When Tao Lin and Megan Boyle first meet Bebe Zeva in her condo in Las Vegas on November 27th, 2010, the audience is also being introduced this charismatic young woman, albeit through the distance of the screen. Bebe Zeva is a millennial, she was alt before there was alt, she’s young and she’s going to transform modern media, along with Boyle, Lin and others attuned to the dispersal of contemporary information capital. For many young women, Bebe will be a new idol, a new type of celebrity. What kind of celebrity is this?
I’d hasten to say that she is a departure from the conventionally attractive bottle blond. She’s savvy. She possesses a refreshingly realistic type of beauty. Bebe Zeva wants you to fall in love with her.
Since learning about a snarly little piece back in March that Bret Easton Ellis published in The Daily Beast, I’ve been fascinated by the new phase of celebrity. Ellis posits that Charlie Sheen represents a new style of celebrity, but the piece reads as generational. Ellis is reacting to the particular transition that’s happening in the way we perceive and experience the speed of media. The image of the grandiloquent, apologetic celebrity kowtowing to the demands of the press dates back to an era Ellis refers to as “empire.” Empire is associated with tradition and post-empire is a uniquely post-modern state intricately tied up in technological advances.
Ellis makes the point that the recent Charlie Sheen Drug Death Watch is actually about “a well-earned mid-life crisis played out on Sheen’s Korner instead of in a life coach’s office somewhere in Burbank…. the mid-life crisis is the moment in a man’s life when you realize you can’t (won’t) maintain the pose that you thought was required of you any longer.”
Not only do I find his statements have alacrity about Sheen’s conflict, but Ellis is also correct to relate these to technological expression, given that is how we are recording our own life events. He mentions that Sheen acquired recognition for tweeting about #winning, babes, etc. People like Charlie Sheen for playing his part. He’s so good at being a celebrity that he’s perfected his own demise.
II.
But, what of, say, a James Franco who is scorned for wanting to be anything more than an actor? What about a co-director who has largely channeled a media presence through her relationship with the first writer to figure out how to make it on the internet? What about a girl who gchatted with Tao Lin before, face it, 75% of the country even knew that was cool? I like learning about how people deal with these suppositions and figuring how that changes my personal opinions about life, hypermedia remediation, girlhood, etc.
Critically, I could say that I think Bebe Zeva is potentially exploitative because it is about a teenager in Las Vegas and filmed by two adults familiar with the New York art scene. Those are very different worlds. Just because we are starting to be aware of these other words doesn’t mean that we have to portray them in ways that attempt to relegate them an us vs. them position based upon an imbalanced power dynamic. I mean that only in terms of its always important to consider who has the resources to produce the film vs. who is being portrayed. Also, that’s not to say there aren’t other counter-reactive power dynamics at work.
When executed without concern to these power dynamics, I think the result is a movie like Catfish, another film about meeting people from the internet. Catfish was about a young man who fell in love with someone on the internet, but it turned out to be a complete fabrication. But, instead of sympathizing with the lead in the film, I was still drawn to the woman who was compelled to construct an entirely different identity on the internet to escape the constraints of her own life. Maybe, witnessing empathy for both characters was what actually distinguished that film, aside from then novel factor of the Facebook storyline.
The point is that as we grow more connected, as we all become video editors, we have to do so with delicacy. There are issues of class, demographic conflict and even regional differences that posit polemical issues of who is going to represent them, how, and why. I can see the facet of the film that could be harmful, as is anything that’s been produced, as is anything that sells an identity or sculptured one therein. But like anything I look at that’s been produced, there is also a positive element for each negative statement I can potentially expound upon.
The positive element of this movie is who Bebe Zeva is, what kind of person she is becoming and (based upon what I know about Tao and Megan) the desire to convey to other people the potential of our generation.
III.
The first sequence opens with a shot of Tao adjusting the camera. The movie starts without further ado. The credits air. Bebe adjusts her sunglasses, she throws them back like an identity. She watches the skyline. She looks at the light pollution.
She mentions something about disclosing something, but then states that it “might make it too vulnerable.”
She’s met her friends on Facebook because she dislikes the ones in her immediate life.
She went to T.G.I. Friday’s on a date, then they stayed up and watched the sunrise. Such Americana. She knows her emoticons, knows more about a stats counter than me, can cite Pitchfork ratings and knows her way around form-spring. Kudos.
She is an experience of youth.
Now, if only millennials would stop snagging all the xs shirts, I’d be appeased.
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