Talking bodies

Welcome to the first edition of Offerings where I roundup news relevant to Altar Boys.

I stopped using Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok last week, so I’m not getting my celebrity news intravenously anymore. Instead, I begged my friends to keep me updated and am trying to seek out culture news in a more deliberate way. So far, I’ve watched a ton of Jesse Eisenberg interviews from thirteen years ago. 

I hosted a watch party for Timothée Chalamet’s double header on SNL and the episode was fine. I liked the first mashup he did a lot because it’s always fun to see someone live out their rockstar fantasy, but it’s less fun that his every vanity idea is humored. 

My favorite phase of an actor is when he’s the most famous person in the entire world to me and just some guy to everyone else. Timmy surpassed that overnight, but his recent efforts to appeal to men further stripped the personal nature of following his career. The A Complete Unknown antics are fun in a nostalgic way, although I loved when he sang along to “Visions of Johanna.” 

‘I’M LITERALLY JOAN BAEZ RIGHT NOW’: Celebrity delivered via the biopic as a relatable figure? More likely than you think. On TikTok young women are finding Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s relationship in A Complete Unknown very relatable and slapping the modern label, “situationship,” on it. This quote via The Guardian, made me laugh, but it also speaks to the way we conflate fictional characters with real people: “I’m seeing so many people be like, ‘Why am I literally Joan Baez right now?’ I just discovered her, and I’m also in her exact same position. It’s like watching Sex and the City and realizing you’re Carrie.”

SHOULD’VE STAYED IN THE DIARY: Another instance of conflating a fictional character with a real person. This time it’s Bridget Jones and Renée Zellwegger. With Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’s release around the corner, discourse surrounding the series kicked back up. A piece in the The New York Times reckons with the way Renée Zellwegger’s appearance as Bridget Jones has been discussed over the years. The story brings up a lot of interesting threads, but ultimately frustrated me because it lacks a critical approach to what these conversations convey and mean. It failed to acknowledge how damaging calling Bridget Jones / Zellwegger “overweight” in the first film is. And dismisses the conversation around Zellwegger’s appearance in Bridget Jones’s Baby, where she noticeably had work done. While conversations surrounding famous women’s appearance often lean misogynistic, it’s important to acknowledge plastic surgery in order to understand the role celebrities play in setting beauty standards and to have a realistic idea of what aging looks and doesn’t look like. 

SPEAKING OF: Chin implants are on the rise among men thanks to the “handsome Squidward” look of stars like Zac Efron, Matt Gaetz, and John Mulaney. 

DAD BODS: In the same week as the Bridget Jones piece, The New York Times owned The Athletic published a story about football player Patrick Mahomes’s “Dad Bod.” It asserts, “Superstar athletes in all kinds of physically demanding sports are combining unconventional body types with otherworldly athleticism.” I have so many questions!! Since when is “flabby” — the writer’s word not mine — “unconventional”? When are we going to stop pretending Marvel movie / Glen Powell-esque physique represents athleticism and not something more insidious? Why are professional athletes, an entirely different kind of celebrity, held to the same beauty standard? Because that’s what this is, a beauty standard!

CHAPPELL ROAN X SEPHORA X HULU: Chappell Roan stars in part one of “Faces of Music” a Hulu docuseries made in collaboration with Sephora. Victoria Monét and Becky G feature in parts two and three. In the video Roan recreates her look from the album cover of The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess and talks about how she aims to be a “messy, campy thrift store pop star.” She emphasizes how she wants fans to be able to afford to copy her look and these clips are intercut between interviews with fans inside Sephora, lol.

Roan also makes characteristically great points about fame including, “I don’t care how the world perceives how a pop star should behave, nothing is worth a woman getting abused.”

I previously wrote about Chappell Roan’s relationship with her fans here.

BRO PODCASTS ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY: This report from Bloomberg about how the podcast manosphere is leading men towards the right, is such important data-driven journalism and depressed me so much! Especially considering pretty mainstream celebrities cough Timothée Chalamet cough go on some of these podcasts. 

I previously wrote about what happens when influencers replace journalists here.

YOU SHOULDN’T GET YOUR NEWS FROM POP CRAVE: This might have to be a recurring PSA in every edition of Altar Boys. I caved and went on Twitter one time this week and saw one of those posts saying, “Found out my rights were being taken away from Pop Crave.” Similar to the Bro Podcasts, why are you dear poster letting your news be fed to you from a pop culture aggregate account instead of seeking out news from reputable sources? 

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

JOSH O’CONNOR is catching up with Harris Dickinson and Paul Mescal. His very own single dad film, Rebuilding, premiered at Sundance this week. With the premiere came several behind-the-scenes photos of him. In one, a donkey demurely nuzzles him while he strikes a pose. It’s the kind of image that in high school I would’ve asked my friend with a color printer to print out for me, so I could display it in the plastic flap of my binder.

CHARLES MELTON stars in the music video for “Love Hangover feat. Dominic Fike” by JENNIE. It’s a total rip off of Sabrina Carpenter’s whole thing and Charles is “May December crying” at the beginning.¹ But all I could think about while watching it is how much hot boy style has changed since Charles’ last music video venture, Ariana Grande’s “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” in 2019. Back then he sported a ghastly embroidered bomber jacket over a hoodie and a leather jacket over a long white tee with a silver chain prominently displayed. Now he’s got a mustache, a workman jacket, and Harry Styles on his vision board.

HARRIS DICKINSON baked a heart-shaped focaccia for a “hen do” his partner hosted and described the incident as “pathetic” while wearing a San Francisco Giants baseball hat.

BILL SKARSGÅRD is bleach blonde in the forthcoming film Locked.

Please let me know what you’d like to see included in these going forward.

Thank you for reading!!

Elena

1  Quoting roommate and friend of the newsletter (RAFOTN), Chloe.