This Labor Day weekend, rather than enjoying a bit of extra time with family and friends, lounging poolside or cracking open a dusty old tome, a not-insignificant number of people decided to freak out about celebrities online. Oscar Isaac sensually strokes Jessica Chastain’s arm on the Venice Film Festival red carpet! John Mulaney and Oliva Munn may be having sex shortly after Mulaney filed for divorce! It’s all so wrong! Or we’re all so wrong for caring either way! This is our world now, an antisocial and gravely self-serious whirlpool of gossip and chatter where we approvingly or disapprovingly type on our computers about the imagined behaviors of people who pretend for a living. Or react disapprovingly to the disapproval, for that matter.
But who am I to judge? I too saw the Oscar Isaac arm stroke and thought, CINEMA IS BACK! After all, sensuality is sorely lacking in our sad new world, laden with superhero allegory and sexless faux-arthouse “studies” of failing relationships (no offense, Scenes from a Marriage, the miniseries). Very online people are drawn to over-identify with celebrities because real life is bleak and so many of the movies and TV shows on offer right now are even bleaker, offering us not flights of erotic fancy but rather schlumpy people disappointing other schlumpy people.
But we’re also ashamed by our overidentification with the beautiful celebs—so after caring too much about their lives, we become self-righteous, protecting the non-famous spouses we know nothing about but imagine are long-suffering. What does Isaac’s poor wife think of his flagrant theater kid press event flirtations with Chastain?! How could Mulaney sleep with a celebrity woman after his ex supported him through years of addiction?! These are real exclamations I read, in large numbers, on the internet this weekend. Why was I there, and why wouldn’t I look away? Surely people who don’t log on are saying much more interesting things, laughing and having fun somewhere, with cocktails?
If you go outside and exclude conspiracy theorists from your happenstance interactions, this turns out to be pretty true. Isn’t the friend who doesn’t have a Twitter the friend whose unexpected call you’re most likely to pick up? “Tell me something, anything!” you plead to them. (I don’t have any data or reportage to back this with, but here on the internet, instinct and anecdote can scale.) Still, we want to type about the beautiful people, and the famous and wretched ones, too.
It would be nice if we could instead write more rigorously about their work and more critically about the industries they work in—and if platforms that encourage that level of discussion were more abundantly available and financially supported. But in our deeply imperfect digitized world, we have the made-up intricacies of their personal lives for fodder, and, well, that’s always been the subtext.
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