This morning, like every morning, we sat in the park across the street with a cup of coffee and a book. It’s usually quiet, so it’s easy to attend to the coffee and the book rather than the park and whatever is going on in it. This morning, though, was not like every morning.
Not long after we sat down at one of the little concrete tables, a herd of a dozen or so children came screaming towards us. It was, thankfully, clear enough that their screams were the excited rather than the frightened kind - but it was not at all clear why they were headed in our specific direction. We checked behind us to see if there was maybe an ice cream truck on the street nearby or maybe an adult they were excitedly headed to greet, but there was nothing. The only things they could be running towards were a set of nondescript trees, the street, or us.
Despite their minimally coordinated legs, the posse of five year olds - some wearing paper crowns, others in sunglasses and baseball caps - happened upon us quickly and immediately surrounded us. They didn’t say a word. No “Hello” or “Nice weather we’re having” or anything. Instead, they started busily investigating the table at which we sat. They were looking all around and under it. They investigated the seat we were sitting on and the seat on the other side of the table. They stopped just short of climbing directly onto us. We thought about getting up, but there were so many, so close, and so singularly focused that we were worried we’d knock one down or tip one over if we extricated ourselves from the fray. We sat, instead, very still and tried to figure out what was going on.
The few words we could make out amongst the yells and cries were things like “Look over there” and “What about that” and similar directives shouted (loudly) at no one in particular. There didn’t seem to be a leader. All were united in their search for something somewhere very much in our personal space. We asked what they were looking for and were either ignored or met with incredulous stares. They either didn’t have time for stupid questions or had only enough time to shame us for asking them.
After a minute of being in the midst of a frantic pile of tiny people, a couple of adults casually sauntered up. They smiled and asked the children if they found “it” yet. They had not. “Well, you need to check the next table! Maybe it’s there!” The children, mercifully, darted over to the next table and the adults smiled at us as if it was entirely clear what the fuck was going on, as if we (an adult) obviously understood that children on Saturdays so love to investigate tables.
The kids scampered over to the next table and got to work looking all over and around and under it. Then, very quickly, they let out even louder screams. It seems there was something tied or taped beneath the table. We couldn’t quite see what it was, but it was small and yellow. They briefly clustered together - all seemingly grabbing at the small and yellow thing - then, for unknown reasons, ran as fast as their little legs would carry them to the opposite end of the park.
This may have been the first time we’d ever gotten mixed up in a child’s scavenger hunt, but the experience didn’t feel entirely foreign or novel. Feeling like we are caught up off guard in the midst of some seemingly organized, ongoing, focused activity that has nothing really do to with us (but nonetheless interrupts or distracts us from other things) is actually kind of common. It’s more or less exactly how we feel online.
Like the scavenger hunt, it always feels like someone online has sent out instructions regarding what random thing we will all focus on today. People then do their version of screaming and yelling and issuing vague directives to no one in particular, then - eventually - folks find the small yellow thing. They have it! It’s theirs! Success! It is small and yellow! It does nothing! Then run hollering in some equally compelling and opposite direction towards some new and slightly different random thing. Maybe it will be medium and purple! Maybe it will be differently yellow and differently small! Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
And, like the scavenger hunt, we tend to stay very still by and with ourselves while it all transpires. We sometimes ask folks we know and they (thankfully more polite and indulgent than the children) explain to us in broadstrokes why the small yellow thing is worth flocking towards or how aggravating it is that the small yellow thing is taking up all this attention when a big blue thing is sitting right over there. But, ultimately, we do nothing with this information. Just as we did nothing upon learning of the scavenger hunt. Neither ceaseless online talk nor chaotic scavenger hunts involve us. We’re just here to observe and, hopefully, get back to not observing as quickly as possible.
Sometimes, though, we find ourselves pulled to participate. There is something about the screams and yells and the small yellow thing that seems maybe curious or unclear in an interesting way. We find ourselves compelled to listen more closely to the directives issued, find ourselves implicated somehow in the proceedings, and before you know it we’re running idiotically around and searching under and over tables and curiously disrupting other people’s regular days.
