Sep 8Liked by caro claire burke, Katie Gatti Tassin
While I completely agree we need to stop deifying celebrity and celebrities, I do sometime feel like celebrities use the algorithm to keep us engaged. Like Caroline I took am a deconstructing swiftie with various levels of success, and all I can say is I sometimes feel manipulated by her marketing. The roll out of TTPD is the perfect example. Apart from the clues and the rep tv bait and switch and the pop up on LA, the multiple versions she released with one song different so "we" can stay at number one felt, idk, wrong on some level.
Carrying this to Blake, I think the hate train got way too big. I think she went away when she started to use the movie, that is adjacent to domestic violence, to promote two brands AND Deadpool. Instead of the movie being a movie, it became a marketing vehicle that she and her family solely was profiting from. Then it just snowballed, and she's unfortunately had some pretty tone deaf moments throughout her career.
I totally agree with this! I think celebrities quite literally depend on our algorithmic attention nowadays, so it would make sense that they would work to capture and hold onto our online attention
As you two were talking I was thinking about Meghan Markle and Jada Pinkett-Smith. The intense vitriol spewed at them for just being themselves and doing what others do while living in a capitalist structure was appalling.
Further upsetting is that while Blake Lively is clearly being strategic about (and not hiding it) her goals of selling product and a brand, MM and JP-S were at times experiencing this hate just living their lives and/or getting hate for how their husbands were behaving which seems to highlight an intersection of capitalism and white supremacy which merits some conversation around how celebrities of color have experienced the dynamic being discussed.
Regardless of the target of this hate, it’s clear we will go to great lengths to avoid confronting how capitalism has stripped our humanity. It’s also clear to me we feel very comfortable and justified in sublimating any awareness of our own participation in capitalism by projecting a moral deficit onto those who’ve simply played the game well so we walk away feeling like we held a bad person accountable by cancelling them.
I think what pisses us off about celebrities is, like one of you said, it feels like we as fans helped them win the game so we are owed a performance of our choosing. What I would add to that is we feel like we made it easy for them to win the game of capitalism while we are working so damn hard.
The game is the problem, it’s rigged, it strips us of our humanity leading to abuse, and by design necessarily leads to all types of morally bankrupt behavior to get ahead. I find it unsurprising this conversation is happening surrounding a celebrity who is using a movie about abuse to sell her brand. The cognitive dissonance of how we simultaneously uphold capitalism while we look away from how it causes abuse is hard to ignore so we have to place it somewhere.
The intersections of white supremacy and capitalism is a big part of what I am compelled by about this. Because I completely agree. And it's difficult for me, as a blonde white women, to watch people like Blake and T Swizzle receive *so much* praise and adoration when I know how I've been treated at points - receiving praise because simply of my proximity to whiteness, and knowing that that's got to be cranked up a million times for them. It's at least to me, a part of it that often goes undiscussed. As discussed in the episode, it's not possible for a celebrity to be honest about their politics and feelings when they're working for corporations but I do come back to that they took those deals. So I think's complicated. How much of it is just the system and how much of it is how you choose, and they are at level of privilege that allows for actual choice compared to a layperson, to participate in it.
i genuinely appreciate the effort you made! i know how long it can take to formulate thoughts especially when they’re founded in frustration/passion/overwhelm
this was a very refreshing listen & the kind of cultural commentary i’ve been looking for on substack audio, so thank you.
you raise so many good points about how we (society) feel celebrities owe us something because we support them. like there’s a catch. we can’t just be nice & supportive of their work alone. we need more. kind of makes me think of those “nice guys” in real life who are never just nice for the sake of it. they think you owe them something bc they were nice & then they turn on you when you don’t give them exactly what they want !!
The way I simultaneously wanted to dive into this episode immediately while also wanting to save it to listen with absolutely no distractions. Loved it. Thank you as always for your excellent content (thinking about that word differently now!).
Amanda Montell comes to similar conclusions in a chapter of her recent book The Age of Magical Overthinking, in a chapter wonderfully titled “Are you my Mother, Taylor Swift?”; a great read for those interested in this odd online world in which we now live.
There was the call to wear your charm bracelets and florals, a nail polish line, a booze tie-in, the hair care line, the lack of static social media posts acknowledging DV (at least 3 weeks ago). While these things happened at different times, many people heard about the missteps one after the other once news broke about a possible feud which created the perception of a terrible press tour. I understand not wanting to dive into the Justin Baldoni discourse since it’s been well covered, but how he discussed DV versus Blake was pretty stark. In comparison, Blake’s part of the press tour was callous at worst and silly at best. You asked what people want from Blake Lively, what I want is her to consistently give DV serious attention. It’s notable that Colleen Hoover wrote the book in light of her mother’s experience with abuse, but that doesn’t mean that she treated DV with the appropriate care to not use more thoughtful marketing in 2024.
