I LOVEEEEE THIS FOR YOU BABETapping into the nostalgic internet, 'ugh my youth' feels, and the exploding ever-adolescent heart.
So, I posted some videos to the internet that had my phone blowing up for days. I kept getting TikTok comment notifications all of last week while I was on my writing retreat (which was awesome and wildly productive, despite the digital distractions, thanks for asking). Just a few characteristic comments:
What, you might ask, inspired such an outpouring of enthusiasm and support? I tossed up a video from my Mexico City trip earlier this year for my 40th birthday. The clip was just me narrating to my friend the very important cinematic history behind the iron gate outside Chapultepec Castle. It shows up in a pivotal scene in Romeo + Juliet, right after the star-crossed lovers meet at the costume ball. I added the text: “POV you’re a millennial in CDMX and you realize Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet was filmed here.” Not the most accurate: I had already known the movie was filmed there and even took screenshots of key shooting locations on the flight down. The movie turned me into a Leo obsessive back in 1996 at the age of 12, when I launched a fan website and daily newsletter. Like I wrote before: “I hadn’t chosen Mexico City for my 40th birthday trip because of the Romeo + Juliet filming locations, but once I squeezed them into our itinerary, it seemed like a kind of poetic revisitation of my youth ahead of this big milestone, and I leaned into it.” I mean, man, do I enjoy leaning into things, obsessively and absurdly. Case in point, these videos. The first one got some traction, people seemed to like it, so I did another video of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, where Romeo and Juliet get married and die. And then another video of the balcony at Chapultepec where Lady Capulet iconically calls out for Juliet. And then another video of the iron gates, because I did some forensic-level analysis to figure out exactly which part of the gate showed up in the movie. With the second and third videos going pretty viral, people started calling for a tour (“Girl, start a tour!!!”). I also started to notice variations on the same sentiment:
This was not the sarcastic or subtle shade-throwing form of “I love that for you.” It was full-on earnest, the equivalent of 4th-grade-me clutching her heart while singing along to Mariah Carey’s “Hero.” I have been writing on the internet for a very long time—almost three decades if you count the Leo newsletter—but I’ve never experienced such an outpouring of positivity. One single person weighed in to say that the film sucked, but everyone else showed up with triple-exclamations and heart-eye emojis. There were women who had R+J-themed weddings, women who still, inexplicably, loved Leo (“Leonardo DiCaprio el es el amor de mi vida!”), and women who claimed that they will now make the same pilgrimage for their birthdays. “The way the algorithm knows my 15 year old heart by having this in my FYO 🥲💕,” wrote one woman. Another said: “Ugh my youth.” The 15 year old heart. Ugh my youth. That was my experience for several days, watching the flood of comments pop up on my phone throughout the day, this melange of heart-exploding excitement and you-go-girl-isms, along with wistful nostalgia for that era when those same things were perhaps more intense, immediate, and plentiful. But also: permitted and expected? That has always been my feeling: hetero adolescent girls’ boy-craziness is normalized at the same time that it is belittled, caricatured, and time-boxed. A discrete phase. I often look back at myself in that era and think, “That was my truest self,” which is perhaps why I so often look back at that era, and attempt to return to it, even. The boy-crazy bit is part of that “truest self” feeling, but more so the way that “crazy” was part of a broader enthusiasm, obsession, goofiness, and earnestness that was slowly drained from me on the other side of 13, when I walked into a hall of mirrors where my desires became men’s desires as refracted through pop cultural stereotypes, you know? I know these commenters know. I think it’s why they “LOVEEEEE THIS FOR YOU BABE.”
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četvrtak, 4. srpnja 2024.
I LOVEEEEE THIS FOR YOU BABE
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