#195: Alas, the Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest
And why it made us feel good
There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that are historically significant, but last week, one thing going on was a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park, which is one of the best things that’s happened in some time. The posters announcing the contest—black text on 8.5x11” printer paper—were put up anonymously around New York City a few weeks prior, offering a $50 cash prize to the winner, and when the day came, several thousand people showed up to see what would happen. The looka-likes arrived too, dressed plainly or in the style of Chalamet’s various roles (Bob Dylan, Chanel ambassador, twink). At some point, the real Timothée Chalamet showed up, making the crowd go wild, and eventually, so did the cops, resulting in the arrest of an unlucky look-alike in a poncho.
The winner (a 21-year-old Staten Island kid dressed as Wonka in a purple coat and top hat, not to be confused with the red-coat Wonka) was given his prize at Mercer Playground, where the operation moved post-NYPD crackdown. He reportedly plans to spend his winnings on candy. Unsurprisingly, this event was heavily covered on New York social media, and legacy media too, because people were obsessed with it in theory and in practice—the unprofessional nature of it, the tiny prize, the specific silliness of a look-alike contest, the twee choice of Timothée Chalamet, the fact that the event could have taken place in, say, 1900. This tweet essentially captured the sentiment: “genuinely can’t stop thinking about the Timothée lookalike contest…. the fact that just a random person put out flyers for an event about an actor and people showed up with so much spirit… and then said actor himself showed up… the people yearn for fun and whimsy”. (Nearly 200,000 likes, including mine.)
To be fair, the organizer was less “random” than I’d hoped: It was Anthony Po, a YouTuber from Jersey City who’s been known to pull publicity stunts for his channel (he once put up flyers advertising that he’d be eating an entire container of cheese balls on a particular day and time, and then did it). But his choice to advertise it anonymously rather than as a branded event was ideal, because in the end it had little to do with him, which is why it was good. It was good for several reasons actually, including less likely ones, like that it was kind of awkward.
You can find evidence of this in my favorite piece of digital ephemera to come out of the contest: this video that shows the crowd voting by cheer and boo on the various look-alikes. Despite being described on Twitter as an event of pure “fun and whimsy,” this two-minute clip also reveals it was a little clumsy. There are stilted moments when no one knows who’s supposed to step forward next; the participants pretend not to be nervous, or say something in an attempt to be clever that the crowd can’t hear, or self-consciously perform disappointment when booed. It reminds me of the absurd antics of high school lunch periods (dance-offs, inane competitions) that would cause all the students to crowd around with glee.
Actually, the whole spectacle reminds me of high school. Not because it’s juvenile, but because high school forces a bunch of people together every day who will do anything to stave off boredom together, and there’s something magical in that particular recipe. It’s not one many of us willingly recreate after we graduate, because it inevitably involves a lot of unpleasantness. But “correcting” for that unpleasantness is probably one of the great tragedies of technological progress. The Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest was charming not just because it was silly, lo-fi, and low-stakes, but because it embraced the awkward friction of public life, and incited a little drama in the process. More often we aren’t bored enough, or in public enough, or forced together enough, for the pleasure.
During a time when we’re often optimizing for ease, I like thinking about the role of discomfort in a good life. In his book Tempo, Vankatesh Rao talks about that idea in the context of Freytag’s triangle, which depicts the classic story structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. He points out that although storytelling is unique to humans versus other animals, the structure resembles the biological stress response that all animals experience, where stress disrupts our equilibrium, then peaks and falls before delivering us back to equilibrium. He writes: “It is reasonable to speculate that the [Freytag] pattern is in fact the stress response.” In other words, the best stories simply track stress and entropy through their natural cycles. In the case of the Timmy Chalamet look-alike contest, for instance, a good number of people had to take on some risk, probably feel a little sick, to make it fun.
The suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen is the engine of memorable life. A lot of us (me) spend quite a bit of energy scrubbing our days of this particular quality. The goal is mastery of our circumstances so we can better manage our time or create positive outcomes. And our most popular forms of entertainment, like scrolling or watching shows, have been made similarly orderly in our modern era through private, mobile, and instantaneous access. But missing from scheduled days and passive entertainment is the texture from which surprise and delight emerge: the true unknown. I think this is why our impressions of other people and of the world can start to feel so airless and depressing when we spend too much time at home or online—it still isn’t where life actually happens.
In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she explains that all good writing must contain both a situation and a story. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot,” she writes, “the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” I think this balance between action and reflection is important to a rich life, too. When we transitioned so much human interaction to the digital realm, we threw off the balance, flattening our collective context to ideas shared on a screen. We became all story (idea, thought, opinion), and very little situation (happenstance, plot, hijinx).
Recently my friend mentioned an article she’d read about bartenders changing their tack for Gen-Z, providing more softness and reassurance for a generation said to be less adventurous and social than their predecessors. I tend to think these trend pieces over-state the issue, sowing generational division that might not actually be there, but I do think that technology has made people of all ages less tolerant of sloppy social dynamics. I was struck in particular by this line: “They’re just here to have a good time, without social hoops to jump through.” But the best times in life aren’t seamless, and I forget this all the time. May the messy Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest serve as an important reminder: Jumping through hoops is where the story gets good.
Last week’s 15 things included an incredible Victoria’s Secret deep-dive, a provocative memoir I just finished, an email hack, a unique scary movie, a cool made-to-order women’s brand, a painting I can’t stop looking at, and more. The rec of the week was holiday movies that are actually about Thanksgiving (underrated genre).
Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley