I Thought I Was A Cool Girl
Until I Saw Timothée Chalamet in Person
BY SOPHIE TEGENU
My friend Ayanna once said that we should get rid of the word “cool.” Tear it out of our dictionaries, delete it from our iPhone’s autocorrect, strip it from our vocabularies. I agreed with her completely. It’s a dangerous word, full of assumption and want and allusion. It’s a word that encourages distance; that turns people into ideas and relationships into calculations.
Another friend of mine, Giulia, once told me that I never seem to freak out about boys. Ah yes, I thought, that’s right. It’s not in my character to lose my cool over some boy. I’m nonchalant, aloof, carefree. No man can get in the way of my composure. I’m a cool girl. This line of thinking obviously contradicts my previous anti-cool vendetta, but whatever people are contradictory. While I believed that the ideas and language around coolness were disingenuous, I also believed that I was cool in a way that was not problematic. All of this changed when I saw Timothée Chalamet in person. For those of you who don’t know, Timothée Chalamet is a 22-year-old actor and cultural phenomenon. He inspired legions of devoted fans and awed critics with his performances in the movies Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, and Beautiful Boy, among others. I saw all of these films, and yes, fell in love in the process. But not, like, that in love. His sad-boy aesthetic was perfect and his eyes were wow, but I was fine. I could still think critically. I would say things like “He’s beautiful, ok, but is he genuine?” or “He seems really full of it but like he’s pretending to be humble.” I was not one to be deceived by a pretty face and swooshy hair. I was a fan, sure. But not that big of a fan. I checked his Instagram from time to time, but refused to follow it. I always made sure to include his acting accolades (one of the youngest people to ever be nominated for an Academy Award!) when I launched into a tirade about how cute he was. I still had my head on my shoulders, my coolness intact. Up until this point, I had never seen him in person, and never expected to see him in person. Because I was not the type of fan that would go searching for her celebrity crush on the street, and chance encounters are wildly unlikely. Does much of my repulsion to seeming “un-cool” stem from having internalized misogyny that says excessive emotion is unattractive and weak? Yes. Is my “coolness” a way of rejecting femininity in a society that deems masculine detachment superior? Yes. Patriarchy hates hysterical women. They are institutionalized, demonized, and infantilized. I wanted none of those things, duh. I wanted what most young people want, to be taken seriously. To be serious is to be masculine, which is to be un-feminine, which is to be cool. To do this, I put on an unaffected air and attempted to create an aura of untouchability. It worked, I think. Anyways, back to Timothée. The High-Pointe Theatre hosted a Q&A with Timothée and Nic Sheff after a screening of Beautiful Boy. My roommate sent me a frantic text on Friday with the link to tickets. I was shocked and excited, but sort of forgot about it over the course of the weekend. After a festive Halloween weekend, I woke up exhausted and under-rested on Sunday morning, about 15 minutes before we had to leave for the event. Should I even go, I thought? Is he even worth it? I rolled out of bed reluctantly and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyeliner from the night before still looked great. Incredible, even. Ok, I decided, I’ll go. I stumbled into the bathroom where my roommate Naomi was getting ready. I didn’t think you were going to make it, she said. Yeah, me neither, I replied. We left the house tired and unenthused. The movie was moving and the audience was muddled with tears by the end. Timothée and Nic came on stage about 15 minutes after the movie ended, and honestly, I was underwhelmed. The room was dark, he was far away, and I wasn’t really feeling anything. Ha, I thought, he’s not all that. The two answered questions for about half an hour, with Timothée providing pleasing and sincere-seeming responses. I was engaged, but not that impressed. We left the theater after the Q&A repeating the same refrain over and over, “He was fine, I guess. He wasn’t really that special.” But then we saw the mob. We didn’t plan on joining it. We had no intention of taking part in it. As we made our way to the car, we saw a mass of people gathered around the back of the theater? What is that, we said to each other. Should we check it out? We inched our way closer and closer to the mob, not fully understanding what was happening. As we approached, we began to hear cries of “Timothée, look this way!” It dawned on us. He was somewhere in the crowd. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced mob mentality, I hadn’t until that moment. It feels a little bit like you’re on a rowboat in the middle of the ocean and everything is rocking gently but all at once. And all the other people on the boat are frantically rowing so you’re frantically rowing, even though you don’t know where you’re going or who you are. And you feel totally unmoored, as if you belong to nothing. And nothing exists except for you and that boat and the other people who are rowing it. That’s what it felt like when I found myself running after Timothée Chalamet on a Sunday morning in St. Louis. I wasn’t sprinting or anything. But I wasn’t really walking either. One moment, I was casually observing the mob, the next moment I was in it, desperately trying to reach Timothée. That girl over there got a picture with him, why shouldn’t I? My friend Ismene and I darted around a car to reach the optimum angle. People were shouting all around us. Timothée was suddenly inches away from us. Inches. I felt hysterical. If he turned around, he would see me, in my beautiful eyeliner from last night and favorite jacket, phone waving above me, directionless. I got a video of the back of his head, and later captioned it “wtf,” all lower case letters. Because that’s a calm and cool response. I was anything but. I imagine this is what it would have felt like to go to a One Direction concert when I was 14. I imagine this is what Beetlemania felt like. I had never experienced anything like this before, and I don’t think I ever want to experience it again. I felt as though everything I knew to be true about myself was false. I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t chill. I was a girl who would dart through a mob in order to get a selfie with a celebrity. Not any old celebrity, mind you. Timothée Chalamet. But nonetheless, I found myself grappling with a side of myself that I did not know. We should be able to fangirl shamelessly, with reckless abandon. We are told that being emotional is embarrassing. It’s not, of course, but I still felt a bit embarrassed. When I got home after the mob, I wanted to scream. I think I did scream, but not as much as I wanted to. Naomi and I laid on our couch, shaken and mildly defeated. I had lost her in the mob; she had run in another direction hoping to catch him. Neither of us could do any homework for the rest of the day. Our worldview, or ideas of ourselves, all of it was false. The feeling of being unhinged in that mob was not to be shaken lightly. Who were we now? How would we go on? At this point, Timothée was already in Minnesota, off to another movie screening. But the memory of him lived on in our apartment indefinitely. I felt loss for some reason. But what had I lost? My old ideas of myself? Timothée in general? Hope? I don’t know. Timothée Chalamet is dating someone who is 19 years old. Perhaps because I have internalized misogyny that tells me to resent younger women (I turned 20 three months ago), this news is slightly upsetting to hear. But in that mob, my goal was not to date Timothée Chalamet. My goal was simply to be near Timothée Chalamet. To be so close to someone with so large a name, who is so very cool, is so very overwhelming. For a brief moment, he turned from an idea to a person. A person who was skinnier than we thought he would be, whose glasses were much less fashionable than we imagined they should be. A person who inspired hysteria and destroyed all of our abilities to remain cool. Today, he is back to being an idea, and I’m back to over-policing my emotions. I think about the mob from time to time and feel a shiver go through me. Did that really happen? Was it all a dream? I’m not really sure what lesson you should take from this tale. Perhaps that we should stop attempting to constrain our identities to uphold an aesthetic. Or that we’re all complicit in upholding the patriarchy. Or maybe that you never lose the 11-year-old mega fan within. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m glad I made my way to High-Pointe Theater on the morning of October 28th. |