A Match Made in Memes

Brittany Menjivar interviews actor, filmmaker, and meme admin Peter Vack about his debut novel, “Sillyboy.”

By Brittany MenjivarAugust 21, 2024

• Fiction

SOME MIGHT RECOGNIZE Peter Vack as an actor—he voiced Gary in the cult video game Bully, appeared on TV shows The Bold Type (2017–21) and Mozart in the Jungle (2014–18), and has starred in a number of indies. Others might know him as an avant-garde filmmaker: his debut feature Assholes (2017) was once deemed “the most disgusting movie ever made,” and his latest film, sci-fi drama www.RachelOrmont.com, premieres this summer. Now he’s stepping into a new creative realm with his first novel, Sillyboy. Published by Cash 4 Gold Books this summer, Vack’s debut follows the titular Sillyboi as he strives to make it big in the film industry—all while trying to save his failing relationship and perseverating on what it means to be a straight white man at a time when cultural tides are changing (the year 2015, to be precise).

Familiar with Vack’s work in film and curious about his creative pivot, I invited him to the reading series I host in Los Angeles, Car Crash Collective, last December. He recited the first iteration of a “meme poem” that he would later perform around New York City, referencing everything from his own work to The Godfather to niche internet microcelebrities. Much like that poem, Vack’s novel reckons with the rise of Instagram, memes, and influencer culture, as well as the compulsion to self-narrativize via autofictional storytelling (the protagonist of Sillyboy shares notable similarities with Vack himself). Yet if you’re expecting an experiment in online lingo, you’ll be surprised—Vack takes a more traditional approach to prose, citing Philip Roth as his primary inspiration.

Recently, the two of us chatted over the phone about Vack’s long-standing passion for literature, his tendency—whether by way of novels or memes—to blur the line between fact and fiction, and his interest in meta-commentary on the artist’s journey.

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PETER VACK: I’ll let you take the lead.

BRITTANY MENJIVAR: I’ll start with questions I might already know the answers to, just so we can provide context for readers.

I’m interested in these questions that you know the answers to. You know what—if your answers are better than mine, we’ll go with yours.

Your author bio describes you as an actor, filmmaker, and meme admin. This is how most people know you. How did you come to write Sillyboy?

I had the impulse to write a novel around the time that I had just graduated high school. Senior year of high school, I really fell in love with literature because of my English teacher, Mrs. Shellie Sclan Berman, who is one of the few people I give a shout-out to in the acknowledgments. She was crucial in my formation as a writer in that she exposed me to Philip Roth. Before I had read Roth, books all just felt like something I was being assigned by academia, and I hated academics. I guess, in that I was a young neurotic Jew from the Upper West Side … For someone like me, who fancied himself this nebbishy urban neurotic more so than I do now, to read Roth was like to read the ultimate version of yourself. It felt like, This is the mind and sensibility that I hope to one day have. He was such a clear and immediate idol—it was like turning on a switch. I went from being super apathetic about literature to being totally obsessed.

So, in my late teens and twenties, I read most of Roth’s books. It’s an interesting thing to read him when you’re young, because many of his books are about being an old man and your dick not working anymore and the horrible inequities of getting old. It’s also a very distinct thrill when you’re young and you’re reading the work of an old master. It totally turned me on. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) especially—it’s like the secular male Jewish Bible.

Ever since I became infatuated with Roth, I had it in mind that I would, one day, write a novel. But because my professional life at that time was all about acting jobs, I couldn’t really dedicate myself to it. Then, at 28, I had made a feature film, which was a goal of mine, and I thought, I have to sit down and really wrangle the discipline necessary to write a novel. And I did. It took a long time.

How did you get in touch with Cash 4 Gold Books?

In the course of writing the book—and this relates to the memes too—I met Jon Lindsey [of Cash 4 Gold]. In an interesting way, actually. Honor Levy, out of the blue, in 2021, texted me a link to Lindsey’s novel Body High (2020). That was a powerful endorsement, so I bought the book. I read it in a couple of days. I fell in love with it, and I was like, “Jon’s a guy I can just DM on Instagram,” so I DMed him and that became our friendship.

I had also been trying to help him adapt Body High into a film. During those conversations, I told him I had this manuscript and he was like, “Let me do an editorial pass.” And he did, and it was very helpful. It was only years later when he was realizing that he was going to start his own press that he was like, “Look, I want to consider Sillyboy.” Also, I put Jon’s book into a lot of memes, which started our friendship in our mutual endorsement society.

It was really just one of those … It was meme magic. It was a match made in memes.

Were you a fiction writer before you were a screenwriter, or did you come to both forms around the same time?

I think I was more interested in fiction writing before I was interested in screenwriting—although, that’s not entirely true. Because professionally, I’m an actor, and I’ve been doing that since I was a child; making movies always felt more in line with that ambition. My impulse to write actually was initially to write a movie. There is a part of me that enjoys the experience of reading a book more than the experience of watching a movie, which has always felt like an internal conflict. The protagonist in Sillyboy deals with a lot of conflicts, but one of mine that I don’t even yet know how to resolve is this genuine interest in a lot of different areas. It almost feels taboo, but I’m increasingly just giving into it.