The other day, for example, we were reminded that Drew Barrymore has a television show and learned that people enjoy mocking her. In specific, people like making fun of how Drew Barrymore comports herself during interviews. To wit:
There’s also this unique take:
It’s very funny, you see, because Drew Barrymore gets physically close to her guests during some (or maybe all) of her interviews. The tweeters are very cleverly exaggerating how close she gets. Like, she’s too close! Get it? It’s really very funny. We think it’s called observational humor? You look at something and then - if you’re smart enough - you extremify it. Like, woah! Eyeball to eyeball! That’s too close! Hahaha! Wow! No one should be eyeball to eyeball! Hahahhh! And that’s what she’s like. Because she gets physically proximate to people. Are you not getting it? Wait. Here’s another.
Homer is so close. He’s too close to Bart! So close! LOL. LMAO. LLSDJJSDN/. You don’t seem to be laughing along with us. Is it unclear? It’s nuanced, we know. Hang on.
This hilarious bit got so much attention - some people were prob even hospitalized from all the yuk yuking and knee slapping! - that the official Drew Barrymore television program social media person responded.
See, this is funny because the cyber embodiment of THE DREW BARRYMORE SHOW is doing the same thing as all the funny tweeters. The show itself is going one step further! MORE CLOSENESS! Hahahkldjfaiopwjerjkl;hio’[iuio’;
Unfortunately, something about this awfully unfunny shit got us interested.
It seemed unusual to us that folks had zoomed in simply and exclusively on someone’s bodily comportment. Drew wasn’t being criticized for something she had said or for her choice of guest, but merely how she conducts herself. People will make fun of more or less anything on the internet (hooray!), but usually folks avoid deriding mere bodily habits unless they’re accidental or unusual. This conduct, though, isn’t irregular for Drew. We looked at past interviews. She is often close to people. It’s a thing she does. She sits near them or kneels on the floor in front of them. This is, apparently, something that happens. But somehow this regular (for Drew Barrymore) behavior needed to be mocked now.
Despite ourselves, we wanted to know what was going on here and why.
We could chalk this up to some retrograde, garden variety misogyny. This kind of thing doesn’t need much of a cause to come up. A woman is embodying a certain kind of emotion or emotive stance publicly and that must be stopped. Folks are almost verbatim playing out “woman you’re hysterical and embarrassing yourself” discourse. While throwback misogyny is fun and all, that wasn’t the interesting part.
The interesting part, rather, was the peculiar character of people’s responses. They skipped over the joke and homed in, instead, on the object of the joke, on Drew’s tendency to get close to others. No one seemed very interested in talking about what (if anything) Drew said or what her guests said or really any of the other usual stuff that people talk about when they talk about interviews. It was only and exclusively about their relationship to Drew’s closeness.
Folks registered either active comfort or discomfort at the prospect of being close to Drew Barrymore. But the comments mostly set Drew aside entirely and vocalized their comfort or discomfort with physical proximity in general. Unsurprisingly, it’s a divisive topic. Some wanted and needed what they saw as empathetic and caring connection. Others distrusted and disliked what they saw as as a domineering and excessive imposition.
It’s not surprising that folks would be divided on this issue, but it was surprising to us that something as innocuous as “talk show host is bodily near talk show guest” would motivate people to vocalize such intense, personal positions regarding personal space and embodied closeness.
Before anyone says “but it’s weird” we would beg that you consider why Jimmy Fallon interviews folks from behind a desk or why Kelly and Ryan force guests up onto high chairs. No one ever seems to make remarks like “I wish I were asked questions while thirteen inches off the ground” or “I’d feel really messed up if I had to cock my head at a weird angle and speak to a dude hiding behind furniture.” Yet Drew Barrymore - icon from such films as Altered States (1980) and Mad Love (1995) - gets within a foot of someone, holds their hand or touches their arm maybe, and we’re all talking about intimacy, touch, closeness, empathy, and being a body amongst others. Why?
People getting close to people is an issue. It’s a concern. We all, in our own ways, need to navigate being and having a body while others are and have bodies nearby. For some reason, though, we rarely talk about this stuff directly. We need to be pushed by screens to express certain anxieties or longings around physical closeness.
Prior to Drew’s closeness, one of the small yellow things that the internet seized upon was “sex scenes in movies and tv shows.” The discourse was, like the above, riven with unfunny shit and bad takes - but also crowded with folks voicing very personal experiences of discomfort or interest, displeasure or pleasure, at the sight of bodies being close and intimate on screen. The most common complaint was that these bodies didn’t need to be shown being close. Sex could be implied or better yet cut out entirely without harming the narrative. Others suggested that the representation of sex - like anything else - ought to be included regardless of narrative utility or characterological necessity because it is a meaningful aspect of lived experience.
