#6 - We Need To Stop Caring About Celebrity Marriages
or: dear slim, I wrote you but still ain't callin'
So, to be totally honest I was going to write about something else this week. But then this morning I was scrolling through TikTok and a montage set to Olivia Rodrigo’s song Traitor came up. It was of John Mulaney and his recently announced soon-to-be-ex-wife, Anna Marie Tendler and it creeped me the fuck out. (Also, after trying to source this TikTok I realized that there was more than one of them with this exact concept. Truly terrifying!)
As a culture, we love a good celebrity relationship. As a Claire, I love a good piece of gossip. In recent years as the idea of PR relationships has gone much more mainstream, there has been a rise in trying to suss out celebrities bound together by contract. But also, an increased obsession over couples that seem real. We enjoy celebrating long-term couples—especially interviews about the secrets to their successful relationships. We love a good wedding pictorial (I can’t even begin to talk about Vogue Weddings right now, but if you’re looking for some bonkers rich people behavior, look no further). Engagements are more documented than ever, with soon-to-be brides showing off their “suspiciously recommended” manicure for their followers before the question is even asked.
Anyway, back to John Mulaney. Certified Wife Guy. He told loving jokes about her bluntness, he let us in on their experiences as a couple that had chosen to be childless, and he loved saying the phrase “my wife”. (It was the first time I had laughed at those two words in years because I was in high school in 2008 and the Borat imitations haunt me to. this. day.)
When his trip to rehab was announced, there was an overwhelming outpouring of support online. I was actually heartened to see how much we had evolved as a culture as far as understanding addiction and supporting people’s mental health journeys. Then came the divorce announcement, with a follow-up that he was dating Olivia Munn. And people are taking the latter news weirdly personally.
It seems like parasocial relationships are becoming stronger than ever. I mean it makes sense right? We’ve all been inside for a year, blasting through more media than ever (I have a major discomfort with how we throw around the word ‘binge’ when it comes to marathoning shows). Comedy is a comfort, and I’m sure many were thrilled to discover the giant catalog of John Mulaney’s work. Standup specials! Full broadway shows! Hours of panel interviews! I totally get it—one of my go-to I-have-nothing-to-watch things is the Co-Op episode of Documentary Now. With all this access to his thought processes, the jokes that are crafted to make us feel seen, the ability to listen in on intimate conversations between him and his friends, it’s easy to see why the line begins to blur.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s fun to like people and enjoy the shit they make! Of course it is! But putting personal stakes into whether or not they’re a good person who will never do anything wrong feels like a setup to be disappointed. Now that John Mulaney has taken a little fall, I’m starting to see people projecting onto who they hope isn’t next. It’s fine that Mulaney got taken down, but they’ll lose their shit if anything comes out about Bo Burnham, okay?!
All of this has somehow lead to teens (I know the TikTok was probably someone in their 20s but I simply need to believe this person is just an over-dramatic sophomore in high school) making breakup montages using his wedding photos. And no, thank you, I shan’t be looking inwards as to why TikToks terrifying algorithm thought this would be something I wanted/needed to see.
It’s not just a TikTok problem. We seem to be hurtling towards a future in which we are compelled to record and share our reactions to everything. If you don’t share your opinion, do you even really exist? And while you’re sharing it, you may as well tag the person it’s about, right? How else will they learn to be a better person!
Those who make their careers in entertainment mutate their lives into a consumable product. It can’t be mentally healthy to have your being become a corporation, but with the rise of the influencer, it’s only going to continue happening, and on increasingly larger scales. Advertising is more prevalent than ever, it’s got more data access than any other time in human history, and now people are not just the target for ads, they’re becoming the ads themselves. Turns out, you can sell a lot more skincare if the person selling it to you feels like a best friend who just so happens to be letting you in on a beauty secret. And all for the low low price of a single Instagram post!
Mulaney’s reliability was part of his brand as a comedian. He invited us in, achieved a feeling of authenticity among his fans, and now that we feel we know him, we get to judge him for this perceived misalignment. And trust me, nothing gets Twitter more bloodthirsty than the downfall of an ‘unproblematic fave’.
I think a lot of the feelings surrounding this particular event have to do with relationships and the narrative we tell about them. Everyone is always each other’s soulmates, every couple is #goals, together4ever, making us fall in love with love again. But people are people, and people get divorced all the time. And that’s okay! Don’t stay in relationships that make you unhappy! People go through hard breakups and come out the other side!
We don’t consume media the way we used to, and the result is feeling much closer to people we’ve never met. And when you’re bored, or a little lonely, anyone can form false bonds without even realizing it. In this situation, Mulaney is going old-school, remaining distant from the fray due to inactivity on social media. Tendler on the other hand is posting to her Instagram, joking that she should hang out with Olivia Rodrigo because they’re clearly going through some of the same shit. But her adding to her stories on Instagram is an expression of her feelings, not permission for people to make videos expressing how they feel personally victimized by the end of this relationship.
Fan culture has become ‘stan’ culture. Somehow along the way, we morphed Eminem’s song warning us about the dangers of obsessive fanaticism into a positive label that people proudly apply to themselves. Celebrities become perfect cinnamon rolls, too good for this world, too pure. Mistakes? Don’t exist. There is no room to grow—they’re perfect exactly the way they are! And if you’re not on board their fans will take that as a personal slight.
Making a breakup montage of two people you don’t know probably isn’t the most harmful thing in the world. Honestly, content is being churned out at a rate that most people will never see this TikTok. I get that I’ve made somewhat of a mountain out of a molehill, but the thing is, those molehills are popping up more and more, and the landscape is rapidly changing.
I love gossip and celebrity culture. I never want to feel like I’m coming off as being above indulging in it, but we need to start having very serious conversations about the danger in the false quasi-friendships that are forming between performers and their audiences. It is one thing to observe, it’s another to obsess.