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At the Cannes Press Conference for Eddington, everyone in the cast handed nearly every question to Pedro Pascal. Joaquin Phoenix was particularly deferential toward him, frequently whispering in his ear and asking for his assistance. Next to them, Emma Stone hardily and frequently laughed like an adolescent boy, and someone named “Micheal Ward” sat silently. The first question went to country singer and Yellowstone alum Luke Grimes: how was working with Ari Aster? He shrugged and said, “I never felt less like I knew what I was doing.” This prompt then got tossed to Austin Butler, who said, in his fake voice, “I had a blast.” This event exemplifies all the qualities of celebrity and movies which are at all interesting to me.

First of all, I need you to know that unwavering bullies of Ari Aster need to be put out of their misery and my sight. Hereditary is a movie for dumb teenagers that is neither good nor warranting of any critical thought, at all. Midsommar is fine: it’s a horror movie that takes place during the daytime. Beau is Afraid, which I only watched for the first time this weekend, is way too long. But it is laugh-out-loud hilarious and the only film in recent memory brave enough to address any truthfulness in our contemporary cultural psychoses. Joaquin Phoenix, one of the greatest living American actors, rolls around naked and says stuff like, “my apartment is open to the public which isn’t really safe.” Vehement detractors of something so unabashedly and purposefully ridiculous should try something more productive on for size, like having sex, laughing, or admitting the harmlessly doughy Ari Aster has far more swag than they could ever hope to possess. Leave it to this messiah of out-swagging one’s own physical appearance to make losers with cell phones angry by calling upon four of the hottest guys to ever live to make what is bound to be another dope motion picture.

Ari Aster, like his new muse Pedro Pascal, is no great talent. Yet neither of these guys really ever tries to tell us otherwise. As I’ve written before, Pascal has made a career off doing hetero minstrelsy and laughing in the face of those who believe his performance. Aster has achieved success through his image as a provocateur, despite never doing anything that anyone should think is particularly provocative. They are both skilled in acute observation, and, more interestingly, different kinds of Guy Swag: the straight man who is short and lame but shrugs his way into Emma Stone’s rolodex, and the gay man who is so effortlessly charming that dumb women refuse to admit he’s gay. Their newfound partnership thusly really got me thinking: men can be so awesome.

A mere hours before the Eddington crew arrived at Cannes, Morgan Wallen released his fourth album I’m The Problem, a mean, funny, sexy, nearly no-skip pop country album about wanting a wife and being a bad father. There is a strangely ahistorical effort to “cancel” Morgan Wallen, as if he’s not just a generically alternative, contemporary iteration of Justin Bieber, who no one has ever really seemed to have a big issue with. As a citizen of the world, should Morgan Wallen have said a racial slur or partied during COVID? No, he’s a moron. But Lana Del Rey shouldn’t have worn mesh masks or posed a question for the culture, either. It’s the fictional notion that Wallen’s fanbase is one particular type of conservative fool (he is almost more popular in the UK) that makes him such an easy target for individualist culture fanatical about identifying bad vs. good corporations and celebrities. Enough!

Beyond that, though, the thing that frustrates me the most about media-types’ relation to Wallen is when they say his music is bad. First of all, this “country sucks” attitude about music that is more 2005-radio-rock than country is tiresome and lazy. Like, I don’t particularly love the TikTok-founded, whisper-singing likes of PinkPantheress or Tate McRae, but I’m not going to pretend that “Illegal” or “Revolving door” aren’t slickly produced or catchy. And if you don’t like Morgan Wallen’s redundant and fetishistic lyricism about emotional immaturity, you must have really hated The Beast, a 145-minute movie about how being romantically vulnerable is difficult.

I’m not a Wallen superfan, but in the current pop landscape I much prefer “Love Somebody” to “party 4 u,” “I’m the Problem” to “Not Like Us.” I only keep harping on Wallen’s merit as a songwriter and pop celebrity because I can no longer tolerate meaningless, faux-critical posturing that is entirely dismissive of a type of music and guy that is totally dominating charts and musical influence. Like it or not, Morgan Wallen walking off SNL is a swaggy thing to do. How else is a rockstar supposed to behave?

Like it or not, Ari Aster doubling down on Beau if Afraid's frenetic interpretation of American individualism in a new movie starring four hot guys is a swaggy thing to do. At the aforementioned press conference, he described Eddington as a movie about a world where “no one can agree what is real anymore,” and Austin Butler described his character in said film as “the embodiment of the internet.” Later on, someone asked what the cast was up to during COVID, when Eddington is set, and Austin Butler said, “I was in Australia working on Elvis.” How does hearing these things not overjoy you? How does being affronted with true glamour, with Morgan Wallen’s ascension to global superstardom despite making no effort to stop looking and acting like any guy you went to high school with not charm you? Do you have no interest in forming your own aesthetic opinions about what’s “basic,” “cool,” or “artistically valuable?” Does hotness not factor into your critical beliefs, at all? Are you happy?

If you know anything about me, you’ll know hotness and swag are the number one things that factor into my evaluation of anything. Obviously that’s a me thing, but I am also obviously responding to specific, relentless online complaining about Wallen and Aster and other things that are fine or don’t matter. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the same kind of problems in cultural criticism with something like Yellowstone:

...the world is more conservative, but a huge part of that was the turn toward puritanical self-policing, not just a rise in global fascism… Yellowstone is imagined as some conservative pariah of contemporary TV because the only people who watch it are dads who shop at Boot Barn, while Succession is fanatically embraced by cosmopolitan Zoomers and Millennials. It’s hard to track these things with streaming, but I would venture to guess Yellowstone has made way, way more money for its network, showrunner, and cast, which plays into a narrative that culture is evil. But if you watch the first season of Yellowstone, a lot of this logic falls apart… In ideological statement or extratextual topicality, it’s at least more progressive and thoughtful than Succession ever was.

All I’m asking is that everyone take ten steps back and actually listen to what anyone is saying or doing before you say “yes!” or “no!” I’m done being serious now, though, and would like to look closely at some images with you.

Austin Butler

It is easy for me to announce that I have never cared about a celebrity more than I care about Austin Butler. No one who has been famous in my memory of the world has dressed better.

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