You, Me & Eugene
or Eugene Kotlyarenko's Memes, Schemes & Dreams, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'The Code'.
On August 3rd at 12:48 am AEST, I took a screenshot of my Instagram notifications to send to my friend Frankie in Melbourne. 2 hours and 30mins earlier, I was at a bar called Cobbler in Brisbane’s West End and had taken a photo of the menu item I ordered to send to my group chat titled Beer Addicts Anonymous: a Grand Theft Auto Vice City-inspired whiskey cocktail.
themasterofcum a aimé votre publication. 18 m [A screenshot of my DAZED article].
themasterofcum a aimé votre publication. 18 m [A selfie I took in a bar bathroom].
I took that selfie a couple of months earlier, May 12th to be exact, and on looking back through my photos, the next image was a screenshot of @pdallarosa’s Instagram story, captioning “Cloutbomb” on his recent purchase of @victim0_o’s My First Book and @nicolettepolek’s Bitter Water Opera. My copy of the former was embargoed by Booktopia AU’s freak administration, the latter I remember adding to my Amazon AU cart, along with @themasterofcum’s Sillyboy.
In bed, drunk off my Grand Theft Auto Vice City-inspired whiskey cocktail and one million beers, I took the two notifications as an invitation. In my mind, and freelance experience in email marketing, there’s a very small window that opens up between consideration and conversion, between an Instagram like and a DM. I was primed for a strong open and response rate.
12:50 AM
olivia.thinks: I’ve almost finished reading Sillyboy!
olivia.thinks: Your likes are encouraging 😊
Emptied of shame, and filled with fear, I deleted the entire chat and went to bed. The key to success is a code, a short and sharp hook that invites intrigue and demands deciphering. I was sure I achieved neither. And, for that reason, the two messages above, are not verbatim, but Frankie believes they’re pretty close.
2:11 AM
frankienapier: Omg
frankienapier: Stop
frankienapier: What
frankienapier: I’m screeching
2:20 AM
themasterofcum: Amazing
themasterofcum: Write a review plz :))))))
I woke up and sent a screenshot of @themasterofcum’s response to Frankie at 11:30 am. By 11:50 am, I’d searched for @victim0_o in my followers and took another screenshot.
@victim0_o had followed me years ago after I tagged her in a photo of my friend Kiara, who wore a gingham babydoll top and a Catholic cross to The Retreat beer garden. Our interstate friendship deepened through our shared love for Wet Brain and round-for-round shitposting in our Beer Addicts Anonymous group chat.
12:46 PM
frankienapier: I’m gonna throw up
olivia.thinks: He’s so hot lol
frankienapier: I know
frankienapier: Like
frankienapier: So hot
frankienapier: Tell him you’ll only write a review if he can get you a copy of The Code
frankienapier: For me
frankienapier: I need to see it now
frankienapier: You should flirt with him tho
It was 12:52 pm and I did as I was told. As Dasha Nekrasova—who, like BRAT Summer, was declared dead by DAZED’s cultural pulse-checks–said, ‘If you’re a journalist, you’re a whore.' (43:50). And if you’re a Pedlowvian poet, well, then you terrorise virgins. So, I guess you’d better be beyond the grave.
@themastercum explained that he didn’t have The Code, but that I should ask Eugene Kotlyarenko, the director, because “he might actually give u one if ur gonna write an article”. So, I did as I was told. 24hrs later I’d screenshot a sexless exchange with a cameraman I also wasn’t dating, a Google image search for René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe and save a TikTok clip of a YouTube video FLEECE posted in 2015 titled “how to write an Alt-J song”.
Two weeks later, I was back in Melbourne, where the drool of Raygun’s Olympic performance ruled—ranging from pithy pub-table remarks to 5-slide Instagram-academic jargon dissecting the Australian colonial project. One morning I’d made the poor decision of pairing a bain-marie breakfast burger with CBD. I finished Sillyboy next to a secluded part of Victoria Park Lake. Drying out, I felt like Daine in her chaotic Instagram exchange with @themasterofcum, ready to scream at the steps of Curtin House, “Where the hoe’s at?!”
I met up with Frankie at Carwyn Cellars, handed her my finished copy, and over two million beers, quipped, "It’s kinda refreshing to read a book by a straight white guy." We laughed. Romantic relationships, like the one in Sillyboy, are always the same: codependent, ego-driven, laced with -ognies and -andries, and here in Melbourne, especially cucked by the constant need to keep up appearances. Peter Vack, The Master of Cum, the silliest of the boys, had made the obvious painfully obvious. In Aussie parlance, he’s true blue, just like my cover of Sillyboy, and I was disarmed by the perverse candour of his internet-pilled prose.
Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code—or simply Eugene from here, as our online experiences intertwine—also escalates the absurd instincts of internet-fuelled lives, following the thankless, sexless relationship between NFT-illustrator Jay Richards (Peter Vack) and budding documentarian Celine Unger (Dasha Nekrasova). Both characters are trapped in their self-absorption, suffocated by surveillance and each other (literally even, as they huff oxygen from a canister gifted by Parthik Miraj (Vishwam Vilandy), their vaudevillian Airbnb host). Their pandemic-era California road trip isn’t a romantic escape but a performative stage for Celine’s directive and obsessive need to document every moment.
Celine’s preoccupation with 'getting the shot right' blocks any real connection with Jay. At their defunct ghost-tour house—posing as a desert retreat with a Global Village Coffeehouse aesthetic—she conducts interviews where form outweighs substance. Constant stops, re-shoots, and debates about “acting real” vs. “being real” blur the already shaky lines between fiction and nonfiction. Even a hench-looking stranger who helps them when their car breaks down dryly quips, “I think it’s weird you’re even talking about it,” exposing just how bizarre their heightened awareness is. Not everyone’s fixated on the filmic grammar of life, even though we’re all unwittingly part of its hyper-mediated script.
Using 75 cameras—from iPhones and Teslas to spyglasses and GoPros—Eugene creates what he calls 'diegetic cinema,' where the characters become their own filmmakers. In the SXSW Sydney Q&A (which he livestreamed, and I recorded from bed), he explained: 'I played with this in Spree, which was a livestream, and now in The Code, I’m digging into the grammar of cinema through the characters’ storytelling. Since everyone’s got a camera now, it changes the intimacy of filmmaking—we all inherently understand how it works.'
And it’s true, this self-awareness toward surveillance isn’t new. Whether it’s my friends and I ogling the Dime Square scene from every angle, Celine downloading a surveillance app onto Jay’s phone, or Jay installing hidden cameras in their Airbnb to regain control of his story, we’ve all been both subject and director in this world. Even Celine’s thirst traps, where she mixes dick-pills into Jay’s food for TikTok, are just another form of self-surveillance and we’ve been living under this gaze for a while now.
That’s why Eugene sticks to using period-specific software—to "point out the ridiculous normalisation of social media behaviour" and remind us just how easily these platforms "manipulated our emotions and interactions." The film traps us in that headspace, spinning the endless loop of distraction, connection, and alienation we’ve been cycling through for years. The camera work—spiritually pulled from TV gimmicks like Ghost Hunters, Nanny 911, and Punk’d—combined with Dylan Brady’s 100gecs-inspired soundtrack, doesn’t give us a moment to breathe. Each switch in angle, format, and style punctuates the film, like saving Instagram posts or TikToks you’ll never watch again—a self-soothing binky for the fear of irrelevance that marks our time.
When I wrote about internet irony’s illusionary critics in 2022, I was burnt out by the endless cycle of artists-cum-curators-cum-critics who dodged real critique through post-ironic self-promotion. Their work spiralled into shallow, repetitive nonsense, masking performance as commentary. It’s the same loop of never-ending think pieces blaming social media for our alienation—"the internet controls everything," then, "the internet isn’t real life." Well, which is it? The Code forces these anal-gazing auteurs to confront themselves, answering back with: "You signed up for this, remember?" But with so many of us trapped in the immediacy of now—denying any deeper connections to the past and too distracted to think beyond the present—what’s left to actually link together? This looming question shadows Jay and Celine’s relationship, where instant gratification replaces real intimacy, and twisted humour slices through communication breakdowns faster than words ever could.
Jay surprises Celine with an RMS Titanic-themed escape room, hoping a change of scenery will help. But with only an hour to crack the code, the urgency mirrors the unravelling of their relationship. As Jay tries to initiate sex, Celine shuts him down with, “Baby, I’m kinda in puzzle mode rn.” It’s not love she’s chasing; it’s novelty. The rush of solving something new holds the depth of their exisiting bond in a chokehold—much like my own sequacious attraction to the bottlenecking trail of @themasterofcum’s digital breadcrumbs.
Back home, Celine lures Jay into another escape room, slipping into cam-girl mode, taunting him with, “I’m sorry your relationship is stressing you out… It’s good your girlfriend is out of town.” Jay, gooning and glazed over, falls into her performance. But the mock intimacy is cut short when Celine’s cousin Collette bursts in, masked and armed with a knife. This twisted predator-prey dynamic reduces Jay’s attempts at connection to a ritual of humiliation.
In contrast, Colette and Parthik dive headfirst into their relationship—immediate, impulsive, and sure of themselves. Just 24 hours after meeting, Colette is in a wedding dress after Parthik’s quick proposal. “I see all these millennials on Instagram complaining about meaningless sex with people they met on apps,” she says, no hesitation. “I want something real.” Her certainty exposes how trapped Celine and Jay are in their performative, internet-driven cycle. Colette and Parthik see the game but refuse to get caught in it.
Celine finally admits the documentary isn’t about the pandemic—it’s a rallying cry for their stale relationship. “The longer we don’t have sex, the harder it is to remember why we were together in the first place.” Her ultimatum—“Find me before sunrise, or we’re done”—becomes just another game. Jay, now forced to piece together fragments of their days, follows Celine’s clues in a Survivor-style search that leads to a new horizon for the couple. In the end, we’re all just searching for someone to understand us without needing to spell it out.
Much like Frankie and I, pulling our parasocial relationships out of thin air and trading screenshots like currency, the line between the virtual and the real has never been clear. Eugene’s The Code doesn’t ask us to untangle that blur (thinking of you @dansdansrev <3); it invites us to lean in, embrace the artifice, and make it work for us. Driven by surveillance, thirst traps, and dopamine-fueled validation, the goal isn’t to escape—it’s to crack the code and find real connection beneath the filters and performances. Once you learn this language, these tools can bring you closer to someone who speaks it too. Frankie’s advice was right: flirt, ask for the screener, play the game. Oh–and you signed up for this game too, Eugene, don’t forget.
