"... when one video broke the reverie. Soft harp sounds played, and then a female voice began a gentle but insistent monologue: 'You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character. ’Cause if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.' Onscreen, an overhead shot showed a young blond woman sprawled on a blanket on the beach, looking up at the camera, surrounded by friends who are oblivious to the lens. Sparkles from a TikTok filter bedazzle the footage. The woman gazes serenely skyward, as if wholly satisfied with her life. The ethereal video played the same role for Thorpe that an antique sculpture did for Rainer Maria Rilke in his poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo': It instructed, 'You must change your life.' 'It was a wake-up call,' Thorpe, who is twenty-three, said, adding, 'Everything made sense in that moment, and I was, like, Wow, I’m doing it wrong, I’m living my life incorrectly.'"
So begins "We All Have 'Main-Character Energy' Now/On social media post-pandemic, everyone is ready to become a protagonist" (The New Yorker).
The linked video was made by a 26-year-old named Ashley Ward in May 2020, and The New Yorker doesn't miss that there already was a "main character" meme on TikTok. I get the feeling the article was written before that discordant reality was noticed and inserted — minimally. So let's switch over to Know Your Meme, which calls Ward's video "sincere." And:
The first main character TikTok video is unknown. On May 11th, 2020, Twitter user and TikToker @lexapro_lesbian posted the first known main character TikTok that sparked the surge in the trend. @lexapro_lesbian reposted her original TikTok video of herself singing about how it's time to walk around her neighborhood because she's the main character (shown below).
Yes, I love the little song and the lighthearted satire:
And for you upscale characters, here's the Rilke poem:im very proud of this one pic.twitter.com/fMUDxqDQVz
— ramsey (@lexapro_lesbian) May 11, 2020
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
I'm fascinated by the concept of the torso! I wrote about it here (prompted by a Donald Trump quote about the best part of the chicken (It's not the torso!)):
Torso... now that's funny. By the way, for decades, I've found the word "torso" funny. There's the line "and the torso, even more so" in "Lydia the Tattoed Lady," and once, when I was in Rome, visiting the Vatican Museum, there were a lot of posters showing a statue that was only a torso, with the word "torso," and, after seeing these posters all over the place, I overheard a young woman, who must have seen what I'd been seeing, and she said, "What's with the torso?" Even now, 2 decades later, I hear her inflection in my head, and I laugh out loud.I, the main character on this blog. But how about you — when you walk through your neighborhood, when you walk through the Vatican Museum — are you the main character... in your head?
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8 comments:
Lloyd writes:
Don't tell the Soylent people. Their whole plan was to remain seated at a computer as much as possible, and not waste time preparing food. So: a liquid that supposedly contains everything essential. The name evokes that Charlton Heston movie, but there was also a less gruesome novel where food was made from soy and lentils.
Now: no outdoor exercise, or trip to the gym with all its rituals? (My son says it's cruel for gyms to put out muffins). We really are approaching an apotheosis of solitude and computer time.
Mitch writes:
Before the pandemic, my particular hobby was going to estate sales.
Standing in someone else’s house with a bunch of other strangers, I felt like the opposite of the main character. I felt like one of many people, all doing the same thing in dozens of houses across the Twin Cities. We were all bargain hunters, searching for houses, searching for cheap treasure, etc.
I felt the same thing when I got out of accounting school and began commuting to work. After a decade of working lonely overnights at a convenience store and trying to write novels, I felt like a small part of something big, this army of people going to work each morning.
Those are moments where I felt most connected with my fellow human beings, when I was just one among many.
Ken B writes: "You asked your quondam commenters who was the main character in their head? Surely you know. For most of them it’s Trump."
JK writes:
Of course, you should be the main character of your life. The problems arise with the pronoun and other activist types, is that they want script and dialogue approval when the various life movies interact with each other. I blame Harry Potter, a good story, but the movies, and I assume the books, were childish stories where every character only had the depth necessary to make Harry the center of attention, the greatest wizard of our time.
Far too many of our problems today seem to be of the “I will not be ignored” variety. When in reality, even the famous fade to obscurity if they aren’t making a scene frequently.
CaroWalk writes:
The signs of the times are piling up, those that manifest the widening chasm between Our Culture and the Wisdom of Tradition. I read your post right after morning mass. Today is the solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist, whose Main Character Energy was spent pointing toward the Messiah. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” — so that’s where my head was when I came upon Ashley whatever’s tik tok monument to self. The contrast was jarring.
More and more, what we see throughout our days amounts to various exhibitions of Self, whether it’s the pulsating bass blasting from your “neighbor”s car at the car wash, or the driver trying to run you off the road, or the high pitched, sorority voice of the young woman asserting her dissatisfaction with a sales clerk at Jo Ann, because they are out of something she needs for a “craft”, and everyone in the store needs to hear about it.
The qualities we are cultivating, the attributes that are valued in our culture, are all anti-virtues that tend toward excess: pride, not humility; “speak your voice,” “sex positive,” “body shaming,” and of course, “main character energy” work together to create a monstrous ethos, which is just beginning to manifest itself in our post Covid world. I don’t know about you, but the way people are driving, behaving in public, to say nothing of the spike in those who feel free to unleash their inner looter, carjacker, or boor, is dramatic in its sudden prevalence.
I am lying low.
Over here, we are clinging to the old verities like a life raft, still hoeing the hard row of transmitting the civilizing virtues to our young uns: modesty, economy, prudence, temperance, forbearance, chastity— qualities that cultivate an ethos of negation, travelling further and further from the broad, wide main stream.
Normally I use my full name— but thinking I should adopt something else— so sign me CaroWalk.
Thank you.
K writes:
When I walked through the Vatican Museum in the glory of great paintings, I saw a sign that had an unknown Italian word accompanied by a diagram of "what is that," I thought as I fell down the stairs which I had been too busy trying to comprehend the warning sign/diagram to "Notice", to notice. I was then the center of many lives and awash in flooding Italian. I only wanted to get away and forget but now Tik Tok shows me that it was a glorious moment and better than the Sistine Chapel. Well, it was just as memorable and unlike everything else around me, I personally did it. That was me. Well, maybe I won't put it on Tik Tok. I'll just remember what was art and what was me.
Tim writs:
I remember you once wrote a post about an experience you had where you had decided to actively start directing your own life rather than just following your feelings and dispositions, I can't remember what you called it, maybe to be the captain of your own soul? I wrote a dismissive comment at the time, but it always stuck in my head and I kind of realized I was actually doing the same thing to a greater extent that I should have been and have worked hard to correct it, as late in life as it may be.
Oh yeah, and Trump is certainly living rent free in somebody's head!
I think whatever you're remembering, you've changed a lot (in the process of making it into something that mattered to you).
"actively start directing your own life rather than just following your feelings and dispositions" — no, that wouldn't have been it. You've got me mixed up with someone else, or you were perhaps reading where I said that at one point in my life I realized I was accepting the culture's presentation of happiness and made an effort to really see what made me happy. That's not rejecting feelings at all but almost exactly the opposit.
"maybe to be the captain of your own soul" — I can't imagine using that trite phrase except in fun. It's silly to see your soul as the equivalent of a boat and to be riding on it!
Chris writes:
The video of the girl walking through her neighborhood made me smile.
At our visit to the Vatican Museum, I mostly remember the Laocoon, that sculpture of the guy fighting the snake. The guy with a perfect torso.
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