Pride Comes Before Your Tits Fall
Reflections on the exceptional and a QUIZ IN THE CAPTIONS
Over the past year, I’ve rewatched “Zoolander” enough times to get it somewhat stuck in my head. This doesn’t bother me, especially since it got taken off Netflix. However, something strange started to happen over recent months. Every time supermodel Emily Ratajkowski popped up on my Instagram reels, her words sounded familiar. Had I known her in another life? Are we cosmically intertwined? Soon I realized that I didn’t and we are not; she just unintentionally sounds a lot like Derrick Zoolander.1
At the end of “Zoolander”’s first act, Derrick Zoolander decides that there is more to life than just his looks and goes out to find what exactly that is. Emrata had a similar plot point, and over the past five years or so has positioned herself as a public intellectual. She raged that she was put in a box of sex appeal, that she is more than a body, that her opinions matter. This is true; we all contain multitudes. Unfortunately, most of the points she tried to expound beyond that were poorly received. She blamed society’s constraints, but really they just weren’t very good.
She was given a book deal and a podcast, both reminiscent of “The Derrick Zoolander Center for Kids who Can’t Read Good”. She wrote essays on the pain of selling her image, all while making millions off of the sale of it. I wondered if anyone told her it was optional. She didn’t have to model, she could retire at any time, go back to school. “What I really wanted to do…was to learn and to make things,” she claimed in a maligned speech she gave at a Hunter College graduation, where she blamed the 2008 financial crisis for her massively lucrative career. But at no point she decided to matriculate instead of posting photos of her ass. She wants to be seen as the smartest but she won’t release her vice grip on being the hottest as well.
At one point, Zoolander reveals that he’s bulimic, and feels little sympathy for the unrealistic beauty standards that have goaded others to develop the disease. Emrata writes in her book about starving herself to maintain her frame, but argues that if she doesn’t perpetuate these insidious expectations and receive the windfall, someone else would. She identifies a spiritual cost but decides to keep paying it, as though taking a stance against her own actions nullifies the effect of them. Her point could be made true about every terrible act. There will always be violence and murder, but that doesn’t justify the individual deed. Even if it’s for a lot of money.
In her book, podcast, and speeches, she’s described the modeling world as her alternative to the ravages of the service industry. She’s bought it up a lot, as though it’s something she’d be forced into if she quit, like Zoolander in the coal mines. In her eyes, it seems to be the worst case scenario: not enough money for exploitation worse than modeling.
I waited tables for years, and to succeed sold different parts of myself; physical labor, my personality. I didn’t do it because of the exploitative nature of that industry, but because all sell ourselves in some way. Doing so is inevitable, and the way we choose to do it does end up defining us. She’s not wrong about that. She complains about the box that she was put in via modeling. I bumped against the corners of the restaurant industry box for many years, and struggled to leave it. But I was able to expand in this box. I learned good skills. I grew until I outgrew it, and then I stepped out of that box and into a new one. “There was no way to avoid the game completely: We all had to make money one way or another,” she writes in her book, as though her options were modeling or poverty with nothing in between.
In most careers, another year is an addition of experience and compounding value. Modeling is one of the few where every year is means one year less. The thing Emrata will always get the most validation for is the thing she never had to work for, the thing that just happened. Every other gift someone is given takes some degree of work to actualize. Virtuoso composers still must learn instruments and write their symphonies. It took Beethoven four years to compose his fifth. It took Einstein 10 years to publish his general theory of relativity, and a lifetime of work preceded it. “Blurred Lines” was viewed by millions in its first day of existence, and it only took a day to film.
I don’t know what it’s like to be surreally attractive, but I don’t envy it. I suppose saying that makes me seem envious, but I don’t think any favor is done by the kid gloves that get played with for people in this arena. Worst case scenario, you get brainwashed to kill the prime minister of Malaysia, though that’s an exceptional circumstance. What seems most common is that one winds up with exceptionally high rewards for an attribute with rapidly diminishing returns. Being clinically hot is a terminal diagnosis, and a degenerative one.
Zoolander goes on a journey to find what is important to him besides his modeling fame, but he ends up saving the world by embracing who he is: fundamentally hot. I want Emrata to have this moment of acceptance. I want her to learn at some point that telling the world she’s smart doesn’t make her seem any smarter, that complaining about exploitation doesn’t turn make her work as a model into an act of rebellion. To receive the same degree of validation for her intellect that she has for her looks, she’d have to do something exceptional. She’d have to cure cancer, or some other kind of disease that takes away from people their ability to live as themselves in the world. She would have had to cure her own hotness.
Perhaps her self-presentation as the sexy second coming of Joan Didion comes from the fear of a waning superlative. And how could she not feel that? I watched her scenes in “Gone Girl” again and was amazed. It’s the same sensation as when I saw the “Blurred Lines” video as a teenager and struck not with the desire to attain something impossible, but awe for this generational greatness. Even as she fades from prominence, those moments will be preserved forever and we can look back and remember what it was like to see her tits for the first time. And there’s a sadness to it as well, not because those tits will fall but because none of us, herself included, will ever know all she could have been or done if she hadn’t been really, really, really ridiculously good looking.
Answers to the quiz are:
Zoolander
Emily Ratajkowski
Zoolander
Emily Ratajkowski