Surveying the many micro-eras of attitude, outlook, and media representation that sprung up, thrived, and then more or less disappeared over the past two or three months of the coronavirus pandemic is interesting.
Very broadly: before the stay at home orders, when it still felt somewhat distant, everything picked up steam in late February/early March with a kind of playful sternness from the media (don’t touch your face; here is how you can make homemade hand sanitizer), which then gave way almost instantly to tentative quasi-excitement once it dawned on the people that were lucky enough to be able to work from home that they would probably be stuck inside for a while (I remember Brian Stelter compared the feeling to the very beginning of a long international flight). This chugged along for a bit, as we quickly learned about Zoom happy hours, movie lists, the best tips for working from home, and, on March 20, which keto freeze-dried smoothies were the ideal “self-isolation splurge.”
Now, exactly two months later, it’s hard to even think about what it was like back in late March. Also on March 20, The New York Times reported that there were 43 coronavirus deaths and 5,600 cases in New York City. As of May 20, in the US, there are over 1.5 million cases, and 91,937 people have lost their lives.
The US is now, by far, the worst-hit country on earth (Russia, #2, has reported 308,705 cases). According to a new Census Bureau survey about the effects of the pandemic, “nearly 6 in 10 adults surveyed reported feeling nervous, anxious or on edge for several days or more.” Given the unfathomable continued increase in cases and fatalities, the complete lack of apparent government solutions, the talk of reopening as if we’re in the clear, the equally unbelievable economic damage, and the continuing stay at home orders, that makes sense.
What makes less sense is the way these feelings have been understood by and portrayed in the media. Sensing our raw exhaustion, anxiety, fear, and helplessness, publishers, brands, and public figures have taken it, processed it, and are now trying to relate to us by turning all our complex emotions into zany performative insanity.
The Cut Instagram is a pretty reliable source of this kind of thing. In a way, The Cut has been a champion of the self-care/lol nothing matters voice since well before “isolation” began, usually talking in a mix of junky Sex and the City stills, meme reposts, celebrity news, and links to skin care stories. Lucky for them (I guess) that overnight all of pop culture turned into a low-res time-waste where loser nobodies and world-famous celebrities alike devise ways to entertain themselves (or actually, to entertain other people online) from their barren homes, and compete for whose days have become weirder. Thus poised, The Cut didn’t really have to change their tone to accompany this cultural shift. Maybe they even led the way.
Elsewhere, we can see a rather jarring stab at performative insanity in last Friday’s Bon Appétit newsletter by senior staff writer Alex Beggs (you can’t see the subject line on the browser link, which is: “My 32 totallllllllllly normal quarantine cooking projects”). Perhaps overcorrecting to get in on the suddenly trendy kookiness, the piece is Bon Appétit’s frankly uncomfortable attempt at coming unglued. Beggs begins:
I’m feeling DOWN. Depleted. Exhausted. Aimless, yet snackish. I hear that I’m not the only one melting into a puddle on the unswept floor. And since we’re sharing, I have something for you. These 32 cooking projects—torn from a wide-ruled notebook I keep next to my lucid nightmare journal—are just some of many I’ve taken on during my childless quarantine. Things began with homemade pasta (ambitious! bouncy!) but as the days became weeks, so did my energy fade and my use of exclamation points wither. The self-help experts want us to keep busy, have goals, but they never quite specified beyond that. I filled in the blanks. So if you’re also looking for a few time-consuming, rewarding culinary projects, I promise that these fit the bill, depending on how you define “time” and “reward.”
The newsletter then continues to list all “32 totallllllllllly normal quarantine cooking projects,” which, except for four, aren’t actually cooking projects or recipes at all, and are written with an overwrought weirdness. For example:
- Shred cheese on each side of the box grater, taste differences
- Use tweezers to see how spicy one red pepper flake is
…
- And oneeee peppercorn
- Pour a bowl of cereal and see how little milk you can get away with
…
- Set burner to medium-high, torch ephemera from a former lover
- BURN FINGER, CRY
- Google “recipes for burn cream”
- Massage cold bacon grease into the burn
- Put broken pieces of linguine in a cup of water so they grow back
- Sit on an egg, gently, until it hatches
…
- Massage a marshmallow
…
- Mix the crumbs into kitty litter so at least ONE OF US can go to the beach
- Cut off the tips of lemons and adhere to nipples with double-sided tape for DIY pasties
- One...single...caper...in….the…belly button
- Brush teeth with tomato paste
- Set a timer for 400 days from now, maybe things will be different then
Yeah, maybe it’s just funny, a bit of relatable escape. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s actually an uncalled-for attempt at gallows humor from a subscription-only food magazine.
