montage #35: Some notes on the strangers in our phones
It’s becoming increasingly clear that 2024 will go down as the Year of the Insane Online Essay. Obviously, people have been writing insane online essays since Xanga pivoted from unsuccessful book review website to fully customizable personal blog platform, prompting me to print out my friends’ Xanga posts so I could re-read them as much as I wanted to on the bus ride to school while listening to my beloved Sublime greatest hits CD (the thrills of early internet). People love and will always love to do a weird thing then admit that they did it in hopes that other weirdos will tell them it’s ok, actually, what they did, anyone would do that, don’t worry 👍🏼. One time in an undergrad nonfiction class, someone wrote an essay about their secret crippling addiction to The Sims and as they read it aloud to the rest of us, each sentence felt more and more like something we should not be listening to. “Hmm,” I remember thinking. “This seems…personal.” That essay as far as I know was never published online, but had it been it would have found a great home at The Cut, where everyone would have acted totally normal about it and definitely not shared their fully rational opinions on Twitter.
The latest insane online essay du jour was somehow not published on The Cut, however—it was published at GQ, which I just found out does indeed still stand for “Gentlemen’s Quarterly.” At risk of inviting discourse that I am frankly uninterested in getting involved in, this essay, which GQ published, is about the writer wanting to be friends with famous low-voiced person Tavi Gevinson, then eventually becoming her friend, then quickly spoiling that friendship. I believe this essay is meant to be a parody of (or a play on?) a specific piece of writing that Gevinson herself recently wrote, but in my opinion if no one seems to understand that that’s what you’re going for then maybe you didn’t do a good job of it (or maybe it was a bad idea? Genuine q). The essay, instead, to me, reads like a person taking a parasocial relationship (“relationship”) to its end, and then—as you now must—admitting every detail of it for…what reason I’m not sure. Empathy…? Cultural “criticism”…? Maybe I am not big-brained enough to understand what I’m looking at here beyond an essay that found home in a culturally esteemed publication despite sounding like something my friends wrote on Xanga in eighth grade. If that’s the case: I’m sorry!
I think what frustrates me about this particular insane online essay—rather than giving me the delicious fascination of an “I was scammed out of $50,000 despite being a financial advisor” or a “Marrying someone older is the only way to go, and by older I mean 6 years older, a fully ancient man, you wouldn’t get it”—is that there’s a nugget in the core of the idea that really holds water. Parasocial internet relationships are very real, very modern, and very relatable. The way the internet has flattened all time and space has its distinct advantages, most of them involving organizing in times of global upheaval or making fun of lobotomized politicians, but I would say nothing good has come out of the way it tricks us all into thinking we’re best friends with millionaires. Do you ever watch a video of a celeb doing one of those content feeders for, I don’t know, Vanity Fair or Men’s Health or whatever (“I am talking about my career” / “I am walking you through my workout routine” / “I am being forced to read weird tweets about me out loud”), and then you notice there are upwards of 40,000 comments underneath? What’s going on there exactly… who are those comments for… do we think Emma Roberts is going to see what we wrote… Scary!
Of course I am not immune to this, to some degree. There are certain people whose careers I have been keeping track of through the internet for years and years, and when I catch myself realizing I don’t actually personally know them, a chill truly does run up my spine. One of these people was just in New York last week, having lunch just a couple blocks away, and for a moment I thought, “I should go say hi!” Hmm. And for what reason would I do that exactly? What precisely would I hope to accomplish? Is this the same thing as having a “friend crush”? I would argue it certainly is not, since watching hungrily from afar is nothing like running in the same circles. We place our own narratives and outcomes on people we’ve formed parasocial relationships with, and imagining that as the foundation of a friendship is almost too upsetting to fully consider.
Maybe this is sitting especially heavily with me right now because I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a great book that was turned into a differently great movie. The best part about this book, which the movie has no choice but to translate via longing glances and Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning frown, is getting to spend so much time inside its narrator’s head as she watches a young, beautiful mother live a life she aches to be a part of. She wants so badly to hang out with this other woman despite saying approximately twelve sentences to her in total, and spends hours inventing what her life must be like. This is so much fun (and so uncomfortable) to read because it’s exactly, obviously, what all of us do all the time constantly every day. Our minds are really good at inventing stories around people and places we know nothing about, and to do so can be intoxicating. Everything is possible from afar! That person is perfect and would love me if they just got to know me! You know what, we’re actually friends already…they just don’t know it yet!
It is actively really challenging to step back from the numbing barrage of social media—I’m not blowing anyone’s mind by saying this. Every app has learned by this point that it greatly behooves them to continue spitting nonsense at you in an ouroboros of lights and sounds until the sun has set and you’ve completely forgotten who or where you are. Our lives didn’t used to be like this; it’s bizarre to think about how quickly everything devolved into a mush of strangers’ grinning faces on the computers in our pockets. We don’t know who they are, they have no clue who’s on the other side, and it doesn’t matter as long as someone’s watching. I guess that’s what we call friendship now? Admiration masquerading as connection; total invention taking the place of selfless interest. Maybe we were always like this, and the internet’s just brought it to the surface like pond scum. I’d like to be better about skimming it off the top to see the cool water underneath.
Movies I watched this week: The Power of the Dog (a masterpiece that history will continue to bury) | Just Another Girl on the IRT (at Nitehawk with a Radha Blank intro; really special experience seeing this with a full and semi-rowdy crowd) | Paprika (prescient of course!!) | Hardcore (at the Paris with a hilarious Schrader Q&A after; George C. Scott my king 💕)
I know this is late — I had a really difficult time figuring out what I actually feel about this topic and how I might be able to articulate that feeling; no clue if I was successful, but I do ultimately feel good about starting to untie some of these particular knots. I am starting to really dislike Being Online which sucks because I have built a thorny home here…I think a part of me is hoping that being in New York, being in the action as they say, will finally allow me to cut the cord. I admire so much everyone who’s been able to do so; hoping to join you in the real world soon!