Separately, more celebrities are likely to find themselves in similar situations. People didn’t sink their teeth into Blake just because of the poor movie tie-ins, it’s also because she’s pretty and rich. The internet’s patience for vacuous celebrities is running thin. I think when people are struggling (America is on fire for many reasons), it feels good, even righteous to engage in moral outrage. Also, part of the deal of getting to make money off difficult subjects is that you have to at least pretend to care. I think Blake did a terrible job convincing the public that she cares all that much about DV. That marketing isn’t only being viewed by CH fans (I’ve never read her books). And just in case I’m mistaken for a Blake hater, I never read that Vogue article and I loved her in A Simple Plan.
thanks for the comment! it seems like you want something very different from blake lively than what I want, if I'm reading your comments correctly. You want her to "consistently give DV serious attention," and I want her opinions and behaviors to generally matter to the public much less than they currently do, regardless of what those opinions and behaviors are. Totally fine for you to have a separate desire for her, FWIW, but I think if we have that fundamental differing in terms of what we WANT from her, then it would follow that we have different grievances and perspectives on everything else that took place this summer.
I also want to highlight this part of your comments: "the internet's patience for vacuous celebrities is running thin." I would love to believe that's true, but I don't personally think it's the case! Before there were TikTok furies, there were tabloid furies. The cycle of platforming, deifying, and then eviscerating famous women is about as old as fame itself. Lively didn't lose any followers on Instagram from this fury, and It Ends With Us certainly didn't suffer in the. box office (I guess we will see what happens with a simple favor 2, but my guess is it will do just fine as well). What's more, I would argue that the internet fury with celebrities is an essential factor in keeping these celebrities famous to begin with (hence our discussion about the sort of chicken-and-egg scenario we find ourselves in with famous people disappointing us, again and again and again.)
anyways, these are just my two cents- thank you for listening, tho, and appreciate your thoughts
Thank you for making this. I’m still sorting through how I feel about it but there are a couple of keys differences between where I came from into this and y’all:
1. I never liked Blake Lively, I found her performance of femininity and morality in the late aughts, talking *often* in articles about how she didn’t drink, would rather bake brownies than go to Hollywood parties, and was besties with Christian Louboutin, to be really off-putting and engineered to capitalize on the downfall of Britney, Paris, and Lindsey, three celebrities who were *not* doing those things. I also grew up evangelical and adjacent to a lot of trad-wife families so she sent major alarm bells off for me in the “mean beautiful girl in the youth group” way. So I agree with the point that she’s always been like this and I also don’t know why it took people so long to see other than that I think a lot of people, white women in particular, really want to believe in the narrative of someone like Blake Lively’s public image - beautiful, wholesome, “perfect.”
2. I can’t speak to their marketing prowess in the same way y’all can but her marriage to Ryan Reynolds has never sat right with me. I don’t think their jokes are cute to one another, I really dislike how little she’s worked since they’ve been married, I was writing my own Substack about this, lol, and pulled the numbers from IMDb, she’s had twelve credits since 2012, the year they got married, he has had seventy. He also worked on three of hers, including scab re-writing on IEWU. I’m not a fan of age-gap romances and there’s eleven-years between them. And ScarJo has also said that one of the reasons *they* got divorced was competition, which is…weird. Also an age-gap marriage. I don’t know them and it’s mostly speculation but I just do not vibe with him and her handling of this movie makes me think she isn’t super clued up on what forms dv can take, like coercive control, and because it is such a commercial film and she is such a commercial actress, a lot of people will be seeing this and taking their clues from her on how to respond. And while I disagree with that and do think policy and laws are the way forward, people are seeing this now. And I know I learned about a lot of stuff through television and films because it wasn’t discussed in my house. While the second half of the quote y’all shared was good, the decision to sell this stuff now, her haircare line, cocktails, etc., at this movie, just collapses any integrity I felt she might have had, which admittedly, was not a lot.
I think I’m just worried about people like my little sister, who is a fan of hers and is more traditional than me and I feel like watching this celebrity be flippant about dv so publicly and also work significantly less than her husband/talk about how they “always work together” 😬 is dangerous because it normalizes it and makes it cool and cute and does a lot of the same marketing work that trad wives do, that was the point of my Substack but coming from the horrified angle, and unfortunately I think some people won’t look deeper or be like “when was the last time I read some actual art,” because being able to reach that conclusion requires critical thinking skills that a lot of people growing up in high-control religions, I know, this is extremely specific, don’t have.
So yeah. I agree that we should care less in general about what celebrities think and do and say but I also can’t break that I feel she is really investing some not great ideas and behaviors into public consciousness. And I really wish she had not chosen an albeit commercial, movie about DV to do it on. I don’t know what I want from her other than to hear about her and her marriage less. But that’s just where I’m at with this and to not comment about it felt bad, which I also kind of feel like was the conclusion y’all came to.
Thank you for sharing your experiences with growing public images. It sounds awful and I’ve often thought that densensitization was one of the only ways you could survive it.
I thought it was interesting that right before the Blake Lively backlash started, I was seeing a lot of comments online about how Ryan Reynolds is super cringe, and I had never really seen that sentiment about him before. It was like that was the first chink in their armor and then people went all in on dragging her.
I also think that our relationship to celebrities is more strained than it ever has been. The pain of income inequality is so acute right now and I don’t find it enjoyable to watch wealthy people continuously diversify their income streams through alcohol brands and hair care lines while I struggle to buy eggs. I think you are right about the fact that people have a lot of anger, and there was something really satisfying about being able to direct it like a fire hose at someone like Blake Lively who seemingly has everything.
Additionally I think there is an entire other conversation to be had about the subjectivity of who we think “earned” and/or “deserves” their success/wealth/fame etc.
my brain is exploding... though I have to say, as someone who isn't deep in the Blake Lively subreddit, it is easy to not notice it. But I agree, celebrities are in a different world and it is unfair for any of us to judge from the outside. Perhaps it says more about us and our own expectations for ourselves? This episode gave me so much to think about...
You guys are desperately inching closer to forcing yourselves to talk about Taylor. I’m ready when you are
I'M NOT READY!!!
LOL
While I completely agree we need to stop deifying celebrity and celebrities, I do sometime feel like celebrities use the algorithm to keep us engaged. Like Caroline I took am a deconstructing swiftie with various levels of success, and all I can say is I sometimes feel manipulated by her marketing. The roll out of TTPD is the perfect example. Apart from the clues and the rep tv bait and switch and the pop up on LA, the multiple versions she released with one song different so "we" can stay at number one felt, idk, wrong on some level.
Carrying this to Blake, I think the hate train got way too big. I think she went away when she started to use the movie, that is adjacent to domestic violence, to promote two brands AND Deadpool. Instead of the movie being a movie, it became a marketing vehicle that she and her family solely was profiting from. Then it just snowballed, and she's unfortunately had some pretty tone deaf moments throughout her career.
I totally agree with this! I think celebrities quite literally depend on our algorithmic attention nowadays, so it would make sense that they would work to capture and hold onto our online attention
Also, please share more about your deconstruction with Taylor!
I can't tell if you wanted comments or not, but I took was captivated by this Blake lively situation. It was fascinating!
As you two were talking I was thinking about Meghan Markle and Jada Pinkett-Smith. The intense vitriol spewed at them for just being themselves and doing what others do while living in a capitalist structure was appalling.
Further upsetting is that while Blake Lively is clearly being strategic about (and not hiding it) her goals of selling product and a brand, MM and JP-S were at times experiencing this hate just living their lives and/or getting hate for how their husbands were behaving which seems to highlight an intersection of capitalism and white supremacy which merits some conversation around how celebrities of color have experienced the dynamic being discussed.
Regardless of the target of this hate, it’s clear we will go to great lengths to avoid confronting how capitalism has stripped our humanity. It’s also clear to me we feel very comfortable and justified in sublimating any awareness of our own participation in capitalism by projecting a moral deficit onto those who’ve simply played the game well so we walk away feeling like we held a bad person accountable by cancelling them.
I think what pisses us off about celebrities is, like one of you said, it feels like we as fans helped them win the game so we are owed a performance of our choosing. What I would add to that is we feel like we made it easy for them to win the game of capitalism while we are working so damn hard.
The game is the problem, it’s rigged, it strips us of our humanity leading to abuse, and by design necessarily leads to all types of morally bankrupt behavior to get ahead. I find it unsurprising this conversation is happening surrounding a celebrity who is using a movie about abuse to sell her brand. The cognitive dissonance of how we simultaneously uphold capitalism while we look away from how it causes abuse is hard to ignore so we have to place it somewhere.
