Timmy and Adam's excellent adventures
Ubiquity, cyclicality, and my favorite character name of the year
This is the first time I’m actively following this awards season as movies get released. It’s not great for my bank account, but I am having a lot of fun making bets on Academy Award nods and acting like I have any idea what’s going to happen.
Thus, I was checking out Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up when I saw this:
Look in the curve of the P—it’s freaking Timothée Chalamet. The same thing happened when I was watching the trailer for Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch:
There he is! It can’t just be me thinking this wispy little man has been everywhere, not just dreaming about Zendaya in Dune but also as the titular character of the new W*lly W*nka movie that I refuse to acknowledge is happening (and thus will not cite my sources), in the aforementioned French Dispatch, and all. over. my Twitter feed. Booked and busy, as they say.
The same, though to a slightly lesser extent, has also applied to another one of the internet men du jour, sir Adam Driver. He’s in a sweater! He’s on red carpets! He’s singing a ballad while coming up for air from eating Marion Cotillard’s p*ssy! (Honestly, that’s range.)
And, by the power of spreadsheeting, I can show that their ubiquity isn’t coming out of nowhere. Here’s where they’ve been this year:1
(This is relevant to nothing but I desperately feel the need to point out Driver’s character names this year: Maurizio Gucci in House of Gucci, Jacques le Gris in The Last Duel, and… Henry McHenry in Annette. Again I say: range!)
Most of those are concentrated near fall and winter, but keep in mind that it’s not just the actual movie that can really stretch out someone’s visibility. A lot of that effect can be chalked up to press tours leading up to the movie, the memes from said press tours, red carpets, the film festivals that screen them before the wide release… the list goes on.
That said, it’s pretty obvious that, if not for COVID, these two would probably be a little less omnipresent. At the very least, there’d be more space between their releases: a few months between The French Dispatch and Dune, maybe same for The Last Duel and House of Gucci. But leaving it at “it’s COVID, dummy” isn’t quite right either. Chalamet really started to pick up steam after 2017’s Call Me By Your Name (a movie I did not see and now can never see), and it looks like Driver did the same about 2 years earlier in 2015 with Star Wars: The Force Awakens (do not talk to me about the sequel trilogy). Indeed, most of these films had been cast and at least partially filmed before COVID happened. Rather, I theorize that COVID essentially compressed an already emerging trend by forcing all their movies to be released around the same time, now that theaters are finally starting to recover a bit.
All of this reminded me of someone else who absolutely ruled Hollywood for a while there, and who coincidentally is also in Don’t Look Up: Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence had a few three-movie-in-a-year streaks sans COVID:
Compared to Chalamet and Driver, that’s a lot more three-non-short-movie-in-a-year streaks than both of them. It would seem like both of those men are starting to enter an era that J. Law came out of in 2016.
The reason I bring this up is because she was, as Chalamet and Driver are now, everywhere in this era, from big blockbusters (Hunger Games, X-Men) to more obscure films like Joy (though she did get an Oscar nod for that). Remember when Buzzfeed was full of “she’s so relatable!” Remember the pizza obsession? Tripping and falling at the Oscars twice? And it wasn’t just memes—she was the world’s highest-paid actress in 2015 and 2016. Even after that prolific period started petering out, she came in third in 2017, then fourth in 2018.
I don’t think I’m reinventing the wheel here by saying Hollywood is pretty cyclical; there’s no shortage of stars who burn hot and bright, then recede from omnipresence after a while. I’m thinking Daisy Ridley, Anna Kendrick, Miles Teller, Emilia Clarke, and maybe Ansel Elgort. I definitely had a lot more trouble finding men who fit this description; in another instance where I don’t think I’m saying anything super revolutionary, it’s pretty clear Hollywood treats its female stars as much more disposable. (Elgort, whose face I cannot differentiate from a slice of Wonder bread, is even coming back for West Side Story in December.)
Lawrence herself would eventually step back, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair profile:
“I was not pumping out the quality that I should have,” [Lawrence] says, a sad statement for someone so fiercely talented. “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right. If I walked a red carpet, it was, ‘Why didn’t she run?’… I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.”
Lawrence’s producing partner and best friend of 13 years, Justine Polsky, says: “The protocol of stardom began to kill her creative spirit, to fuck with her compass. So, she vanished, which was probably the most responsible way to protect her gifts. And sanity.”
It’s way too early to tell if Chalamet and Driver will eventually follow a similar path of ubiquity-then-fading, and you really can’t ignore the gendered aspect (Hollywood is, as we’ve learned time and time again, very willing to keep its men around, and women tend to bear a disproportionate amount of Hollywood pressure.) But if I had to play bookie, I’d say Driver probably has a bit more staying power—I’m not sure what makes Chalamet particularly unique as far as actors go, and as Kyle Buchanan notes, Driver made himself into a go-to if you need a gonzo performance or line reading:
(I’d also say he never shed the “wiggliness”—the parts of Annette I did manage to get through were plenty, uh, wiggly.)
While I don’t plan on seeing Don’t Look Up2, it is interesting to think about Chalamet, whose star is rising so quickly, sharing a screen with Lawrence, who has been through that rising period, taken the break, and is now coming back. Among other upcoming projects, she’s going to be playing Elizabeth Holmes at some point, and I cannot wait.
Let’s just hope she has the good sense to stay away from harebrained W*lly W*nka adaptations.
I got the information in that spreadsheet from the Wikipedia pages for all those movies, and in some cases I had to simplify down the release delays—Dune in particular would have been a nightmare to write out. I did the best I could, as, I cannot stress this enough, I do not get paid to do this.
It’s just gonna make me too depressed, as it’s a not-at-all veiled satire of the response to the climate crisis, and I’m just a bit apocalypsed out. Just a bit!