shall we go through my screenshot folder?
some thoughts on the comments section
Well, it has happened. The thing we all feared: Timothée Chalamet has split from Kylie Jenner. When the pair started dating, it was Ramadan and I had stopped using all social media platforms so that I could better concentrate on my hunger, both spiritual and literal. But when my friend texted me to tell me Chalamet and Jenner were an item (we keep each other abreast of important developments like this), I somehow already knew. I’m still not sure how; it wasn’t divine revelation, I’m pretty sure.
Anyway, I have no connection to either of these people — well, except for the time that, whilst I was studying at Oxford, Chalamet was there for a few weeks to film Wonka. Even that does not constitute a connection; I never even saw him. But I did, months after the fact, think of a joke about him. This is how my Timothée Chalamet joke goes: ‘Remember when Timothée Chalamet was in Oxford? And a strong wind blew and he started flying?’ So, basically, the punchline here is that Chalamet is so scrawny that a strong gust of wind can actually propel him into the air. It’s not a very kind joke, is it? But I imagine he’ll live.
Despite my lack of connection to either Jenner or Chalamet, I have had this screenshot saved in my laptop for months:
Kylie Jenner’s panic: ‘I’m losing Timothee Chalamet’. When I saw this headline I not only smiled but, in fact, laughed, and knew I had to somehow keep it with me forever. I was touched by the idea of cultural titan Kylie Jenner referring to her boyfriend by his first and last name, in a panicked tone, and speaking of their potentially imminent breakup as though he were slipping into a coma. Even more, I was tickled by the certainty that nothing of the sort ever happened, and instead someone, or some computer, had invented the whole thing so that people would click and read the article, which no doubt would be filled with information and turns of phrase even more useless than this one.
I’m pretty sure there’s no point in holding onto absurd internet ephemera like this — to begin with, there’s just so much of it that it is impossible to record all of it. So much of being on the internet is about ingesting tonnes of completely nonsensical material, ignoring it, and then moving on to the next nonsensical thing before you have even had time to process the last one. Recently, however, I was going through my camera roll and found heaps of screenshots of things I had seen online that had, for one reason or another, amused me or concerned me or irritated me, that I had clearly felt I needed to keep a personal record of. This, for example, from a recent interview wherein Lily Allen spoke to the Editor-in-Chief of Interview Magazine:
What does it mean, I ask you, to relate to the act of someone spilling chili [American spelling] sauce all over themselves? It seems to me to mean nothing, and is instead the kind of inane, pointless statement people make just for the sake of saying something or, in this case, for the sake of soothing a celebrity’s ego. Which is fine — obviously, I have said countless things in my lifetime that were ultimately pointless, and I have also lost control of my wits and senses in the presence of celebrity. I just think, if I was Editor-in-Chief of a magazine about interviews, and we were publishing an interview I had done, I probably would have fought tooth and nail to have that particular remark struck from the record.
What I found, though, when going through my screenshot folder, was that most of the internet ephemera I had saved over the years was not from articles or interviews, but from the comments section. Take this example, also Lily Allen-focused, from a clip on YouTube of her and Miquita Oliver’s podcast Miss Me?:
This comment was posted before the release of Allen’s much-discussed album West End Girl, in which she chronicles the breakdown of her marriage with actor David Harbour after he requested an open relationship. There are a lot of people, of varying intelligence and foresight, who claim to be the savvy cultural critics of our confusing age, but I am afraid that most of them cannot hold a candle to mariacorretge6615’s insight and wisdom.
By far the most interesting internetjunk that I have accumulated are from the comments section on Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube and the like. I now present a collection of them for your consideration, below:
