perfection without production
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain? No problem, we don't want to see him.
One.
Under any ‘then and now’ post showing a photo of a female celebrity a number of years ago vs how she looks today, there will be people at each others throats in the comments about whether the celebrity has undergone any cosmetic enhancements. Obviously some have and some haven’t, but many fans are really invested in the idea that their favourite celebrity is completely ‘natural.’ They’re adamant that [insert literally any female celebrity who has been in the public eye for more than five years] has never so much as dreamt of a needle or a scalpel. As if it’s completely ridiculous that an adult woman—one with money to burn, whose job requires her to be attractive and who is ageing in the public eye under constant scrutiny from the industry, the media and the general public—would opt for a cosmetic procedure or two. ‘It’s just ageing! She’s just older now!’ If that’s true, there does appear to be a very interesting phenomenon affecting only famous women whereby age causes their skin to get tighter, their eyelids less droopy and their lips fuller. The opposite of the ageing process that affects the rest of us. Someone should study that. But fans remain invested in the narrative that their favourite celeb just naturally looks like that. Natural beauty, no enhancements.
Two.
It’s very important for models and actresses to let us know that they eat just like we do and exercise to keep fit, they just so happen to be very thin. It was very important for Bella Hadid to let us know that she eats pizza ‘probably…at least once a day.’ At least once a day? At least???? Come on, now.
juliagmonty on tiktok posted a video saying, ‘I’ve seen first hand what a lot of your favourite models, influencers, celebrities do to stay in shape. You’d be appalled to know the truth.’ This appeared to actually be like breaking news to many viewers. Like they genuinely believed that people whose careers depend on their bodies looking a certain way were really just eating pizza, going for a ‘hot girl walk’ and drinking concoctions made of that green powder everybody and their mother was hawking on tiktok for a minute. (maybe they’re still doing that, i’ve just not seen it for ages (not a complaint!))
She went on to say that her tiktoks perform better (i.e. more people choose to watch for longer) when she is ‘leaner,’ to a level people can only achieve by being ‘obsessed with it.’ It’s not just pop stars and actors—we want everyone we watch to be at the peak of conventional beauty (I mean, duh, look at who we make ‘influencers’), but we want to think they’re just genetically blessed.
Three.
Change of gear: ‘30 under 30’ lists. Overnight success stories, young tycoons and young stars’ meteoric rises to fame are so appealing to us. We looooove talent! We loooove discovery of young talent. We don’t love graft. We don’t love years of work before hitting the big time. We don’t love someone who’s been knocking at industry doors for years (or, god forbid, decades) to no avail. That’s desperate. That’s sad. You’re an adult (or worse, a mother!). Give it up.
Nicola Coughlan (Derry Girls, Bridgerton, others) is older than she looks. She’s in her 30s and plays teenagers onscreen. She has said that she was advised to lie about her age earlier in her career because, even though she looks young, it would disadvantage her for people to know she wasn’t. Because obviously looking young isn’t enough, as soon as people know you’re not then it’s curtains anyway.
We love a clean and tidy narrative. A neat little rise to success. God forbid someone have had a life before success. God forbid they have experienced something that makes their art richer! We (the industry and the audience) love ‘authentic’ stories of real struggle. But art enhanced by real struggle is much preferable when the struggle was overcome before the struggler aged out of appeal. Mustn't have too much of a background, now.
Note: we also don’t love nepo babies. We want people to spring into the spotlight, but we don’t want them to have help getting there. Again, no orchestrations behind the scenes.
Four.
Creatives have to be social media people now. Everyone is expected to be their own marketers. Which means they themselves have to be marketable. Being marketable on social media means developing a persona and an aesthetic (hello lit girls, literary it girls, thought daughters, et al.) that people like looking at and creating more and more content that pleases that audience.
It takes time and effort to get good at making social media content, hoping something gets enough traction to garner you an audience.
(Largely) Gone are the days when commercialised art could be made by little freaks and weirdos and nerds. Now creatives have to be beautiful and aesthetic, making their work in a beautiful and aesthetic way in a beautiful and aesthetic setting. You can’t make enticing social media content if you do your work squirrelled away in a hole, looking a riot. (personally I am writing this in my bed in the dark with wet hair and a big t-shirt, no bra no trousers, and my ‘typing face’ which I discovered at uni and is definitely not for public consumption. I will never be famous.)
From a Vox article about the importance of ‘“building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist’:
You can see this tension play out in the rise of “day in my life” videos, where authors and artists film themselves throughout their days and edit them into short TikToks or Reels. Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch. You’ll see a lot of cottagecore-esque videos where the writer will sip tea by the fireplace against the soundtrack of Wes Anderson, or wake up in a forest cabin and read by a river, or women like this Oxford University student who dresses up like literary characters and films herself working on her novel. Videos like these emulate the Romantic ideal of “solitary genius” artistry, evoking a time when writing was seen as a more “pure” or quaint profession. Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.
Alan Cumming said in a recent Times article: ‘As a producer, I get new casting lists, and next to every name there’s a number that indicates Instagram followers. That’s now something you have to worry about as an actor when trying to get work, as if it isn’t already hard enough.’
