Meme Report 7/30
There's a mini essay on everyone's favorite topic: Sydney Sweeney
Join us tomorrow for a Memeforum Investigation into what exactly happened on the Substack app this week.
Quinn Fabray L
What the hell. Sure! It’s the middle of summer, and culture hasn’t given us anything amazing. Nothing for us to sink our teeth into anyway, so we must go back to the archives. Glee will always remain the north star for a certain kind of nerd on the internet. When all else fails, when other media disappoint, Glee will always be there. There is always some kind of forgotten ephemera to be dredged from memory and fan sites. Diana Agron, making the famed Glee L, is a new image to me and one of many more I hope to see in my lifetime as Glee fans continue their great work.
So My Buddy
Over and over again, we are faced with the question, What’s wrong with men? Men themselves are even asking it. But they are asking it earnestly, in a profound way, as if they are cosmically cursed in a way that others can see but they cannot. Of course, in their asking, they attempt to put forth how normal and regular they are. It is in this list that we find out exactly what is wrong with them. There is always some glaring problem with them and their views on the world. It’s not just that these men are conservative, it’s that they’re hyperconservative and want to be treated like they’re normal among the, at best, socially liberal, fiscally conservative women of the major cities they live in. Their obliviousness makes them the unending butt of the joke. As long as they believe Elon Musk’s X, the everything app, is for them and not just the ruins of old Twitter, they will be the subject of ridicule. As they should be.
TikTok
Disco Snails
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
There’s something about this that isn’t sitting right with me. It feels like everyone participating is willfully ignorant about the world around them. Not in any real sense, but this just feels like it’s from a bygone era. The internet isn’t like this anymore. Buzzfeed isn’t going to celebrate this. We’re not trapped in our homes. The song itself is fine and the kind of thing that goes viral among the hoi polloi on TikTok every couple of months or so, but the dancing is what kills me. There’s something about dancing to a “funny” song that makes both the dancing and the song feel like a cheap ploy for virality. It’s too late in the game for me or someone like me to be charmed by this. All the familiar faces participating make me sick. What made the original video so good is that it was in competition, and the girls participating had to keep a straight face and present it like any other dance. Exploding into forced giggles after half a verse is less impressive and less interesting.
Sydney Sweeney
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Obviously, this is bad. It is both unwoke and unwise to say that to have blonde hair and blue eyes is to have good genes. However, it is a little disengenuous on the liberal media’s side to act like we haven’t been trying to get celebrities to admit their beauty secrets are just genetics, and then, when they do, say that it’s bad to admit that. I understand there’s more at play here, but the driving sentiment behind the ad is not a new, uniquely evil thought. Before the ad, I would say most people would have said Sydney Sweeney had good genes, and that also would have been the end of their compliments. She has good genes and not much else.
I am worried for Sydney Sweeney and her career arc. Though she has tried her entire career to come off as randy and knowing, I fear she is not in on the joke. She wants us to think that slumming it with these Spike TV knock-off products is good for her brand instead of cheapening the whole thing. American Eagle was her chance to at least get out of the “as seen on Barstool” aisle at CVS and into the mall, and she can’t even do that without embroiling herself in scandal.
Culturally, we’re a little too advanced to have a bimbo who isn’t a little postmodern, or at least an actress bimbo who isn’t a little postmodern. Influencers and models tend to play the part well, unencumbered by those expectations. Sydney Sweeney started as a prestige darling, so she should easily transition to “hot, but can also act”. She has been more than a blonde girl the whole time. She was willing to get dirty and go there, as it were. She’s also, and I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, really hot. An uncomplicated, old-fashioned, Carl’s Jr. kind of hot. One might say “MAGA hot” but as previously discussed, that’s all genetics. She didn’t choose it. She maintains it, but she didn’t choose it. She’s caught between her two audiences, and while the entertainment industry collapses around her and fails to elevate her to real movie star status, Dude Wipes pays the bills.
How many ads can she do before that’s just who she is? How much will her career depend on how much she can provide for her MAGA family, who gave up everything to move to LA and support her? If they weren’t in the picture, could she take the pay cut to be in more prestige projects that could have a better payoff in the long run? Is it simply a matter of taste, and there’s no one in her corner telling her to stop saying yes to anyone who calls? How much nuance does she deserve? How much can the general public handle? How many things do we have to know about Sydney Sweeney in order to still like her?
Sydney Sweeney wants us to believe she’s in control. That would be one thing in a movie or a Cartier ad, but as it stands now, I have a hard time believing she’s getting one over on these boys. I would love to learn in 20 years that she’s not using her real voice, but her job is talking and reading for a living, and as we learned this week on TikTok, her voice doesn’t sound good without the face to accompany it. In ten years, we’ll all have to eat our words because Sydney was smart the whole time, but smart at what exactly? It remains to be seen.
Throwing a Fit
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
False premise. Or a real premise that makes me sad and reminds me that most people are children. Obviously, to some extent, people do say “Sorry we’re late, someone was throwing a fit” about their friends and partners as a joke, but sometimes in these videos it feels too real. It can sometimes be an unintended peek into a toxic relationship that makes my blood curdle. You can tell when the boyfriend plays his role of “She was throwing a fit” a little too well. Those words are already in his vocabulary, not just as a joke. Some couples play too fast and loose with the TikTok trends, and we see their barely concealed contempt for each other.
disco snails is a really rough situation. haven’t seen it yet and hoping i don’t see it again
Fabulous Sweeney dissection