Image via Timothee Chalamet/Instagram
Ock Sportello says life is about reading articles, and sometimes books – not finding purpose or collecting experience.
About three months before a global pandemic restructured public life as we know it, a self-described polyglot who goes by Xiaoma posted a video on YouTube entitled “Clueless White Guy Orders in Perfect Chinese, Shocks Patrons and Staff.” One month ago, as part of his winding, guerilla-style press junket in support of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet joined ESPN’s College GameDay, setting a pocket of the internet ablaze when he convincingly and compellingly shouted out Parker Navarro, the fourth-year quarterback of the underdog Ohio Bobcats. The clip was posted to YouTube by the ESPN College Football account with the title “TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET ELITE BALL KNOWLEDGE.” The caption reads: Timothée Chalamet stuns the College GameDay crew with his football knowledge.
Seemingly overnight, Timothée Chalamet has become the first genuinely inescapable movie star of his generation. Our fractured, post-monocultural moment makes this rise noteworthy in its own right. More fascinating is the way in which Chalamet has established himself as something of a generational icon. Chalamet, by virtue of sheer structural limitations, does not enjoy the sort of suffocating omnipresence that, say, a DiCaprio did at the height of his fame. But while culture once came to DiCaprio, and made itself in his image, each time Chalamet ends up on my timeline, it is for a completely different reason. In effect, he has found a way to speak directly, personally to each of us, and as a result, has attained the sort of celebrity by which he can grace multiple timelines at the same time.
Each Chalamet materialization seems to exist in its own contextless world: he is promoting his movie, sure, but aside from that there are no obvious ways in which one appearance nods at another. In the last four or so months, Chalamet has served up catnip to more subcultures than can be tidily summarized. In his College GameDay appearance, Chalamet performed a sort of fratty gambling addict; in subsequently unearthed photos of a young Chalamet hunting down Landry Fields at Grand Central Station or a modern-day, mustached Chalamet grinning with Karl Anthony Towns, the star has positioned himself as an earnest and versed city kid ball-knower. He has made an everyman pitch on Theo Von’s podcast, the sort of platform you learn about every four years when the Democrats lose an election, and he riffed with a TikTok comedian I have never heard of. He has played expertly curated, deep cut Dylan songs on SNL for your parents and the nerdiest slivers of Gen X, and he has gushed about Lil B on Nardwuar for you.
He has sung “Visions of Johanna” in a Yankees bomber while rap-squatting in front of the New York City skyline, he has stunted in a Raiders bomber in front of the Eiffel Tower, and he has flexed a Beyblade on the red carpet of his movie premier. The entire time, he has been dating Kylie Jenner. These appearances are bound then only by a certain internal logic: Timothée’s goal is to ingratiate himself with as many people as possible by displaying omnivorous and omnipotent cultural fluency. By ordering in perfect Chinese and shocking both patrons and staff.
Much has been written about the way in which Chalamet has cannily inverted the traditional press tour in order to promote both himself and his film, from his embrace of “new media” outlets to his convincingly-styled humility, with both aspects showcasing his curational “authenticity” in expression via taste. But the most interesting thing about Chalamet’s ascendance is less its form than what its form implies. Timothee has sussed out, whether himself or with the assistance of a particularly sharp public relations team, that mainstream culture as constituted is no longer capable of producing culture-dominating stars, so Chalamet’s bid for relevance depends upon identifying with, embodying, and convincingly belonging to as many subcultures as possible. In effect, he is bucking the mandate to be all things to all people by attempting instead to be one thing to each person. Chalamet’s press tour is designed to make you like him because it communicates to you–whomever you are–that he’s just like you, fr.
While accounts differ, Chalamet’s campaign to position himself as the most tapped-in everyman celebrity began in late October of 2024, when he made a surprise appearance at his own lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. The party crash, which spawned perhaps the most breathtaking tweet of the year from the feverishly committed Club Chalamet, would serve as something of a blueprint for the months to come. Lookalike contests, to the extent that they can be called a phenomenon and not a series of connected, fleeting jokes, are the sort of subcultural congregations that Internet users have flocked to to replace the absence of freestanding paths to real-life community. They are the type of thing you go to if your sense of perception has been fundamentally warped by the internet, and they offer the internet-addled mind both the cover of irony and the promise of like-mindedly online individuals with which to approximate community. All of which is to say that Chalamet’s attendance set the terms for the guerilla campaign to come: the sort of press that most people will never see, some will see only in passing, and a certain subculture will understand as definitive proof that Chalamet lurks among their ranks.
The point of Chalamet’s modern celebrity is not that we, as media subjects, are meant to be aware of all of these exploits; almost definitionally, these multiple Chalamets are defined in opposition to one another. Perhaps it’s the sheer idiosyncracy inherent in following these disparate subcultural plays that drives someone like Club Chalamet, stan par exemple, insane with rapture. Rather, you are meant to learn about Chalamet’s escapades exclusively to the extent that they coexist with your own subcultural interests. Like any press tour, Chalamet’s is intentional–to recognize this intentionality is not to accuse the young heartthrob of cynicism. Like any A-lister, Timothée works painstakingly to ensure the image he communicates is the one he intends to communicate, from collaborating with the most tapped-in vintage stores to having someone research the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns in order to impress Pat McAfee. And yet whether through some innate cool or the power of his legitimate acting chops, Chalamet cuts a broad appeal because of the way in which he is able to convey a sort of authenticity. The man doesn’t appear to be cosplaying–or, at least, he’s not cosplaying everything. In his defense, he has receipts.
Less interesting than the question of whether Chalamet actually forces Kylie Jenner to listen to 6 Kiss is the one of what his new mode of celebrity actually means for those who have found themselves taken by it. Chalamet’s gambit is that culture has fragmented beyond the sort of monoculture necessary to produce era-defining stars. At the same time, this mass cultural disintegration has occurred alongside a very real shift in fandom–specifically fandom as mediated by the internet–as a legitimate identity. You are, increasingly, what you consume, a delusional form of self-conception that is only made possible by the fact that people are no longer all consuming the same thing at the same time.
What Chalamet recognizes, in other words, is that we feel close to people who appear to be into the same shit as us, because the shit we’re into feels like a substantial representation of who we are. A bet that may soon make him the youngest Best Actor recipient in the 96-year history of the Academy Awards. Whether Chalamet’s crowd-pleasing subcultural whack-a-mole is a young man finally opening up about his deeply held interests, or a cunning media operator scheming his way onto as many algorithms as possible is up for debate. For analytical purposes, it doesn’t matter. Chalamet’s rise has marked a sea change of major celebrity in the new era of consumption-as-identity best encapsulated by a prophecy through which his character’s acts are breathlessly worshipped in Dune: “He shall know your ways as if born to them.”
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