The other day, my friends asked me, “If you could only consume one form of art for the rest of your life, what would it be?” I was between books and film, but I ultimately went with books.

“Books” is the safe answer. But you know what the primary-process answer is for me? Online content.

That didn’t even occur to me.

It’s disgusting. It’s literally repulsive. If you were to print that in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I might as well be shot.

We can keep that off the record.

Maybe you should out me as a phone addict. I’m not actually going to go with that, but I will be honest—that was the thing that came up.

It was your first instinct.

Yeah. But it would absolutely be books. Just like if someone said, “If you could only eat one food …” I would be wrong to not choose a healthy food. I might want to say candy, but that would kill me.

How do you think your background in the film industry has influenced your writing, both on the craft level and in terms of your practice?

The film industry isn’t literary at all. A screenplay isn’t a literary document. So, it’s influenced me in my rebellion against it. What I really enjoy about prose writing is that it feels like a way in which I am standing against the grain somehow. Screenwriting and reading scripts as an actor, I’ve come to believe there’s almost no good screenplay, and I include my own in this. Screenplays are at best an interesting outline for what could become a good film or a television show, and they might be brilliant in that they’re a brilliant instruction manual, but the documents themselves are not a literary experience.

My work as a prose writer has been a lot of dealing with the film industry and feeling, in moments, underappreciated in a system I don’t even necessarily like that much. I don’t have the reverence for it that I feel I should. For reasons I’m not 100 percent clear on, it felt more satisfying for me to deal with that in a book—maybe because, at the time that I was writing it, I didn’t want to see a depiction of the film industry in a film.

Is that because you think it’s more difficult to deal with those topics fully in a film, or do you think such a film would be too trite or on the nose?

My feelings about this have changed, actually. In the time since I started writing the book, I’ve seen a lot of movies and TV shows that I do like that talk about the meta-struggle of the actor or filmmaker. I like 8 1/2, and I like my sister’s film [Actors]. But at the time, turning to fiction felt rebellious. When you’re a lifelong actor, Hollywood and the TV industry have such a magnetic pull that you sometimes need to take some sort of refuge away from them. Writing a novel was definitely that for me.

Sillyboy is rooted in your personal experiences as an actor. I think it’s interesting that, even though it’s set in 2015—and you’ve mentioned to me that you started writing it around that time—it plays with autofiction in a way that feels very much in tune with current preoccupations in the literary world. Considering Sillyboy, and even Assholes where you and [your real-life sister] Betsey [Brown] play siblings, you’re clearly interested in autofictional storytelling.

It’s funny. When I began writing it, “autofiction” wasn’t trending, and I had a lot of misgivings about it. But it was the instinct that I had, and I was trying to follow this instinct that was visceral and not submit to my self-criticism, which was intellectual. And a lot of what I like to do with my creative work is follow impulses. I trust—almost too much—my impulses.

Maybe now it feels calculated because autofiction is so memed. But as you know, when you spend years working on something, you invent a lot, and it does become something outside of your experience. Really, I think I was trying to write about things that scared me. It was an exercise in doing something I felt uncomfortable with.

Do you find yourself defending yourself against people who believe that you’re exactly like your fictional alter egos, or do you welcome or revel in the confusion?

I think about that a lot, actually. It’s in the book—the protagonist imagines that his mother is reading the book as he’s writing it and is outraged and worried. It does feel like we’re in a moment now more than ever where readers are linking creators to their work. And I understand that.

There definitely is a lot of me in this book, but I have turned up the volume on a lot of my worst qualities. It’s not journalism about my life. We use our worst qualities to create these literary monsters that hopefully serve as some sort of cathartic symbol for people when they take them in. With a character that’s a struggling actor and a filmmaker, it’s impossible to not see the author, me, in that—but it can feel reductive. It’s almost like some sort of anal exam. It feels like someone’s giving you some proctology exam where they’re like, “Let me get exactly which percentage of your fecal matter is cancerous and which percentage is benign.”

Forgive the disgusting analogy, but it does feel like that. It’s slightly frustrating, but I do it too. Why do you think people are so obsessed with that?

I think it’s partially because writers—and I do want to ask you more about this later—have become more forward-facing in the age of social media.

It does feel like it’s linked to the expectation that everyone has to post, to be online, to have a presence. That presence is often “you,” but we all know that, if you’re putting stuff out for public consumption, there’s an element of performance. I think that’s why there’s more media that is meta about the entertainment industry and about actors, because actors recognize that they have to act. In the past, writers could probably get away with … I mean, Roth spent most of his adult life in a cabin in the woods, and at a certain point, he didn’t interact with society in New York. He would just send manuscripts off to his publisher. He wrote a lot in his later work about whether or not he should even publish. But in our social media–inflected world, everyone feels that if they’re not posting every day, they don’t exist. And the performance of themselves is almost as important as or equally important to the work.