(What we’re also seeing here, of course, is brands and publishing companies continuing to talk more and more like people talk on social media – or, like they think their readers talk on social media. Since its somewhat recent redesign, for example, Cosmopolitan has introduced a house style based on the texting tics of teenage girls: lower case everything, words with additionallllll letters, internet slang, starting headlines with “Er,” or “Um,” etc.)
I get the impulse to veer off into this kooky lolzy unhinged thing. Believe me, I do. It works as a coping mechanism. And at any rate, cabin fever breeds a weird kind of glee. Feeling worried, dazed, and loopy, and almost enjoying those feelings, is not a problem; it can almost be refreshing. These performances can be therapeutic. But it’s the fashionable, codified repackaging of all this serious emotional territory that worries me.
In The New York Times last week, there was a piece that encapsulates (knowingly, I assume, but maybe not) almost everything about this idea of acting crazy on purpose. Titled “Insanity Can Keep You Sane: If you can’t live normally, why not find little harebrained ways to warp reality?”, and written by Molly Young, the essay is basically a longer-form, higher-brow version of the Bon Appétit newsletter, with more context and even some historical framing. It begins:
My quarantine has been fine. I was able to get out of the city; I don’t have the virus; I’ve lost some work, but not all of it; and just under 17 percent of my immediate family members have fallen seriously ill. I’ve made out beautifully, and I feel terribly unhappy: a pair of conditions that are tough to either reconcile or deny.
Young writes about the “little harebrained ways” she’s “warping reality” with a just-so preciousness that betrays any claim to “insanity”:
The physical manifestations of my own dread have included insomnia, a bumper crop of gray hairs and an absence of self-control around any form of alcohol or drug. At some point my ribs became countable. I daydream about which elected officials most deserve to get Covid.
And:
I spent a day working from the floor, squatting before and around my computer as though it were a campfire, with glutes aflame and feet unshod. ‘‘This is how a monkey sees the world,’’ I thought, dreamily.
And:
I wandered around naked and stayed up all night. I paced thousands of laps around the kitchen table. I slept in places that were not my bed. I ate a meal without using my hands or any utensils, like a dog, just to see what it was like. (Sloppy, as I expected.) I coaxed a group of wild turkeys out of the woods with a trail of sunflower seeds that I placed in a circle, which they obediently traced. I tried to attract other birds by sitting quietly on the porch cloaked in seeds but had to go back inside after being menaced by a squirrel.
Sigh.
In her recent review of contemporary “climate poetry,” poet and critic Elisa Gabbert writes about how the tropes of climate poetry are already boring, specifying “the performed uncertainty (uncertainty is real, but performed uncertainty is clichéd)” present in so much writing about climate change. Replace “uncertainty” with “insanity” and this criticism exactly applies to a lot of current quarantine writing (insanity is real, but performed insanity is clichéd).
This brings me now to maybe the most performative of all the entries in the performative insanity canon. This month’s issue of GQ features a wildly long cover story profile of Robert Pattinson in quarantine.
The profile is a crazy read, but not exactly for the reasons its subject and writer might think. As a document of our current situation, it’s remarkable. The piece is your standard-issue celebrity profile tied to a movie release – Pattinson is starring in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and the new Batman movie – but it’s written during a global pandemic. The magazine accommodated for this odd timing by basically staging a full-blown isolation drama, illustrated with Pattinson’s self-consciously crazed self-portraits, taken while staying-at-home in a London apartment. (In the photos, though, he’s wearing typical GQ photo-shoot garb: $7,700 Dior jacket, $420 scarf, etc.)
