Day 439 of Talking About Sydney Sweeney
Clocking in for my shift at the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle opinion factory.
Everyone I know is looking for the correct opinion about Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. What signals fascism concerns me, but also the online rantings of Barbz and establishment Democrats do not?1 What do people who know the phrase “culture wars” is a dog whistle of a sort of vaguely rightwing friend-of-a-friend who, after a few glasses of wine, admits that he posted a black square on Instagram during race war summer and is irritated that he was made to feel bad about that think of Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sweeney, the 27-year-old Euphoria actress, says in a deadpan tone. “My jeans are blue.”
The camera doesn’t really have the guts to ogle her. Richard Avedon’s lens enjoyed Brooke Shields’s adulthood cosplay with a sort of erotic remove in those Calvin Klein ads in the 1980s. That camera was in cahoots with the viewer’s curiosity, making it taboo. The American Eagle ad has a bland passivity. This is what Meg Ryan meant, in You’ve Got Mail, when she rolled her eyes at the 20-somethings who never give their full names. “Hi, I’m Kimberly! Hi, I’m Janice! Don’t they know you’re supposed to have a last name? It's like they're an entire generation of cocktail waitresses.” The camera is as curious about Sweeney as that trope in a TV show where a parent learns, mid-bite, that her daughter has been a vegetarian since September, which she’s said many times, duh.
