It’s 2015 again

JADE, Zayn, vegan, The Killer, and TV

Housekeeping:

• An exciting announcement: I am the leader of a Creator Mini-league in Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League this year, and I’m playing to win. My Mini-league is called The Butheads. Stay tuned for more info…

• Pre-order your copy of Grand Rapids for our book club next month.

• Read me on British clothing, etc.

The Killer

Crises persist in the U.S.A.! Everyday, someone is asking for me to engage in some severe conversation about what’s bad and what’s good. I’ll bite on some stuff soon, maybe—the nature of celebrity as it pertains to phones and ideology, the tragedy of personhood contemporarily meaning nothing without fame—but most of it I find quite silly. Ultimately I don’t think we learned very much from 2015-2020, and, in my mom’s words, “that guy’s wife is gonna be poor now, and next month no one will care.” The woke boomer carries with them an enviable serenity.

Here’s the other thing I’ll say for right now: free speech is a good idea that is easily rendered a deceptive tool of individualist capitalism. For years, and when someone else was president, private citizens have not felt safe commenting on a genocide happening in plain sight. I don’t know what in the last few days is more alarming or surprising than that, and I think calling “Jimmy and Seth” “two total losers” is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. “The FCC”—something else that is hilarious. The twentieth century is BACK!

i like “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” more than “President DJT” (TRUTH DETAILS)

Another Clare Momism that I find helpful is calling people The Killer. You might think, “your mom stole that from Wendy Williams”—I doubt my mother could pick Wendy Williams from a line-up, let alone recognize any of her witticisms. My mom has always substituted human beings’ names and titles with new proper nouns, like each of my boyfriends being called “Boyfriend” or one of my enemies being re-named “The Beast.” “The Killer” began when Bryan Kohberger killed those children in their home, because first there was “A Killer” on the loose, then they arrested the guy who, indeed, looked just like you’d imagine “The Killer” to look. Soon, everyone doing creepy crimes was The Killer, then people like Luigi Mangione were The Killer, too, and also all men we find unnerving in any way. “Is he The Killer ? / Kind of.”

I’m sharing this because I find it a helpful tool to cope with the tragedies and frights of our world. The Killer is a cipher for the true-crime-character-du-jour, on either side, instantaneously articulating the spectacularity and performativity of violence that converge in men everywhere, all the time. The Killer is everywhere, and it is not special or unique when he becomes a subject of your attention. It is more productive to search for a sense of redundancy and boring-ness to The Killer, rather than psychologize how The Killer of the month is different from The Killer last month. When The Killer is a true archetype spanning all types of selfish bravado and misogynistic, racist lunacy, he’s less an impenetrably complicated cultural figure than something you can feel in your everyday life, that you can trace through history. The Killer seeks nothing but feeling awesome—And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.¹