#110: Why Parasocial Relationships Are Destroying Authentic Art
And Why I’m Writing This for No One (and Everyone)
There is a chance you won’t see this. That is by design. If, somehow, you do happen upon this piece, welcome. It’s almost like we’re sharing a secret that only we can hear. Please feel free to interact with this piece in any way you like. I welcome criticism, praise, constructive dialogue, shares, love, and anything that suits you, but I did not send this via email. And I did not promote it in any way. Both as an experiment and as a statement of intent, a promise kept to my current and future selves.
For the longest time, I’ve been avoiding my writing. I haven’t been able to understand why it had gone from me, or rather, why I had been dodging it in the first place.
Writing has, for much of my life, been as natural to me as breathing. It’s been a necessary way for me to express myself, to learn more about what I think and why I think it, to reflect on experiences in their fullness — experiences I might have otherwise sleepwalked through, as we so often do in a modern world dizzy with bings, pings, scrolls, and other endless distractions.
What did I really think about that breakup? About that job? That city where I lived? That person I was? This person I am now? All of these things I explore through the medium of writing, with the hope that I can gain a greater sense of clarity on how I am meant to spend my precious time on earth.
It began the other day while chatting with a friend. We talked a bit about Substack and how blogging as a medium places importance on the writer themselves — the perceived persona and personality of the writer — instead of the writing itself.
When you read a thrilling essay from The Cut, you don’t think, “Oh, it’s going to be a certain way or make me feel certain exact things because it’s written by this specific person I consume regularly.” No. You more than likely click or flip based on the idea itself, the heading, and the subheading, each promising its own sort of journey. Whether it’s snake oil or a miracle cure, that’s the gamble.
The trouble comes when we expect the miracle maker to consistently and effortlessly heal us, each and every time. Something that, it should be said, no mortal can do.
When we read on a platform that centers the writer themselves, the persona of that writer, we say effectively, “it doesn’t matter what idea it is, it only matters that you make me feel how you did before.”
One might remember the incident in which Haley Nahman, beloved Substack author, faced pushback for her criticism of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. I admit, I too, was surprised. I thought, She’s not the kind of person who would hate this movie, and it filled me with a sadness I couldn’t place.
I, like many of her fans, built a parasocial relationship with her — a stranger — projecting my perceived values and beliefs based on her past work. But I, nor her other fans, know her personally, and to those in her life, her views may, in fact, seem perfectly in line with the personality and tastes she’s expressed to dislike such a film. But to the bewildered herd (borrowing a term from Noam Chomsky here and implicating myself in its use), it seemed, well, shocking.
The problem is that when we center a writer at the source of our desire to consume ideas and art, and we project what that writer should or should not think, we sometimes rob ourselves of the subjective experience of encountering an opinion without the weight of the writer’s pre-existing reputation.
This is the curse of all who achieve fame. Everything you do, whether you like it or not, will sadly and unfairly be compared to what you’ve done before. In the case of Haley Nahman, a writer I deeply admire primarily for her tremendous consistency and work ethic, this curse seems to have found her in spades.
It’s hard to feel too bad for her; making nearly $50,000 a month in subscriptions probably eases the pain of criticism. And I should note, that what a PR professional might consider a misstep rarely occurs in the universe that Nahman has so thoughtfully and ingeniously crafted.
But the thing I wish to critique is the fact that, in the process of reacting to her article, fans, myself included, lost the plot of debating the idea itself. Instead, we became concerned that the person we’d built up in our minds was behaving in a way that didn’t match our projection. We do this all the time with celebrities. Pop stars, actors, creatives — those who we think we know, but who have never (and likely will never) know us.
It happens the same way, again and again. Sisyphus pushing that damn rock. Something shocking is said, and we all defend, condemn, or balk at their words (or actions), weighing our existing understanding of the public figure against the newest revelation brought to light. Deciding, cruelly, whether or not we will discard them entirely.
We don’t treat the famous like human beings, we never have. Said another way: If we treated our loved ones the way we treat celebrities, we’d likely end up completely alone.
This whole process, in summary, kills creativity. It allows discourse to descend into the trivial, the banal, and the vapid — all while creating an expectation for the writer (or public figure) to always behave a certain way, to always like certain things, and to always be a specific kind of person.
I believe that this lack of complexity, the complexity we do not allow from our idols, insidiously infects and coagulates — becoming fixed thinking mindsets in our personal and romantic lives.
It creates a world in which one must perform a self, instead allow themselves to simply be. We do not accept people for who they are. We accept them when they most line up with who we would like them to be.
This is the incantation of destruction we cast again and again, as nobody can stay perfect for long. And when they deviate, sinning one time too many, we punish them cruelly, by withdrawing our love entirely. Unsubscribing, blocking, and deleting them from our lives entirely.
