelve bucks to see his new film, and so did Matt.
Around this time, a few jealous hit-pieces including institutionally bankrolled comedian Pablo Torre and industry bootlicker Dancing with Ghosts alongside an onslaught of negative comments on the New York Times article tried to paint Matt as a deceitful hack; simultaneously, Matt went mega-viral on Tik Tok, a platform he himself does not use, for his poop songs once again. It seemed as though these worlds he’s created couldn’t overlap, and that no one on the novelty song side did their research. Pablo Torre refused to take his “No Jokes” work in good faith and Dancing with Ghosts’ polemic on “Dig In!” reveals his inability to listen with rectitude. What baffles me the most is their lack of curiosity. Wouldn’t you want to know more about a guy who’s made 30000+ songs, especially if you were to produce a video essay about him or cover him on your paint-by-numbers comedy podcast?
The ironic lens has been donned, and his conceited nay-sayers refuse to accept that his oeuvre is overflowing with meaning. Pablo Torre’s been validated by Comedy Central and Dancing with Ghosts by his jaded subscribers while guys like Matt Farley and I remain steadfastly driven by ourselves and our attrition. Moreso, we encourage others to commit to selfmade-vernacular artistry; to create art for art’s sake; to inundate the world with folk art in the face of an industrialized, socially-metriced society. Ted Kaczynski by way of Jed Fair. Proliferation is one thing, but survival is another. Cheap adages like “less is more” or “quality over quantity” don’t account for how one sustains creative drive; the exercising of the impulse; the compulsive nature of art-making. Because of proliferation, I have outlasted 100s of peers who briefly garnered infinitely more esteem and attention than my projects. Matt Farley, barnone, has made five movies since Tarantino’s last and more albums than anyone since the dawn of the phonograph. That is to say, we are still here, and many of our more successful peers are not—in defiance of the irony-poised, conceited masses’ perception of him as a trickster.
The best gateway into the Motern mentality is Local Legends, without a doubt. It’s a Stardust Memories–esque autofictional account of being a lifelong backyard creative and strain it puts on coexisting with an otherwise working-class suburban environment. Its sequel, made 10+ years later, is about what happens when that guy gets just a little honeysuckle of fame, and has to reckon with an ego validated.
Creativity as Attrition
The difference between imagination and creativity is manifestation. Imagination is step one; it’s the fun part; to limitlessly conceptualize and dream on. Creativity, on the other hand, adds step two-through-one-thousand. I recall the aforementioned friend—the one knows better than Spielberg—telling me about a screenwriting circle they were in. They complained about how lofty and unmakeable their peers’ scripts were; and while I didn’t love how down on the rest of the class they were, I did agree that pragmatism is what transfigures imagination into art. Furthermore, I’m not convinced higher learning is conducive to creation either; it’s an institution and institutions beget more institutions which beget waiting for pug-faced mafia executives to give you their blessing to create. Local Legends is a radical act of giving oneself permission to create. No middle man. No espresso tastings. No notes. No budget.
In Farley’s universe, a ‘failed artist’ is not someone who’s failed to achieve renown; it’s someone who fails to produce altogether. I think I’ve heard him use the term ‘low-level’ artists to refer to himself, but never failed. Local Legends does not seek to raise the low-level artist to the stature of celebrity, but to herald them as they are honestly; that folk art offers something the intuition cannot. I spoke with my brother Cameron, co-star of all my films and all my films to come, about a local film Church of the Flying Saucer by Angus Silver I had seen recently. I liked Silver’s film for its Vancouver Island charm and for some of its well-executed party montages but felt disappointed that it followed the narrative and formal conventions of an ‘indie’ (in the Fox Searchlight sense, not the Motern Media sense) and ‘coming-of-age’ film. It was too safe, and no one is telling Silver to be safe. “I don’t get it,” I said. I proclaimed to Cameron that Silver was not shackled by an institution, by executives notes, and by a real-need to corner a market and turn-a-profit, yet made something so in-the-box. My own brief conversations with the director suggested he was not interested in film festivals nor conventional distribution at all thus hoped that his film(s) had reflected that punk ethos.
His other feature, The Life and Death of Angel Candy, was a little closer to what I had imagined—an agoraphobic descent into hustler-induced madness loaded with dialogic idiosyncrasies and DIY aesthetics (it’s a found footage movie). Regardless, Cameron simply replied “maybe that’s what he likes. I like spy movies with predictable twists. I find them comfy, and so do you JP!” to which I replied “I guess it’s a categorical error on my part—wanting it to be something that it just simply is not” to which Cameron honked my nose like a clown and made a mock-satantic peak-a-boo face and said “hee-haw!” Cameron is right, but he’s also so wrong.