On the whole, nothing interesting was said about sex during this whole ordeal.
This is because people’s attitudes towards the representation of sex in (mainstream) movies and tv are not necessarily coincident with or in anyway a reflection of people’s attitudes towards sex itself, the representation of sex in places other that (mainstream) movies and tv, etc. Porn is popular, OnlyFans is lucrative, half-naked people are commonly seen across popular culture or the real world, arthouse movies with unsimulated sex tend to get good (or a lot) of attention, and sex pretty much continues to sell everything. Sex scene discourse wasn’t really about sex, but rather about something more basic and much rarer than sex: physical intimacy. And this, too, is what fucks people up (for better or worse) about Drew Barrymore’s closeness to her guests.
You rarely if ever see people touch or express intimacy physically in mainstream media. You might catch a quick hug, peck, or handshake, but - other than that- people keep a respectable distance. This is true both in reality programs and fictional ones. If intimacy is depicted, it’s depicted through words. People say how they feel and they show it with their faces. They don’t (heaven forfend) touch each other. They especially do not allow skin to touch skin. People circulate in the media in a constant and impermiable personal bubble regardless of their relationship with the other folks with whom they’re sharing the screen. It’s a touchless world of distant people who only ever talk or get violent. Physical intimacy - especially if it’s platonic or non-romantic - is a rare sight.
This rarity, though, isn’t (we don’t think) what spurs people to share positive or negative opinions regarding it. It is, rather, that the representation of closeness alienates the viewer. It’s one of the only things you can do on a screen that emphasizes that the viewer is not really involved in what’s happening. Representations of physical intimacy necessarily position the viewer at home or in the movie theatre as outsiders, interlopers. This feeling of distance, then, motivates people differently, but always personally. Having been effectively excluded from what’s transpiring in front of them, viewers are forced to feel out their personal position or, at least, register their inchoate pleasures or displeasures about what’s transpiring. And there’s no correct or final position. There can’t be. Physical intimacy - whether of the sort demonstrated by Drew Barrymore on her show or by the various bodies doing sex stuff in movies - is intensely and often inexpressively personal. What one likes or dislikes about touch and closeness is often unclear and, compounding that, why one likes or dislikes certain touches or instances of closeness is usually even more unclear.
What makes Drew Barrymore’s closeness interesting is that it seems to force certain considerations into the fore. Mainstream media is meant, for the most part, to be an easy salve. It invites you in, welcomes you, and swaddles you. You lose yourself in it, you escape. It makes you talk about the celebrities and the characters, the pull quotes and the plot points. You’re not meant to think about yourself as yourself, consider yourself as a bodily thing. As Kathleen Stewart puts it, being “in the mainstream” (i.e. attending to popular or trending stuff) is a matter of “being in tune without getting involved.” The mainstream, in her view, is “[a] light contact zone that rests on a thin layer of shared public experiences. A fantasy that life can be somehow seamless and that we’re in the know, in the loop, not duped. That nothing will happen to us, and nothing we do will have real consequences…” Representations of physical intimacy, though, seem to happen to us. They catch us off-guard and have certain consequences on our disposition. Whether these consequences are enjoyed or not really comes down to you, just you, only you.
Sorry, gotta cut this short, the screaming and the yelling is leading us towards something red and sparkling (Sam Smith dressed up like a devil), so we gotta run.
Or maybe we’ll just stand very still by and with ourselves for a moment.
"that the representation of closeness alienates the viewer. It’s one of the only things you can do on a screen that emphasizes that the viewer is not really involved in what’s happening."
I've found it personally jarring for sure and "alienating" feels like the right term..
Mirror neuron research is interesting here in it's confusing discrepancies about whether we ARE having or whether we are NOT having an empathetic embodied experience when we are watching a
body / bodies move(ing).
Here's some "fun" research for the nerds who are neuroscience-inclined.
"Mirror neuron areas (inferior parietal and premotor cortices), however, can be envisioned as part of the Action Observation Network (AON), encompassing “all of the brain regions involved in action observation processes, rather than those exclusively engaged for observation and execution” (Cross et al., 2009), including areas related to visual analysis of action, and to visuomotor and sequence learning."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8123236/
Sorry for the novel.
Another thought provoking blog. The morale of the beginning of the story is to always check under your table before sitting down and bring some chocolate bars and a jug of lemonade just in case. But remember keep your distance. Thanks for a bringing a few laughs early in the morning. I did check under my table, it was free and clear.