I definitely give into that, 100 percent. Being a meme admin has freed me, because posting selfies in the early days of Instagram triggered all of these horrible, vain impulses in me. I leaned into the world of memes because it felt like a license to—in a satirical way or in a post-ironic way or in a sincere way—lean into the need to post. It was freeing: “I am living this pure persona on these apps, and I will be uninhibited because the ethos of the meme world is to flood the feed with content.”

There’s this paradox: being uninhibited becomes a way of taking control of the narrative.

Totally. And I think there’s also something that happens … Much is said about meaning breakdown and how we can’t trust institutions, we can’t trust images. So there becomes something appealing about giving in to chaos and anarchic vibes. It almost feels more authentic, because who can control a narrative anymore? The shitposter’s way of standing against that is, “Everything that’s said about me, I’m going to post. I will post fake news about myself. I will give into this meaning breakdown by becoming a symptom of it.”

Who knows if that’s a good thing or a bad thing—I kind of don’t have a judgment. I’ve just been following the impulse to enjoy that kind of performance.

That makes sense. How long have you been memeing your own work or talking about it in this self-referential, post-ironic way?

I started doing memes in 2018, but I think the real self-memeing maybe began in 2020 or so, and continues to this day. And it might stop. But I believe posting is a literary genre.

It definitely has its own internal logic. Has it given you any particular insights into how you’re perceived as a public figure?

People mostly have the wrong idea about me and about the book, and I know I’ve done a lot to furnish their wrong idea. The book is pretty straightforward and naturalistic, and the language of memes is more esoteric, edgier, harder to parse. I think people are expecting that with the book, but I don’t think the book is that connected to the language of memes. The character is a proto-memer, but that’s not the whole book.

Given your online presence, would you say that you’ve experienced people having parasocial relationships with you? If so, how do you navigate that?

Oh yeah, totally. I often meet people who have written a script about me. How I deal with it … I’m not sure I know how to deal with it yet. I’m interested in it. I know I brought it on myself. It’s such a gamble to attach yourself to anything memetic. I mean, no one controls the memes. Memes are just constantly being iterated.

To meme yourself is to attach yourself to something kind of volatile. I don’t know what that means yet. I maybe do have some sort of gambler’s mentality where I’m interested in pulling that metaphorical lever—for a game where I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

The Instagram in the book is very much the Instagram of 2015—all about putting forward the most airbrushed version of yourself, increasing your follower count, etc.

Yeah. I did consider, for a time, updating it. I’m glad I didn’t. I realized I didn’t want to because it felt sort of quaint to let people remember a time that wasn’t that long ago, but still the quality and the texture of online life have changed so much since then. I felt potentially that it would give people that feeling you get when you see a photo of the way an operating system looked 10 years ago. In this slight nostalgia, it might be easier to see certain things about today than if I had been trying so hard to nail the current moment—which you never can in a book, because there’s always this lag time.

Totally. Do you have any broad feelings about the window of nostalgia shrinking in general?

Yeah. We have this thing, I’ve heard, called “new nostalgia,” where culture cycles are so accelerated … We used to have nostalgia for 10 or 20 years ago, and now people have nostalgia for two to five years ago. It’s very legitimate to hear people talk about 2021 as if they were talking about the 1990s, and I think that’s only going to get more pronounced.

I wonder what’s going to happen when we reach that breaking point where the window gets smaller and smaller until it collapses in on itself.

We’ll be dressing “retro” and dressing like we were a year ago. That seems too surreal though.

One thing I say in the book that actually is pure autofiction is that I am pretty against nostalgia. I am—almost to a fault—interested in what’s going on right now. I really love reading contemporary people. I love seeing films from the moment. I think that’s part of what drew me to meme culture, because it’s probably the best medium for communicating something happening in the moment.

Memes are such an easy way to tap into or express feelings about the current culture because all you need to do is spend a few seconds editing on your phone and then post. It takes time to produce a film or write a book.

It’s so true. Part of the reason salon theater has become popular in New York and Los Angeles is that, similar to memes, you can get salon theater pieces up quickly enough that they can comment on the current moment, but a fully produced play or a book—they’re never not going to be talking about the past. That’s not to say that isn’t beautiful, because when you do that, you’re creating a record of a time that could potentially be an iconic record for humanity to reflect on. But it does make it harder to make a biting statement about the moment you’re in right now.

I do think it’s cool that you lean into your book being set in 2015. It becomes such a poignant snapshot of that time rather than trying to pin down the current state of social media, which is so in flux.

It’s also a personal sensibility—I’m not into things that are “timeless.” I like work that feels dated. I always feel like I’m being a little lied to when I read a book and the author is trying to make it seem like it wasn’t written in a specific time. I always wonder what they’re avoiding about their life.

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Featured image of Peter Vack by Maya/@stolenbesos.