Again, I am implicating myself in this condemnation of fame and the treatment of those who attain it, because I, like you, have in one way or another, taken part in it. No wonder Chappell Roan finds her meteoric rise to fame to be a profound sham, an abusive and controlling sham.
I believe it was Toni Morrison who once wisely said, “You can’t own another human being.” And in our world of hyperconsumption and parasocial relationships, I would argue that we would all be a little happier if we stopped trying to police what one another said and instead focused on debating the ideas themselves, the critiques, the revelations — allowing a freedom of thought, instead of a narrowly held set of publicly acceptable ideals.
I should note, of course, that I am speaking of ART. I believe fully that the center of this framework of thinking does not hold, unraveling fully when it comes to issues of drastic importance that I believe we all should feel pressure to speak about: unjust wars, consumerism, and any form of exploitation, violence, and/or corruption. The powerful should have to use their platforms to fight for a better world — we all should.
But when it comes to subjective opinions and critiques of art, we’ve reached a stage in which I feel as though people do not feel safe expressing how they actually feel about anything, for fear of losing income, fans, or worse.
In a world of hyper-connectivity, where celebrities attain more power than ever before, where our idols have truly become idolatrous proxies for religion in an ever-secularising world, to dislike a celebrity, a film, or a TV show is considered almost sacrilegious.
You cannot dislike something without being labeled a hater, a bad person, a racist, a sexist, or any of the things. In the instance of Nahman, a white woman who didn’t enjoy a predominantly Asian cast-led film, this criticism was rampant.
I must admit that, at first, I too thought this. I was ready to discard someone almost immediately who I’d spent nearly years reading.
Think about that.
How quickly I was ready, as so many of us are, to sort someone into the binarist category of bad. Irredeemable. Instead of accepting the truth that all humans are complex, ever-growing, and changing, and differ immensely from ourselves.
As someone who loves Everything Everywhere All At Once, I felt somewhat betrayed by Haley for disliking the film, something that feels silly to say out loud, but something that is true nonetheless.
We want the people we love to think like we do, right? Again, something that is particularly insane, as I do not actually know this human being — though I will say, I have spoken with her once or twice and expressed my deep admiration for her work.
My point is, though, that we need, in the realms of art and creativity, to allow people the profound freedom to speak freely. A society in which you cannot say what you actually feel about something without fear of a mob of people coming to harm you is not a society that values free discourse and freedom of thought.
We should also, in the same vein, interrogate why we dislike or are not drawn to certain things. For a person like Nahman, who consumes widely, the accusation of not liking the film based on the race of the cast members is, in retrospect, quite reductive and a bit silly. After all, by positing that claim, the one throwing the stones is essentially guilty of exactly what they claim Nahman was doing: reducing the value of a piece of art to the racial identity of its cast.
That fact does not negate another truth that many people who “did not like” or deliberately avoided the film might have done so for purely racist reasons. We should be interrogating, unlearning, and healing from our internalized and often subconscious biases, something we ALL have, regardless of what race, sex, gender, or age we might be. And I also think that we should be supporting art from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups with greater gusto and fervor than we might extend to mainstream films because of that historical inequity. An unjust hierarchy that deprives equally deserving BIPOC, API, and queer creators of the chance to tell their stories, earn a living, and reap ALL of the benefits of their chosen field.
The tension between these two forms of thought is not lost on me and I suppose it is up to us, consumers of cultural criticism to discern bad-faith actors versus genuine opinions.
One of the ways I think we can all free ourselves from the shackles of the pressure to act a certain way online is to free ourselves from the platforms themselves. For example, I started this piece by saying you likely will not see it. I’m not publishing it via email or promoting it in any way whatsoever.
While on Medium I only have around 1,700+ subscribers and on Substack a little over 6,000+ followers and subscribers, this piece will likely, at first, get only one or two views, and will only likely extend to a larger audience if organically shared by readers, which is intentional.
I began to notice, much like many creatives with a platform, that one of the reasons I choose not to press send on many of my ideas, is because I know the number of people who will be opening and judging my words, positively, negatively, or somewhere in between. By publishing into the void, I protect myself from that entirely, at least temporarily.
If this piece ends up finding a massive audience and people share it far and wide — fantastic, that’s great. I hope it sparks interesting discussions and proves useful to you. But if my ultimate goal is just to tell the truth as I know it, to write as consistently and regularly as possible, and to use my gifts to reflect thoughtfully on the world as I see it, and if refraining from promoting and sending my work out via email allows me to feel secure enough to speak my mind, then publishing into the void it is! I encourage you to find what in your own process fills you with a similar sense of freedom and conviction.
I hope you enjoyed today’s piece. Despite any evidence you may find to the contrary, I delight in reading your comments, so please comment away. Please feel free to share in any way you see fit, and know that you are welcome to do so. I hope this piece finds who it is meant for and I welcome any and all feedback.
With love,
in perpetuity,
Alex