Inside the Heart of Every Teenaged Girl is Jimmy Stewart Scrolling #FragranceTok

Hey, Team.

I’ve got a lot of feelings and maybe four or five thoughts. Let us dive in.

If there’s anything I took away from going for a master’s in Marketing Communications it’s these two truths:

as in, what movies are getting a lot of attention, what shows are being promoted at a scale that seems a bit much, what types of personalities are cropping up and what aesthetics seem to get pushed to the forefront more than others, the average person can triangulate what the culture is trying to be, or has succeeded in becoming. Girl bosses became mom friends became office sirens, curvy girls became clean girls, witty rapport became evisceration. The culture wants thin, wants hard, wants mean. It wants infighting, wants blood, wants survival of the cruelest. It wants uniform, it wants lethal application of deru kugi wa utareru,¹ it wants dutiful little guard-prisoners in the panopticon.

We’ve been heading this way for some time, fashion bloggers flagged concern at the trend for clean girl (robbing women of color of the very trappings that used to get them ostracized and bullied for being too “ghetto”) and old money, noting the troubling decline of the avant garde in favor of sleek utilitarian silhouettes and makeup. The way figures were rapidly deteriorating into the hyper lean bodies that broke the collective millennial brain so callously in the 90s and 00s. Actors slowly lost their color, blonde, blue eyed mannequins using their long legs to step over any who can’t disguise their ethnic traits. But there are brunettes! Shut the fuck up. Look around you. Who populate the mainstream reinforcements of reality and who populate the “important stories” that only get told once a year to bait an accolade or two for the producers? Use your fucking head. We’re cooked. We can still crawl out of the pot but not if we keep denying that the water is boiling.

This is why I always warn against dismissing pop as frivolity. Mindless media, vapid songs, influencers reaching new heights of societal pull, none of this is worthless information. The boom in hyperpop and club beats gaining the mantle “recession pop” wasn’t just a tongue-in-cheek silly little goofy nickname, it was a harbinger of a culture that will both seek out and be forcefully thrust into escapism.

Influencers, shocker, influence. It is not all fashion hauls and dancing to trending songs. But even those are not to be dismissed. Fashion hauls put consumerism into turbomode, microtrends and a disposable mindset coming together in the service of desperately seeking the brass ring² of connection. An interesting (to me) phenomena of this is viral fragrances. Fragrance, something that is a luxury item, became part and parcel of the “haul” ideals. I recall riding the T on a Friday night. There were plenty of young college-aged women on the carriage, and the air was thick with the scent of YSL’s Eau Libre. Then, those women got off. The scent never left the space, however, as another group adorned with the very same perfume immediately got on. The scent was refreshed. If you’re unaware, before Baccarat Rouge took over (if I recall correctly), this fragrance, with Dua Lipa as its spokesperson, completely overran #fragranceTok. It was a community. During the pandemic, fragrances became a form of sensory connection. Fragrance reviewers became a popular cottage industry online, selling out entire lines of items that are prohibitively priced. We were isolated and lonely. We could not touch each other, but we could smell like each other. Close enough. An article that discusses this a little bit I will link here.

It would be foolish to overlook the lifestyle influencers, namely the family influencers. Largely Morman, uniquely inaccessible, these creators present natalist propaganda in neat displays of curated baking and aesthetically pleasing bits of earth. These women, thin, beautiful, unnaturally gentle in their mannerisms, often white, are surrounded by a brood of beautiful, playful, white or whiter children. A sea of limbs and gap teeth teeming around them as they wade in slow motion from $10k stove to unfathomably expensive rustic table, their delicate dancer or model’s arms curving from bras bas to first position as they cradle a fresh sourdough loaf or roast or infant. Their husband, like a father figure in a Tennessee Williams play, is largely absent but his will is apparent. She bakes for him, she births for him, she bends to him. And to feel even a fraction of the serenity her dead eyes promise, purchase from her brand partners, subscribe to her paid blog, warp your features and your spine as you wade deeper into the ever warming waters of a conservative seafood boil. Just like dousing yourself in Eau Libre allows a sliver of your mind to pretend you’re akin to Dua Lipa, giving in to this world and subtle proselytizing, as Madeline Hunzinga describes, allows a sliver of your mind to pretend you have the financial breathing room to not only purchase a stove that costs more than my used Nissan but use it at all hours of the day(becauseyourhusbandwillsitfrombehindtheviewfinder).

I will avoid bringing up celebrities right now but please know that I have Thoughts and Feelings about celebrities being given the same microtrend treatment. To love so-and-so is to be in league with and close to everyone else who loves so-and-so. But do not forget: so-and-so will soon be replaced by such-and-such, who will thrill and delight until whats-their-face rolls along. Disposable, rapid cycling, people are products and products simply do not have lasting power. Is the star dead? Or can a star only continue shining if they manage to burn bright enough that they leave a severe after image on our retinas forcing us to never truly look away? All us holding hands and blinking together to try to walk without ramming into a wall, a community of fried eyeballs. Is that what Glen Powell was trying to do all last year?

I’ve been watching a lot of Jimmy Stewart pictures lately, so have been recalling this one, which I last saw when I was maybe 22? 23? I think I remember it accurately enough. It hit me that it's a pretty good cross section of variations in masculinity. We got three types of Guy(s) in this picture, we got Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a familiar asshole: a bully, a vicious hateful pile of alpha bullshit who runs on the fear of the town and the simpering loyalty of his dirtbag gang, with zero intention of reciprocating this trust. He’s the quote unquote strong man. He’s toxic, he’s hateful, and if he were real, Andrew Tate would probably respect him, Elon Musk would be contorting his slack face muscles to force his prolapsed anus of a mouth into mimicking his sneer. Not to be a little weenie, if he were real he’d currently be sitting for a second term [cough cough]. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is the stoic man’s man– tough, reserved, fiercely protective of his flock (the town). Behind his stiff expression and terse pilgrim’s he’s full of rage and a fear of loss. I guess some loser out there would call him a sigma. He’s independent, he feels lust and desire, he begrudgingly takes on Ranse as a pupil in manhood. Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) is, according to that same loser, a beta. He’s mousy, he’s not physically strong, he’s bookish and nervous and overwhelmingly accommodating to those around him. But spoiler alert for this 63 year old movie: he shoots Liberty Valance. When Valance vandalizes the newspaper office and attacks the man who runs it (Edmond O’Brien) for reporting unfavorably (reporting truthfully) of him, Ranse goes for it. It is Ranse who commits this act of violence he so feared all his life, an act of violence that would guarantee him hero status in this town. But it would also ruin his prospects of leaving the town. Indeed, this murder almost halts Ranse’s political career, that is until Tom insists he’s the one who did it. He takes the credit but also the burden from his gentle friend.

Ranse and Tom are, in a way, two halves of an idealized masculinity whole. Valance is the utter rejection of the half Ranse provides. He is a diseased creature, uninterested in healing himself, completely devoted to using his plague to warp, disfigure, and destroy all that surrounds him. Hard to say if such a creature can be given any other treatment than what becomes of him in this film. Perhaps jail, but what would that achieve other than galvanizing his cronies to lash out on his behalf? So perhaps this brutal end is the only viable path? Apparently Luigi can spin Bowser faster and farther with more spins than other characters.

Now you have.

Okay, Team, that’s all for now. Talk soon (threat)!