Film
Ben Stiller’s satire on the fashion industry, Zoolander, is more a satire about media and celebrity generally – about people deeply in love with themselves – and it is a key text on modern narcissism. Stiller plays the “ridiculously good-looking” model Derek Zoolander, an empty-headed idiot, neurotically obsessed with being toppled from his status as the world’s No 1 runway model by an up-and-comer, Hansel, played by Owen Wilson. Derek has plans for an educational legacy project, a Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good. But Derek’s masterpiece is his Blue Steel, the specific face he puts on for the cameras, a kind of intense, magnetic pouting stare. Blue Steel preceded social media by years but it is the great ancestor of the selfie craze that dominates Instagram and everything else. When we gaze lovingly into our own faces, framed by our smartphone screens, it is Derek Zoolander looking back at us. Peter Bradshaw
Art
Caravaggio’s 1596 imagining of Narcissus is steeped in Renaissance literature but it has a queasy resonance for today’s culture of selfies and scrolling. This master of darkness and light has placed the beautiful youth in a gloomy abstract void and his arms form a circular frame: his self-love is a prison of his own making, a loop that can’t move on. Light falls with full force on his knee of all places, recalling the proud penitents bent low with stones on their backs in Dante’s purgatory. The doomed boy looks away from the glow, into the black pool. It presages the waters of the Styx that will soon carry Narcissus to the land of the dead, and into which he continued to stare. Skye Sherwin
Music
Arguably her finest single to date, Lily Allen’s The Fear, a takedown of celebrity culture and social media self-obsession, plays like something of an early predictor to the kind of Instagram vanity that has spawned an entire new “influencer”…
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