Austin Butler STUNS in Limited but Numerous Interactions with Fan at THE BIKERIDERS Q&A
Breaking News
In 2014 Harry Styles threw his used water bottle at me during the One Direction Where We Are Tour and I drank from it. A culmination of all my high school years on “One Direction Twitter,” which I had to leave because I was canceled for defending Trisha Paytas’s contemporaneous provocations, Where We Are was the best of the 3 One Direction concerts I saw because I was front row next to the runway. I was, to be clear, also front row next to the runway the following year for the On the Road Again tour, where I had an almost more harrowing interaction with Harry when he pointed at me and asked, “you good?” (I was), but Where We Are was more fun because I was one year younger and had not yet been so physically proximal to Harry Styles.
Harry Styles is one of six people I feel comfortable fetishizing to my full ability of sexual objectification and/or parasocial fascination: Harry Styles, Bradley Cooper, Vanessa Hudgens, Allison Williams, Lena Dunham, Austin Butler. For as much as I earnestly revere Adam Driver or Lady Gaga, if I saw them on the street I would say “oh my god” and move on because I don’t have anything to say to them or to gain from a brief interaction, really. They know they are great. I thought Josh O’Connor was so hot in one movie, but that does not necessitate my social engagement with him. Likewise, while a photo with Taylor Swift would be funny, it would ultimately not entertain me for more than an hour. I would like to be a peer to Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift: they are people to me who sometimes make good art and sometimes bad, but always interesting aesthetic decisions regarding their celebrity, which has not yet become so overwrought or abstracted in my mind that their cultural productions still call for measured criticism. And Josh O’Connor isn’t really famous, at all.
If I saw Harry Styles, Bradley Cooper, Vanessa Hudgens, Allison Williams, Lena Dunham, or Austin Butler anywhere, I would feel compelled by an almost moral compass to knowingly irritate them by exploiting their bodies and cultural presence for 1) a photo, 2) a brief conversation about the influence they have had on me, and/or 3) a completely staged performance of flippancy, delivered through overly specific and quickly witted compliments about their outfit(s). What I have never really considered, however, is how I would handle sitting 6 feet from one of those people in a setting not conducive at all to social interaction, where they are postured as celebrity and I as not, and, also, it is the one of those 6 people I think is one of the hottest guys to exist on Earth at the same time as me?
When a post-screening Q&A is advertised, to me, it inherently implies some forced physical distance between the celebrities answering questions and the audience that is there to look at the celebrities like zoo animals: enough so that you cannot see their pores. In this case, that was not an implication. I was made aware of a screening of The Bikeriders followed by Q&A with Austin Butler and Jodie Comer only a few days before it was happening, and before I knew it I had a ticket to sit in the front row. Early in this process, it occurred to me there was a vague, fleeting possibility that my presence could produce some sort of interaction between myself and Austin Butler, who I have been fetishizing since long before Tarantino got to him in 2018. This made me very nervous, but I was mostly excited to see him in person, because it is novel to be in the same room with huge movie stars. Then, I arrived at the said room and had to quietly suppress utter humiliation, because I thought I might start crying.
The chairs for the forthcoming Q&A were set up before the movie started, my proximity to which cannot be understated. I watched the movie, which was fine. Then, I heard the door in the back of the theater unlatch, turned around, saw Austin Butler lingering in the back rows, and felt so overwhelmingly grateful that someone so hot and weird, whose filmography is genuinely fun, who wears such amazing clothes in his free time and loves Disneyland, can exist, and that I can watch him do stuff on my phone and, in that moment, in front of my very eyes, and that I can giggle about it, in what I trick myself into thinking is subversive appreciation for the grotesquely successful invention of celebrity heteronormativity. It is actually not humiliating, I decided in that moment, to be infatuated with the classic suavity of a hot and famous guy: that is what both he and I were born and trained for.
When Austin Butler arrived at his seat, he did a double take at me and waved. That part I don’t quite understand. We made eye contact a few more times. Then, while standing to exit, he complimented my seat mate’s outfit (this post is about ME), turned to me, said “thanks, bye,” waved, and left. This sequence of events is something that has done what last week was unimaginable: totally, in sensuousness and affect, replicated the feeling I had when I was on One Direction Twitter as a child, parasocializing with Harry Styles to returns of great joy.
Now, I am an adult, and have, in some ways, made celebrity fetishization and male objectification part of my career. It has never become less fun, but I have grown confused about my relationship to it. Now, sometimes, friends of friends of employees of friends of those six people might be at the same party as me, or know someone who knows someone who follows one of my best friends. I have never cracked how to politely and successfully navigate this dialectic–between my passion for hot men and insanity, and ability, willingness, and commitment to being normal–when I do, still, feel sheer overwhelm at the neckline of Austin Butler’s sweater, but also have no real interest in externalizing that feeling. With no time to consider it further, though, on June 20, 2024, I was thrust into a kind of exposure therapy, to a man so cool it is hard for me to fully understand, and found that all I really wanted to do was ask him where he buys his jeans.
reread this morning to remember why we do what we do
Some things never change. Started with Barney, a purple dinosaur. Then Aladdin, a cartoon……