The over-the-top stylized isolation is made clear right away. The piece begins with a transcribed interview, where Pattison and the interviewer are both “[blurry, pixelated, unshaven].” In the profile, Pattinson is painted as a complete recluse, unprepared, with no track of time and terrible internet, wasting away trapped in a London apartment paid for by “the Batman folks”:
He’d come to London with, like, three T-shirts. The rest of his stuff, he says, is in his place in Los Angeles, where he actually lives. His internet in London is in and out. His laptop mostly isn’t working. He has two phones, one of which is getting reception
We learn that “Pattinson, who turned 34 in May, has spent his adult life separating himself from the rest of the world.” Quickly, the tortured genius actor and unkempt quarantined man merge into a single aspirational figure, a kind of rabid dog artist-creator:
April 10, 10:16 a.m. PST // 6:16 p.m. GMT
Pattinson:Yesterday I was just googling, I was going on YouTube to see how to microwave pasta. [laughs]
GQ: That’s not a thing.
Put it in a bowl and microwave it. That is how to microwave pasta. And also it really, really isn’t a thing. It’s really actually quite revolting. But I mean, who would have thought that it actually makes it taste disgusting?How are you actually surviving?
I’m essentially on a meal plan for Batman. Thank God. I don’t know what I’d be doing other than that. But I mean, yeah, other than—I can survive. I’ll have oatmeal with, like, vanilla protein powder on it. And I will barely even mix it up. It’s extraordinarily easy. Like, I eat out of cans and stuff. I’ll literally put Tabasco inside a tuna can and just eat it out of the can.You’ve been training all your life for this, apparently.
I… It is weird, but my preferences are…just sort of eat like a wild animal. [laughs] Like, out of a trash can.
This is performance, there’s no other word for it. Pattinson has assumed a stylish, unhinged, underfed, crazy-eyed badass affect here. And GQ is all for it.
Pattinson has a generous but thoroughly chaotic energy. Today he’s wearing a black Carhartt hat and a white T-shirt and is alternating pulls of Coca-Cola with pieces of Nicorette gum—just one after another after another. “So disgusting,” he says cheerfully. He starts and stops sentences like a broken carnival ride. Sometimes he misplaces so many words in a row, interspersed with so many heavy sighs and nervous laughs, that you momentarily think he’s speaking a different language entirely.
Even though pretending to be crazy is so popular right now, I was still surprised when I saw the trailer for a new Russell Crowe movie called Unhinged, which is supposed to come out in July. The movie doesn’t look like what I thought it would be, but its existence (and title) also seems like the inevitable conclusion of all of this, of the glorification of acting like you’re losing it, of the shocking year-long ascendance of the word “unhinged,” and of the (very real) need to blow off steam and buck normality.
But what’s actually crazy in all of this is the lengths so many very normal publishers, writers, actors, and brands are going to to come off as insane.
Live Bait 🦐
Ben Smith’s Times column this week was an out of left field serious/brutal/petty critique of Ronan Farrow (and The New Yorker).
In the aftermath of the piece, Farrow claimed he “misspoke” about his Weinstein reporting; Erik Wemple, in The Washington Post, writes, if that’s the case he has a “misspeaking problem.”
Matt Lauer also published a column criticizing Farrow and his reporting.
And the fallout from Alison Roman’s “controversial” interview continues: The New York Times has reflexively put her “on leave” without really stating why.
There may be problems with Facebook’s purchase of Giphy, it’s fifth-largest acquisition ever.
Amazon just released Crucible, the first big video game from Amazon Game Studios.
Volodymyr Zelensky wrote an opinion column for The New York Times.
The Washington Post published two Josh Rogin pieces about China this past week: it’s time to stand up to Chinese cybercrime; and, finally the world is beginning to realize how bad the CCP is.
The Senate passed a bill to delist Chinese companies from US exchanges.
The new iOS update makes it easier to unlock your iPhone with FaceID while wearing a face mask.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel Rodham looks like another sad moment for Hillary.
Food Network has “nailed the recipe for pandemic programming.”
The Wrong Missy, David Spade’s new Happy Madison comedy, has been the #1 most-watched thing on Netflix for like a week?
Spotify cut a $100 million exclusive podcast deal with Joe Rogan.