“I am a new being, made of digital flesh. I have merged with the cyber.” That’s a quote from comedian Conner O’Malley’s satirical, experimental short film Endorphin Port. But for those who have seen Harmony Korine’s bizarre new feature Aggro Dr1ft, it easily sounds interchangeable from its dialogue. Indeed, much of the conversation I had in the immediate aftermath of my screening surrounded the question of “Is it a joke?”
It’s an impenetrable question to ask about Aggro Dr1ft, clearly one that Korine wants us to ask and will not give us any straight answer to. To his credit, why should he? But that question then begets the sub-question, the more important question. “Well, if it is a joke, is it a good joke?”
There are even more questions to ask after that. Is Korine intentionally making something both thematically and visually indecipherable and repugnant, or isn’t he? Is he being earnest or ironic, and to what extent, if either? Does he succeed? Does it matter? Because if Aggro Dr1ft is indeed intended to be scoffed at and derided, is it doing anything interesting other than existing as a provocative totem of ridicule with little else bubbling below the surface? You know what answers all of these questions? Endorphin Port.
More on Endorphin Port later, but there isn’t much more insight to these queries in relation to Korine’s film from the film’s press notes (in which Korine writes, “Wasn’t wanting to make a movie. Was wanting to make what comes after movies,” and “More like a video game. But who’s playing who. GAMECORE. EDGLRD”) or from Korine’s announcement of his new production company. All of this strikes less like an artist entering a new creative era than like a bonafide mid-life crisis.
Aggro Dr1ft is very much not “what comes after movies,” but simply your run-of-the-mill experimental film (post-screening, a friend remarked that he might have been more impressed by the film if it was 30 minutes long and made by a college student). Aggro Dr1ft exudes the existential anxiety of a 50-year-old artist who used to be a stoner provocateur now struggling to remain in his groove as he becomes old, uncool and out-of-touch. This is also possibly indicated by his collaboration with rapper Travis Scott, as this film is apparently a brainchild of their meeting of the minds.
Aggro Dr1ft follows meditative assassin BO (Jordi Mollà), a family man who must support his wife and children by being a ruthless murderer-for-hire. BO is tasked with killing a literally demonic Floridian crime lord—and that’s about where the plot starts and abruptly ends. Travis Scott is somewhere in there and I forget who he plays. The rest is embellished with sequences that could have been taken from Spring Breakers but filmed in irritating infrared and stretched to feature-length. Bikini-clad women prance around and shake their tits and asses while fawning over the men around them, men who might say something along the lines of “Dance, bitches, dance.” BO’s wife, indeed, spends the entire film either writhing around on her bed pining for her husband to come home and fuck her, or shaking her ass for the camera. Meanwhile, BO narrates the film in cryptic voiceover, espousing pseudo-philosophical musings like “The old world is no more,” and “I am a solitary hero,” and “Life is exactly like a video game. I got the cheat codes”—fooled you, that last one was from Endorphin Port!
For clarity, Endorphin Port was released during the darker days of COVID two years ago, and was preceded by a short film with similar themes entitled Leather Metropolis. O’Malley has gone on to create a website for a real “Endorphin Port” which is, as he explains in the original video, “Not a website. It’s a different reality; it’s a whole new world where we can be whoever the ‘F’ we wanna be.” For now, he’s used the site to put out a longer short film about a conspiracy-radicalized Whose Line is it Anyway? superfan named Tyler Joseph, and an A.I. chatbot named “Jeremy Bot” who shares O’Malley’s face. O’Malley’s videos have a similar interest in a hyper-specific technological version of brain damage that you can only get in present-day America. Endorphin Port specifically satirizes that failed push for a “metaverse” where we can get rid of our horrible, disgusting forms; a Cronenberg-inspired hypothesis in which we literally transcend our bodies. Feverishly edited, O’Malley vamps around New York City ranting about his designs for his ideal version of reality. Eventually he creates it through sheer force of will, despite saying he’s actually gonna need a lot of American money.
It’s not really a surprise how much Aggro Dr1ft parallels Endorphin Port in execution, if maybe not intent. Either way, it’s unbelievable just how much the work of a clear satirist surpasses Aggro Dr1ft, in every way—from special effects, to cinematography, to acting, to intended or unintended comedy. BuzzFeed should make a quiz where participants must discern between Aggro Dr1ft and Endorphin Port quotes like “Mental soldiers in a war with no enemy” and “The old world is no more.” And Endorphin Port has the advantage of not being filmed in infrared. While an intriguing notion that shockingly did not give me a headache for the 80-minute runtime, it does render much of the screen into unintelligible multi-colored blobs. I laughed when a guy, who I guess is BO’s handler (but who knows), explains that BO will someday have “All this you see.” This assumed handler spreads his arm out indicating the world: A world that only consists of heatmap blobs.
Both films are, nevertheless, about a type of transcendence: Korine insists that Aggro Dr1ft signifies surpassing the medium of film (it doesn’t), but with its subject matter of a ruthless killer trying to balance his domestic life, it’s also about transcending our flesh when you realize just how clearly frightened Korine is of aging. Aggro Dr1ft with Endorphin Port contain dueling existentialist anxieties about tech and American life, but frankly Aggro Dr1ft isn’t doing anything nearly as compelling, or as funny, as the latter film, despite being very funny by virtue of its sheer ridiculousness. Aggro Dr1ft is less interesting than the video game cutscene it resembles, padded by a narrative peppered with the tropes of a hit man action film but lacking substance. Its only clear intention is to provoke. Sadly, that provocation is far less valuable than O’Malley’s outwardly comical idea that “we need a new place on the computer where we can be epic mind soldiers who live by the Assassin’s Creed and do the most epic of legendary behavior.”
Director: Harmony Korine
Writer: Harmony Korine
Starring: Jordi Mollà, Travis Scott
Release Date: October 14, 2023 (New York Film Festival)
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.