the new genre of wedding horror
"Whole Earth Catalog” aesthetic is the new Corporate Memphis
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Something strong is circulating in the water per recent portrayals of weddings in pop culture: Earlier this month, ELLE’s Erica Gonzales wrote about why weddings are descending into chaos on our screens right now as a response to The Drama and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and that was all before the Nate-Cassie wedding fiasco that unfolded on Euphoria last weekend. There’s definitely a consumer porny aspect of it; a wrecked wedding dress or the ability to witness an extravagant wedding (set) get ruined certainly scratches a special patch of schadenfreude in the exact opposite way that the wedding as plot device once functioned in ancient Greek comedies to symbolize union and closure.
I also liked reading Halima Jibril’s piece for Dazed, which reexamines the marriage plots of Materialists, The Drama, and the new season of Beef (which I found so boring! Any critic who says Beef is “back and better than ever” is wrong! It is, as Variety’s Alison Herman put it, overcrowded, unfocused, and unnecessary. A huge waste of Charles Melton, tbh). I think Jibril is exactly right in that marriage has become the perfect lens with which to parse ideas about isolation and loneliness.
After Emma reveals her darkest secret, Charlie proves himself hypocritical and disloyal, yet she still wants him. Is it love? Is it relief at no longer having to hide her past? Or is it, as the film suggests, that Emma has no one else? Like Materialists, The Drama left me wondering whether Emma ever really believed she could leave Charlie when the alternative was not freedom, but isolation.
Beef season two pushes this narrative even further. It’s not just that these couples only have each other, but that everyone outside the marriage begins to feel like a threat … But as Josh, Lindsay, Ashley and Austin continue to meddle in one another’s lives – trying to hurt, expose, destroy and eventually save each other – their emotional walls begin to come down. They become more honest, more vulnerable and more self-sacrificing than they ever were inside their sealed-off couples. In Beef, it is only by rupturing the closed circuit of marriage that they are finally able to express their full humanity.
This marriage vs. isolation dichotomy (or even the idea of marriage as one big institutional coping mechanism for individual isolation) does seem to illuminate the tenor of our modern anxieties around it, especially since its economic appeal is less dominant (though never not part of the equation). The rub, of course, is when marriage inevitably proves to be a vehicle for its own brand of loneliness, as every other piece of culture tries to remind us. No wonder that in our movies, TV shows, and our imaginations, the act of wedding resembles less a joyous rite of passage and more so the ritual of an ancient doom cult.
Ever since the New York Dept. of Sanitation released their line of “limited-edition” merch from the “compost collection” (NYDS SS26?), I’ve been thinking about the proliferation of that particular font and its insinuation of a kind of crunchy handfeel — then came across Elizabeth Goodspeed’s 2023 piece for Port magazine on the commercial rebirth of counterculture via the Whole Earth Catalog aesthetic, which identifies that iconic typeface as “the psychedelic mainstay Windsor … itself a resurgence of a typeface designed during … the Arts and Crafts movement,” amongst many other influences the magazine had over contemporary visual culture:
Companies hawking everything from yoga mats to skincare have embraced the aesthetics of the Whole Earth Catalog, enticing consumers into a commercialised nirvana. Spend enough time scrolling and you’ll come across squares of grainy multicolour backdrops punctuated by delicate linework, each tile offering a roadmap to navigating emotions, introspective tools, or guiding affirmation … The original intent behind these repurposed formal motifs – to weave together the logical and the mystical, challenge societal norms, and encourage profound personal transformation – feels increasingly overshadowed by a simpler, more marketable message: buy this product and be better
As Goodspeed pointed out on X, seeing AI companies actively co-opt that look and feel seems par for the course amid the Anthropic-ization of AI branding with cozy earth tones and faux connotations of the handmade. It reminds me of the whole DTC millennial start-up craze that so depended on the corporate Memphis look, which made all those brands seem childishly simple to entrust with our lives. Little did we know! Or maybe we did, but such savvy design compelled us anyway…
Questions I still have…
How did The Yale Review manage such a killer lineup for their summer issue? And which are we reading first: Lauren Oyler on her AI boyfriend or Sheila Heti on her chatbot?
Apparently 1/3 of top publications on Substack contain AI-generated content, but unfortunately Taylor Lorenz is not naming names… “Just two large Culture publications account for roughly three-quarters of AI content in that category.” Shall we guess?
Greta Rainbow went long on that Book of the Month campaign, asking the question that a lifetime of grade school-sanctioned Pizza Hut certificates and library summer read-a-thons have tried to crack for a millennia: Is it even possible to make reading seem “cool”? (A lot of good publishing industry factoids in here, the most interesting to me being that Book of the Month controls the supply chain so well that they print their own books, and you can tell the difference!)
Can it even be called “fame” if it’s not happening to a human person? So I wondered while reading Teddy Brown’s dispatch on the virtual influencers and “identity cosplay” in The New Yorker. I think: popular, yes, in-demand, yes. But my sense is that real celebrité inherently requires a sense of human scarcity — the thrill is in Taylor Swift’s impossible ubiquity + mortal coil combo (the idea of her aging, falling in love, dying, etc.). But in the near-future, saying a virtual influencer (or, as is more often the case, an AI pornbot) is “famous” might just feel like saying Coca Cola is famous. But perhaps reading Oyler or Heti this summer will change my mind!
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