C‘he is always a pioneer who re-establishes the system. When asked «where were you when you saw it for the first time Timothée Chalamet’s lean, tattoo-free body?», no one can answer precisely. In the meantime, from fans screaming for an autograph on fishing Call me by your name (it happened at the Venice Film Festival in 2019) a Dunes, Timmy has become the delicate emblem of a new masculinity.
Since where there has been success there is a frantic search for facsimiles, the show has progressively a trend introducing what gen Z soon called Babygirl men. An expression of adolescent complicity between girls used to describe the grace of gentle males with a clear and at the same time magically neutral sexuality. As in the most perfect of boy bands, these wholesome heartthrobs have specific peculiarities.
Josh O’Connor is the king of sweaters pucciosi and fashionable looks; Harry Styles and Jacob Elordi are the ones wearing handbags and hair clips; shorts – beat the sun or blow the north wind – are the passion of Mister Gambissima Paul Mescal (the only one to have an object worn by one of his characters on the market: the replica of Connell gold chain, good and suffering boy from the series Normal People).
Actors and new anti-toxic masculinity. From Timothée Chalamet to Jeremy Allen White
A masculinity that adheres to the One to One personalityTimothée, Josh, Jacob, Harry and Paul have obviously been co-opted by fashion. They are, after all, much more interesting than a generic fashion show model, but they are also because the big pot babygirl contains the beautiful and the so-called (well yes) Rodent Menthat is, men with rodent-like faces. Let’s be clear, pleasantly rodent-like, and no less sexy, less tender, and less loved by fashion: when Jeremy Allen White by The Bear he became the poster boy for Calvin Klein underwear, the internet was riveted on his photos for weeks.
Jonathan Bailey, from “Bridgerton” to “Wicked”. (Getty Images)
Although there is no real factory around these new faces and intersecting bodies (Josh O’Connor is considered both Babygirl and Rodent, as well as Mescal), it is also true that we talk about it thanks above all to the work of women and gay authors. Behind Chalamet’s boom is Luca Guadagninoalso responsible with Challengers for the consolidation of O’Connor, later called by Alice Rohrwacher in The Chimera.
After the toxic role in EuphoriaElordi exploded with Saltburnthe master-servant film directed by Emerald Fennell, the Millennial actress-director who won an Oscar for A promising woman. While Connell-gold-chain-Mescal is an idea of the writer Sally Rooney. The new babygirls Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavezvery handsome assassins of Monsters 2 (on Netflix), are director Ryan Murphy’s latest hot release.
Needless to say, political machismo doesn’t like this crew. The accusation, as if we were in the days of metrosexuals, is of gradual destabilization of virility. Yet, openly gay (Koch) or became professional actors because they were accused of being gay due to their passion for dramatic art (Elordi)the mild masculinity of these stars seems to genuinely adhere to the personality, firmly anchored to the civil and social ideals typical of the new generations. Therefore, if it is a secret plan to eliminate gender, it is in the sense of a change in customs, so inevitable and surprising that it manages to soften even beards and biceps. No longer aggressive traits but magically inconsistent attributes.
Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, murderous brothers in “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez”. (Getty Images)
Babygirl, rodent and golden retriever, males compared to animals
It already seems like a distant past, but only this summer the whole country was at Thomas Ceccon’s feetthe Olympic swimmer with the eyes and poses of a teenager, a sudden neutral idol of the wildest social frenzy. The same goes for Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift’s football player boyfriend, a bearded romantic of considerable build but kindthoughtful, attentive.
To those who point out that babygirls, rodents and golden retrievers (category to which Kelce belongs, and certainly not the last animal-inspired one) have always been there, including guys like Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman (not to mention Leonardo DiCaprio, who in 1994 was even more wiry than Chalamet), we are reminded that the difference is that no one likes being the leader and grabber. In line with degrowth and other circular economy concepts, ambition is out of fashion.
A crazy theory? Far from it. In an interview given shortly before the release of Gladiator 2Paul Mescal – the gladiator of the title, not really an extra – said that if the takings went badly he would go back to making independent cinema (like Aftersun by Charlotte Webb, for which he was nominated for an Oscar in 2023). In short, breaking through would still seem pleasant for an actor, while excelling smacks of Tom Cruise-style tomboyishness. Or like Denzel Washington who effectively stole the show from Paul Mescal’s muscles in a film over which the good Russell Crowe hovered imposingly and assertively.
Paul Mescal, Mister Gambissima: he is the king of shorts. (Ipa)
Hence the question: did the crowd who went to see this sequel do so for the new sensitive actor or because they had the memory of Massimo Decimo Meridio in their hearts? Looking at the 10 global takings for 2024, the second hypothesis would seem to win. In fact, for the first time in history, the most viewed films are all sequels, prequels, or sophisticated authorial remakes. Chalamet, with Wonka And Dunes 1 and 2and the next biopic on Bob Dylan (another safe genre), he seems to be the king of it, and for now the only young actor to do the numbers of a vintage Cruise. His appeal is undeniable, but the suspicion remains that instead of him dragging the films, it is the films with the famous brand that drag him.
Films carried away by stars or stars carried away by films?
The new masculinity would then be genuine, but also intimately connected to the crisis of ideas in Hollywoodas well as the trend of general infantilization of society, stuck in a perpetual stasis and replication of memories. Keith Hayward explains it well in Infantilized: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Infantilization: how our culture has killed “adulthood”), a book that also partially structures the complaint of the old guard of cinema on the end of the divinity of the male star (also, the male male).
A point on which she also often spoke Camille Pagliaa privateer scholar of art and pop for whom today’s actors do not have the fiber of those who arrived at the cinema by chance and after having done manual labor. Harrison Ford, for example, a former carpenter who rose to everlasting fame with Indiana Jones and Han Solo.
In essence: virile charisma has always looked good on the big screen, are you sure that watering it down is good for entertainment? But the matter is not simply bad boys versus babygirls, it has more to do with different ideas of the world. The world of entertainment, the territory of fantasy, believes that ogres or presumed ogres are easier to control/eliminate if the whole system becomes virtuous. Even at the cost of creating an Olympus of languid Peter Pan against a reality which, unfortunately, is very often its terrifying opposite.
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