Weekly Scroll: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Theater Kids, BlueSky momentum, and Kai Cenat's big month

This edition of the Weekly Scroll is better late than never. We’re talking about the insanity behind the Wicked press tour, BlueSky’s continued momentum, and the cultural juggernaut that is Kai Cenat. Plus - I was featured on PBS NewsHour this week!

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Holding Space For Wicked

Wicked, the musical that the most insufferably annoying kid at your high school was obsessed with, has a new movie adaptation out starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. And boy have they been having a hell of a press tour.

The drama started a few weeks ago when Erivo publicly lashed out the movie’s fans for creating fan edits of the poster (and then was forced to back down and apologize). Since then she’s tried to make up for it by publicly weeping several times during interviews over basic questions like “What was it like filming this movie?”. She and Grande have acted so oddly throughout their PR appearances that people are speculating they’re in a secret relationship. But the pièce de résistance of the insanity is this interview clip that I literally can’t stop thinking about:

Let me level with you. None of this matters in the slightest. But I have watched this dozens of times. It’s not healthy, but I am going full anthropologist on this shit. There are so many things I want to mention, so many things I need answers to:

• What is ‘holding space’ for lyrics? What is ‘feeling power in that’?

• Is this just ‘people liked this’ or ‘people had feelings’ but said in the most pretentious, therapy-speak way possible?

• Why the hell is the therapist interviewer saying it like it’s the most profound thing ever?

• Erivo and Grande are clearly treating this as an intense and shocking revelation. Girl, please, like emotional teenage gays haven’t been getting worked up over Wicked for decades?

• “I’m in queer media” said in an authoritative tone as though it explains the entire interaction?¹

• The final revelation that none of this is a real trend, it’s literally just “I saw a couple posts”…

• Ariana, for some reason, grabs a single finger of Erivo’s? What is she doing???

The faux solemnity is unbelievably funny to me. If you watched the facial expressions here without sound you’d think that the interviewer was revealing a Holocaust survival story. It’s an unbelievable level of profundity over what is essentially “Some people liked your song on Twitter”. They are desperately trying to convey that something important has happened despite nothing having happened at all.

This is all very silly, of course. But I do think there are two interesting trends in here that teach us something about how the internet works these days: