I read a one star review of wicked on the letterboxd app on my iPhone that changed my life a little bit. I’ve been taken aback by the ferocity with which I’ve been hating things recently. I feel frustration and anger seeing an advertisement. I am a graphic design major who up to a recent point was content and expecting to follow the pipeline towards creative advertising. I have not yet accepted that We Live In A Society. I am unsure whether this is something everyone must learn, whether it’s something important I’ve missed, or whether I have spent so much time online being a contrarian that it is now just a facet of my personality. I think Chappell Roan is a poser hack. I like to harp about celebrities that I don’t know or enjoy seeing.
I think Chappell Roan is a poser hack! I think she’s playing the gay community, not in a malicious way, but in the way where Chappell Roan as a character was not created by the girl who plays her, it was created by her wide team of incredibly talented and interesting artists and a Pinterest mood board, and we are lifting the girl who plays her up to mythical status. She is a fledgeling star who has been taken in by artists, who will hopefully show her to research and reference. She is a fabulous singer, but I don’t see her as an artist.
The one-star Wicked review made one Large and Good point. The author, who I will have to go back and find as I accidentally cropped his name out of the screenshot, says, “I tend to feel that a piece of entertainment is only worth hating if it actively makes the world a shittier place and/or represents evil of some kind that can’t afford to go unchecked, and as much as I hated sitting through Wicked, at the end of the day there’s no part of me that thinks this film meets that criteria... If I can reverse-engineer a rationale from my reflexive decision not to review it, I think it’s because I feel like we need to be more pointed and emphatic about the things we hate, not less.“
Yeah, yeah, okay. I won’t try to justify my disdain for Chappell Roan with these guidelines. If I was reaching, I’d say she represents the degradation of authenticity. What the fuck do any of us know about authenticity? I changed my mind because of a Letterboxd review. I went into the theater expecting to hate Wicked as much as Twitter hated it. Every day I think about a meme I saw on my Instagram explore page. Nothing of me is original! I don’t know what this means. I‘ll have more to say later I think.