The intersections of white supremacy and capitalism is a big part of what I am compelled by about this. Because I completely agree. And it's difficult for me, as a blonde white women, to watch people like Blake and T Swizzle receive *so much* praise and adoration when I know how I've been treated at points - receiving praise because simply of my proximity to whiteness, and knowing that that's got to be cranked up a million times for them. It's at least to me, a part of it that often goes undiscussed. As discussed in the episode, it's not possible for a celebrity to be honest about their politics and feelings when they're working for corporations but I do come back to that they took those deals. So I think's complicated. How much of it is just the system and how much of it is how you choose, and they are at level of privilege that allows for actual choice compared to a layperson, to participate in it.
you can't see me but I just stood up out of my chair and clapped wildly
Also, I had more to say but had to cut myself off.
Please share more, if you want. It was really good
That’s very validating because I stayed up way too late formulating my response and I’m tired at work now but your reaction makes it all worth it!!!
i genuinely appreciate the effort you made! i know how long it can take to formulate thoughts especially when they’re founded in frustration/passion/overwhelm
this was a very refreshing listen & the kind of cultural commentary i’ve been looking for on substack audio, so thank you.
you raise so many good points about how we (society) feel celebrities owe us something because we support them. like there’s a catch. we can’t just be nice & supportive of their work alone. we need more. kind of makes me think of those “nice guys” in real life who are never just nice for the sake of it. they think you owe them something bc they were nice & then they turn on you when you don’t give them exactly what they want !!
“The kind of cultural commentary I’ve been looking for on Substack audio” made my heart sing. Thank you, Emilee!
Thank you so much for this! Made my day
Of course !!! Both of you are so articulate. Can’t wait to hear more ❤️
The way I simultaneously wanted to dive into this episode immediately while also wanting to save it to listen with absolutely no distractions. Loved it. Thank you as always for your excellent content (thinking about that word differently now!).
Amanda Montell comes to similar conclusions in a chapter of her recent book The Age of Magical Overthinking, in a chapter wonderfully titled “Are you my Mother, Taylor Swift?”; a great read for those interested in this odd online world in which we now live.
WHAT A SURPRISE ON A SUNDAY
🥲
There was the call to wear your charm bracelets and florals, a nail polish line, a booze tie-in, the hair care line, the lack of static social media posts acknowledging DV (at least 3 weeks ago). While these things happened at different times, many people heard about the missteps one after the other once news broke about a possible feud which created the perception of a terrible press tour. I understand not wanting to dive into the Justin Baldoni discourse since it’s been well covered, but how he discussed DV versus Blake was pretty stark. In comparison, Blake’s part of the press tour was callous at worst and silly at best. You asked what people want from Blake Lively, what I want is her to consistently give DV serious attention. It’s notable that Colleen Hoover wrote the book in light of her mother’s experience with abuse, but that doesn’t mean that she treated DV with the appropriate care to not use more thoughtful marketing in 2024.
Separately, more celebrities are likely to find themselves in similar situations. People didn’t sink their teeth into Blake just because of the poor movie tie-ins, it’s also because she’s pretty and rich. The internet’s patience for vacuous celebrities is running thin. I think when people are struggling (America is on fire for many reasons), it feels good, even righteous to engage in moral outrage. Also, part of the deal of getting to make money off difficult subjects is that you have to at least pretend to care. I think Blake did a terrible job convincing the public that she cares all that much about DV. That marketing isn’t only being viewed by CH fans (I’ve never read her books). And just in case I’m mistaken for a Blake hater, I never read that Vogue article and I loved her in A Simple Plan.
thanks for the comment! it seems like you want something very different from blake lively than what I want, if I'm reading your comments correctly. You want her to "consistently give DV serious attention," and I want her opinions and behaviors to generally matter to the public much less than they currently do, regardless of what those opinions and behaviors are. Totally fine for you to have a separate desire for her, FWIW, but I think if we have that fundamental differing in terms of what we WANT from her, then it would follow that we have different grievances and perspectives on everything else that took place this summer.