Creatives can’t be (‘successful’, professional) creatives without a following (I’m generalising here, obv). A following is made up of audience members who are looking for authenticity, behind the scenes content, a look at the ‘real’ you. But they’re not going to follow if the ‘real’ you isn’t someone they want to follow. So you have to make a production of the ‘real’ you, crafting a persona and content that people want to watch, which of course takes effort. But this must seem completely natural and uncontrived or else people won’t want to follow you. People want to see the ‘you that isn’t performing’ but probably not the actual you when you’re not performing. They want a faux-authentic version, but they don’t want to know it’s faux-authentic.
Five.
People looooove to think, correctly or incorrectly, that actors improvise their lines. Every so often a clip will circulate on social media along with a caption like ‘can you believe this was improv?’ or ‘apparently he improvised this!’ or ‘this wasn’t even in the script but it was so funny they kept it in!’ Whether or not this is true in any particular instance doesn’t really matter. Either to the people who like/share the clip (there’s never a source, any of them could be a lie) or to my point here. What I care about for current purposes is how much people love the idea that a line was made up off the cuff or, better yet, that the audience are seeing the actor’s real reaction to something (as distinct from the character’s reaction).
The subtext (often just text) is very clear that a line or a scene is better because of the ‘fact’ that it was improvised than it would be if it were written by a writer, directed by a director and acted by an actor. The same line would be made less impressive, less good, purely by the knowledge of it having had more people involved in its creation. The less production, the better the line.
(As I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself, yeah, duh. obviously something is more impressive if it was created without the input of other people. And then I remember the whole point of this essay: of course I think that. That’s my point.)
Similarly, people loooove to think Chandler (Friends) was just Matthew Perry, instead of a deliberately constructed and developed character and performance. I’d postulate that, in this case, it’s a way to feel like they ‘know’ an actor that they feel a connection to.
Six.
A couple of days ago, the royals released a video update about Kate’s cancer journey (she’s finished chemotherapy). The video depicts the five of them having a little romp in the forest as a family. A little family forest frolic. Kate delivers a monologue over wholesome clips of this frolicking. It’s shot to look very natural, the clips made to look incidental. But everything is obviously very intentional. For one, everything they do is very intentional.
For another, the video is very highly produced: it’s carefully stylised, with visual effects and obvious editing (although perhaps best not to mention the ‘e’ word too loudly in this context). The video is credited to Will Warr, a freelance professional filmmaker who has made adverts for Tesco, Red Bull and Puma. Of course they used a professional filmmaker, they always do (they’ve used this guy six times).
And yet. The only bit of dialogue in the video other than Kate’s speech is George (I think) right up at the camera saying, ‘is this filming?’ Then the other two children get up close and say, ‘hello?’ This shot is set up like any DIY social media video: the camera is still, it’s pointing straight at the family and the shot has a different aspect ratio than the rest of the film. We are being given all the cues to believe Kate set up this shot herself. But of course George knows it’s filming. You can imagine behind the scenes, the director saying, ‘now you say is it filming and then you two come in and say hello.’
I have no problem with this. Like, really no problem at all. I actually think it’s a very nice video. But it is noteworthy, in my opinion, that even the royal family, whose every public appearance is a performance and who really have nothing to prove to anyone, feel this pull towards needing everything to appear DIY and ‘organic’ (I’d take GMO videos any day, personally).
(I’m obviously glad Kate is doing well. And the video is very nice to watch. And it’s nice that the kids got a trip to Center Parcs out of it.1)
We love the illusion of something springing into existence fully formed and perfect, but without contrivance or effort or work. We want production value without the production.
Maybe sometimes we simply enjoy the fantasy. Maybe sometimes we favour nonchalance and are put off by the earnestness of effort. Maybe sometimes we want to think some people have their looks or talent or career or audience because they were destined for it, they are the way they are because of some miracle of genetics and fate. Maybe sometimes we don’t want to think that the difference between them and us is the willingness to defy the cringe and do it anyway, putting in the work behind the scenes. Maybe sometimes we don’t want to think that we could have that career, body, success, life if we also had the wealth, connections, opportunities, privileges, etc. that have allowed them to make these alterations to themselves, follow a particular lifestyle, enter into a particular industry or make successful art. Maybe it’s comforting to think they’re just special and that’s why we could never be them—not that we could have been them were it not for all the factors holding us back. Or maybe we just like to see perfect things fully formed.
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I’ve never been to Center Parcs but I imagine it’s just, like, forest-y.
This is SO good
“We love the illusion of something springing into existence fully formed and perfect, but without contrivance or effort or work. We want production value without the production.”
I think about so many of these points all the time and I was even thinking to write a post along these lines but my post would’ve been so limited compared to this: this is so fleshed out and so insightful and so true and you have significantly expanded my thinking.
I think about your nepo baby points all the time actually. A lot of people shit on clairo for being a “nepo baby.” I think this kind of thing is so weird because like, a lot of the same people are often posting stuff about how what’s wrong with the “west” is individualism. But is the demand for someone to be perfect without assistance and without effort, simply as a result of their own inherent genius, not also a form of extreme individualism?