Devil’s in the Details
When you imagine your perfect life, you may or may not imagine one where everything looks like a Slim Aarons photo. As a window to sumptuous luxury, overwhelming beauty and influential power, work like Aarons has influenced generations of glamor-seekers. Almost everyone seems to crave a stylistic life full of attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.
Image Courtesy: Slim Aarons
This idolization of socialites, jet-setters and celebrities is a fairly common experience – we all have the tendency to divulge in the lives of others. Whether you went through a One Direction phase in middle school or found yourself joining the Arianators, you placed such figures on an untouchable pedestal.
These fixations are not limited to just influencers and our daydreams, though. Books, movies and art make up a funhouse-mirror-replica of the new popular culture.
While these facets of culture appear incredibly idyllic, such glamorous company can be hiding quiet secrets.
If anyone would know about deceivingly picture-perfect secrets, it would be the wife in the psychological thriller “Don’t Worry Darling.”
In a tour-de-force performance, Florence Pugh plays a 1950s housewife who cannot trust those around her, while Harry Styles depicts a duplicitous character with some horrifying skeletons in his closet. From partying with bottomless cocktails in one scene, to all hell breaking loose in the next, this film implies not everyone is as they seem.
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
Although a highly stylized and surrealist fictional piece, this mysterious feature is enmeshed with elements of reality – there is sometimes way more going on than meets the eye.
Take the real-life fraudster Anna Sorokin, for example.
Cunning, dubious and armed with an ambiguous inflection, Sorokin paraded as a German heiress. Using this false illusion, she was able to infiltrate herself into the inner circle of New York City’s biggest socialites, scamming countless people, hotels and banks.
This infamous Soho grifter’s rise and fall to fame proves the secret lives big-names can lead.
Image Courtesy: L’Officiel
The creation of social media and modern technology facilitate how easily content can be fabricated. Social media’s failure to hold these celebrities accountable for their actions has encouraged the following of false role models.
The reality star, Kim Kardashian, has been called out on numerous occasions for altering the pictures she shares online.
Image Courtesy: @kimkardashian on Instagram
As if we wouldn’t notice the squished car behind her…
In contrast, internet personalities like Emma Chamberlain eschew the hypercurated and facetuned aesthetic. Instead, she shares authentic content like the time she had an eye infection.
Image Courtesy: @emmachamberlain on Instagram
Cultivated by the media to resemble face-to-face relationships, parasocial relationships have flourished with the growing popularity of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Tik Tok. Now, celebrities are able to share the most intimate and personal moments of their lives, making followers feel like they know them inside and out.
Even musician Billie Eilish has utilized this parasocial relationship to bring a platform to mental health and depression.
This feeling of closeness makes individuals feel like their favorite blogger or social media influencer understands them, and when celebrities like Eilish and Chamberlain show their experiences with a dark time, it reveals the human element sometimes missing from the perfect idealizations of our culture.
Serving as cautionary tales, “Don’t Worry Darling,” Anna Sorokin, Kim Kardashian, Emma Chamberlain and Billie Eilish remind us that even though things might seem simple, the details are often more complicated than expected.
Strike Out,
Writer: Cassie DesVergers
Editor: Kate Corcoran
Gainesville