I also want to highlight this part of your comments: "the internet's patience for vacuous celebrities is running thin." I would love to believe that's true, but I don't personally think it's the case! Before there were TikTok furies, there were tabloid furies. The cycle of platforming, deifying, and then eviscerating famous women is about as old as fame itself. Lively didn't lose any followers on Instagram from this fury, and It Ends With Us certainly didn't suffer in the. box office (I guess we will see what happens with a simple favor 2, but my guess is it will do just fine as well). What's more, I would argue that the internet fury with celebrities is an essential factor in keeping these celebrities famous to begin with (hence our discussion about the sort of chicken-and-egg scenario we find ourselves in with famous people disappointing us, again and again and again.)
anyways, these are just my two cents- thank you for listening, tho, and appreciate your thoughts
Thank you for making this. I’m still sorting through how I feel about it but there are a couple of keys differences between where I came from into this and y’all:
1. I never liked Blake Lively, I found her performance of femininity and morality in the late aughts, talking *often* in articles about how she didn’t drink, would rather bake brownies than go to Hollywood parties, and was besties with Christian Louboutin, to be really off-putting and engineered to capitalize on the downfall of Britney, Paris, and Lindsey, three celebrities who were *not* doing those things. I also grew up evangelical and adjacent to a lot of trad-wife families so she sent major alarm bells off for me in the “mean beautiful girl in the youth group” way. So I agree with the point that she’s always been like this and I also don’t know why it took people so long to see other than that I think a lot of people, white women in particular, really want to believe in the narrative of someone like Blake Lively’s public image - beautiful, wholesome, “perfect.”
2. I can’t speak to their marketing prowess in the same way y’all can but her marriage to Ryan Reynolds has never sat right with me. I don’t think their jokes are cute to one another, I really dislike how little she’s worked since they’ve been married, I was writing my own Substack about this, lol, and pulled the numbers from IMDb, she’s had twelve credits since 2012, the year they got married, he has had seventy. He also worked on three of hers, including scab re-writing on IEWU. I’m not a fan of age-gap romances and there’s eleven-years between them. And ScarJo has also said that one of the reasons *they* got divorced was competition, which is…weird. Also an age-gap marriage. I don’t know them and it’s mostly speculation but I just do not vibe with him and her handling of this movie makes me think she isn’t super clued up on what forms dv can take, like coercive control, and because it is such a commercial film and she is such a commercial actress, a lot of people will be seeing this and taking their clues from her on how to respond. And while I disagree with that and do think policy and laws are the way forward, people are seeing this now. And I know I learned about a lot of stuff through television and films because it wasn’t discussed in my house. While the second half of the quote y’all shared was good, the decision to sell this stuff now, her haircare line, cocktails, etc., at this movie, just collapses any integrity I felt she might have had, which admittedly, was not a lot.
I think I’m just worried about people like my little sister, who is a fan of hers and is more traditional than me and I feel like watching this celebrity be flippant about dv so publicly and also work significantly less than her husband/talk about how they “always work together” 😬 is dangerous because it normalizes it and makes it cool and cute and does a lot of the same marketing work that trad wives do, that was the point of my Substack but coming from the horrified angle, and unfortunately I think some people won’t look deeper or be like “when was the last time I read some actual art,” because being able to reach that conclusion requires critical thinking skills that a lot of people growing up in high-control religions, I know, this is extremely specific, don’t have.
So yeah. I agree that we should care less in general about what celebrities think and do and say but I also can’t break that I feel she is really investing some not great ideas and behaviors into public consciousness. And I really wish she had not chosen an albeit commercial, movie about DV to do it on. I don’t know what I want from her other than to hear about her and her marriage less. But that’s just where I’m at with this and to not comment about it felt bad, which I also kind of feel like was the conclusion y’all came to.
Thank you for sharing your experiences with growing public images. It sounds awful and I’ve often thought that densensitization was one of the only ways you could survive it.
I thought it was interesting that right before the Blake Lively backlash started, I was seeing a lot of comments online about how Ryan Reynolds is super cringe, and I had never really seen that sentiment about him before. It was like that was the first chink in their armor and then people went all in on dragging her.
I also think that our relationship to celebrities is more strained than it ever has been. The pain of income inequality is so acute right now and I don’t find it enjoyable to watch wealthy people continuously diversify their income streams through alcohol brands and hair care lines while I struggle to buy eggs. I think you are right about the fact that people have a lot of anger, and there was something really satisfying about being able to direct it like a fire hose at someone like Blake Lively who seemingly has everything.
Additionally I think there is an entire other conversation to be had about the subjectivity of who we think “earned” and/or “deserves” their success/wealth/fame etc.
my brain is exploding... though I have to say, as someone who isn't deep in the Blake Lively subreddit, it is easy to not notice it. But I agree, celebrities are in a different world and it is unfair for any of us to judge from the outside. Perhaps it says more about us and our own expectations for ourselves? This episode gave me so much to think about...