new writing: sydney sweeney's creepy fans

at the lamp

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In the newest edition of The Lamp, I have a short piece about Sydney Sweeney’s creepy Nazi fans. Is this piece also, in its way, about… Taylor Swift? Yes, obviously:

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Now, you may, after reading this piece, feeling like coming back here and saying: BDM, isn’t this piece more of a series of jokes at the expense of a bunch of weird losers than it is a piece of “reasoned analysis”? The answer is: first, yes it is and second, doing that was fun.

As I say in the piece, I can’t help liking Sweeney as a “persona” because I like all actors who seem unable to say no to jobs, like Nicholas Cage and Orson Welles.¹ Now in the case of Cage that’s because he kept buying skulls or whatever and I’m sure the answer with Welles is equally depressing, but nevertheless. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of old radio shows full of the actors doing ad reads, mostly for stuff like “Roma wine,” but sometimes for (depending on the show’s date) war bonds, the general idea of the United States of America, or “not being racist”:

The house is being fumigated for something we thought was bed bugs but is probably something else, so I’m probably 10% insane right now because of the fumes and also the emotional journey of the last week, but… I suppose like this general level of “always selling something” because to me, I suppose, this speaks to a level of artistic integrity so deep there is no need to use money as a symbol. (Although when somebody uses time that could go to ads on delivering a what seems to be personal plea, as Price did, that action is also rendered more meaningful by being unexpected.)

I trust Orson Welles not to make a crappy movie on purpose, but I do not trust him not to advertise a bunch of stupid products. I trust Nicholas Cage never to give a phoned-in performance, no matter how stupid the movie is, but I imagine he can easily distinguish between a movie he’s proud to have been in and a movie that helped him buy more skulls. Whether or not I trust Sydney Sweeney to use her ad money to make interesting art is still an open question.

Anyway, thoughts on radio shows are in development, but for now we will end on the note of “even Orson couldn’t hack it somethimes”:

I do not own American Eagle jeans. I own two pairs of Levis and one pair of Everlane. They are all cotton. The Everlane pair needs to be hemmed up. That’s my personal jeans report.

1. I don’t think there’s really an equivalent form for writers because all the writer versions of “just getting paid” require anonymity.