Local Legends and its sequel are this exact conversation I had with Cameron—the former unabashedly taking my side, and the latter exploring Cameron’s disdain for my DIY dogmatism. Local Legends is a gently eccentric autofictional manifesto akin to Stardust Memories, while Bloodbath! is something akin to Allen’s later Deconstructing Henry – a tear-down of one’s creative ideology and a psycho-analytic act of self-criticism.
Local Legends should be the first and last movie anyone is shown before pursuing a degree in the fine arts. The institution does not galvanize the creative spirit–it informs it but it does not fortify it in a practical sense. Your film prof might encourage so-and-so lighting and your screenwriting prof so-and-so structure, but Farley is a genius pragmatist – deeply aware of his own limitations, weaponizes what one-might-call delusion into finished material, keenly conscious of the metrics of success constructed by society, and unabashedly unprecious about sharing his art. Nothing in Local Legends is upheld by the institution – the ethos is punk and the presentation its own. It’s a radical act of autofiction, of inculcating an audience into a worldview, and of holding to one’s own (openly fledgling) creative drive.
The Cost of Validation
On the other hand, Local Legends Bloodbath! almost reads as a bitter screenwriting professor’s red-highlit notes on their otherwise-star-student’s final project. It confronts what a modicum of success does to the ‘islanding’ of an unstoppable productive vernacular artist; one who’s built up their own methodological armour that can not be chinked. He’s been validated, on his own terms, giving way to a toxic tour of I told you so!’s and enabling his already self-involved modus operandi. Recently, Ben Affleck said to Theo Von that “money is great; I would never give that up. Fame ain’t worth it,” or Mark Knopfler, who said “Success is the gas; Fame is the exhaust coming out the tail pipe.” Geniality is a trademark of Farley’s persona, both the man and the character, but Bloodbath! lets the coy-desperation of its predecessor fester into acrimony towards his loved ones. He plays into the claims of Pablo Torres and Dancing with Ghosts; he’s a hustler now, a walking contradiction between the vernacular and the enterprise, and nothing can stop the contempt of this runaway paradox.
Bloodbath! is a PhD in self reflexivity, but not a metafictional exercise; in fact, parsing out its metafictional status is made impossible by Farley’s intentional well-crafted narrative design; Local Legends, the original film, exists in Bloodbath! as a movie Farley made, but its elements—namely Farley’s business alter-ego—come to life, yet the internal logic of these characters coming to life are not treated as a Purple Rose Cairo character-crawls-out-of-the-screen trope rather just par-for-the-Motern-course absurdity. Bloodbath! does not break-the-forth-wall, but disrupts the reality implicit in Local Legends autobiographical format by refiguring it as a carefully constructed fiction upholding Farley’s vanity.
Todd Philips tried to make something like Bloodbath! with Joker: Folie à deux, in which he refutes the philosophies of its predecessor and punishes its subject for the sins the source text condoned; but Folie à deux doesn’t work because Philips isn’t a radical outsider (I think Joker 1 doesn’t work for the same reason too); Philips writes in DNC campaign speech prose, and you can not refute a mainstream narrative with another mainstream narrative, whereas Farley is firmly grounded in the interpersonal and vernacular, as is Before Midnight, perhaps its best sequelized counterpoint besides, maybe, The Matrix Resurrections, which seeks to interrogate its predecessor’s legacies and the pressures of a franchise-pilled film industry; I found it impressively brazen but overall recondite.
I worry sometimes about my band Really Loud Free Jazz, among my most successful projects to date, being too jokey. I mean, the band name is hilariously precise, and the music is ridiculously over-the-top. But when playing, I transcend, lost in Maxwell’s raging beehive drums and Liliana’s seamless ability to pastiche Jaco and Les Claypool while counterpointing my idiosyncratic Zornian squanks. But it’s the poop songs that brought Matt into the cultosphere, and funded his net-loss filmography, and it’s Really Loud Free Jazz that’s ingratiated me to a community of weirdos that I’d otherwise have never crossed paths with. Hopefully, a couple of them will watch my movies or read my books. But my faith in curiosity is squandered by the plague of the ironic lens and pretension of the precocious connoisseur. Curiosity can only start discourse, it can’t join in on it.
An acquaintance of mine Zach, aka Fussing, went viral on TikTok for a particularly fiery noise set. It’s nothing new for noise artists to exit their niche and fall victim to normie discourse, especially those that border on performance art. Same goes with Maxwell Patterson, aka io, who co-starred with me in The Promised End on a recent r/drumming Reddit thread as well as a Rate Your Music infamy. He exited his orbit and was tarred and feathered for it. But, whatever, that’s all matters of reception, not the art unto itself; let the combative spirit of neophytes and critics fuel creation, not upend it.
feel free to let Matt know you read this article by calling or texting him at 603-644-0048.
