"mmmmwuah" - Timothée Chalamet

Earlier this week, Vulture declared Timothée Chalamet the “Perfect Movie Star for 2018,” which, if nothing else, had to come as bad news to Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise, Michael B. Jordan, the monster half of Venom and all four Chrisses. The article makes a case for Chalamet as the heir apparent to Leonardo DiCaprio, as they share quite a few attributes (early Oscar success, screaming crowds of girls, skinny whiteness), but it also reveals, in several quotes from Hollywood insiders, that there’s more than a little institutional skepticism about the newer, more sensitive mold of leading man that Chalamet is meant to herald. It’s an institutional skepticism that proves that Hollywood’s gender politics are still pretty fucked.

With Chalamet’s new movie, Beautiful Boy, only playing on four screens nationwide and a box office total that places it 260th for the year, it might be a smidge too early to fit him for a crown and sash (though we get the impulse). He’s an ascendant star with screaming hordes of fans and, if his recent spate of red-carpet fashion moments and canny selection of upcoming projects are any indication, a seemingly preternatural sense for how to play the part of movie star. He got a Best Actor Oscar nomination last year, which puts him one up on contemporaries like Lucas Hedges (a mere Supporting Actor nominee!). It’s the “for 2018” part that seems to have gotten a lot of people hung up, and for good reason. There’s the not insignificant fact that, in 2018, naming another straight, white male as the avatar of his generation seems remarkably deaf to the tone of where the culture is at and where it’s moving towards. Even if it’s undeniably true that Chalamet has seen the kind of success that ascendant stars like Amandla Stenberg (The Hate U Give) and Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk; Amazon’s upcoming Homecoming) haven’t seen yet. But maybe we just put a pin in this Voice of a Generation talk until we see how this generation shakes out.

The point, however, that the Vulture article was making about Chalamet being a child of 2018 wasn’t about demographics, though. It was actually about #MeToo, and the post-Weinstein version of Hollywood that we seem to be (hope to be? declare that we intend to be?) moving towards. Timothée Chalamet, the line of reasoning goes, is the perfect movie star for 2018 because he seems softer, friendlier, more sensitive to a changing Hollywood. In their words, “He’s an actor who has come to be viewed as emblematic of a cultural shift that calls into question the very essence of modern male masculinity.”

This is all good, by the way. “The very essence of modern male masculinity” is something that should be called into question, in Hollywood and elsewhere. Ideally, that essence should be multifaceted: soft, hard, white, black, queer, straight, conforming to gender norms or defying them. Chalamet certainly seems like a step in the right direction, if indeed he can make this Movie Star thing happen in an era where Hollywood is finding it ever more difficult to launch Movie Stars in the way we’re used to them. Today, the star is secondary to the character as far as bankability goes, and while that sounds like a more art-forward way of doing business, what that means is that we can have three different Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?) in the span of a decade and the star isn’t Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland; it’s that webbed blue-and-red mask. At the moment, the only potential blockbuster on Chalamet’s slate is Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune, and if you think that’s a slam dunk to launch Chalamet to the top of the charts, you should really familiarize yourself with Dune.

Which is why the one path ahead for Chalamet that everybody agrees on is Leonardo DiCaprio’s. Just like James Dean is the template everybody cites whenever a young actor struggles not to cry and squints inscrutably into the middle distance, DiCaprio is the great American success story for skinny young actors far and wide. Beginning his career as a boy and becoming one of the biggest movie stars on the planet without going through the typical child-star growing pains (well, if you don’t count these Growing Pains), DiCaprio is the gold standard. He even did it without ever having to star in an action-blockbuster franchise, a luxury afforded to you when your big period-piece romance movie becomes the biggest box-office success story of all time. DiCaprio is the actor every young (white, male) actor is measured against.

Which is why it’s insane that so many of the unnamed Hollywood insiders (some of them identified as producers, some talent managers, some Oscar strategists) in the Vulture piece don’t seem to have a clue about DiCaprio’s own history when they call into question Chalamet’s ability to ascend to the A-list. These anonymous critiques appear to reveal a Hollywood that is still very much steeped in old-fashioned gender roles and toxic notions of masculinity. Throughout the article, Chalamet is concern-trolled as being “soft,” “fey,” and a “beta male.” One remarkably thinly veiled piece of homophobia claimed, “He might be the next Anthony Perkins, rather than the next Leo,” referring to the star of Psycho who remained in the closet for his entire career.

These kinds of comments raise one particularly obvious question: do these Hollywood types even remember the early DiCaprio years? After This Boy’s Life and the Oscar nomination for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, DiCaprio took on a variety of interesting teenage roles: a fresh-faced gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead; a high-school drug addict in The Basketball Diaries; a rebellious son to Meryl Streep in Marvin’s Room. And then the romantic one-two punch of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Titanic sent him into the stratosphere. But right from the beginning, there were always questions, scoffs, and caveats about DiCaprio’s appeal. Too boyish. Too girly. I’m sure they said “soft” and “fey,” and if insecure men were throwing around the term “beta male” back then, they’d have thrown it at him. Maybe one of them even swallowed a gay slur and compared him to Anthony Perkins instead.

The point is, it took YEARS for DiCaprio to be accepted as sufficiently masculine by the Hollywood establishment. The money was still rolling in because of the screaming girls buying tickets, but the Oscars snubbed him in the Best Actor category for Titanic (pretty much the only part of Titanic not nominated for an Oscar that year). Spielberg hired him to star in Catch Me If You Can (an excellent film and performance), but in a role that relied on that very boyishness. In many ways, DiCaprio’s many collaborations with Martin Scorsese had been as much about laundering the actor’s image into hardened, masculine adulthood. It was laughed at initially; DiCaprio’s dirt-smudged brawler in Gangs of New York was not at all taken seriously, with some good reason. The Aviator got Leo his second Oscar nomination, though not without a lot of industry hand-wringing about whether he could hack it as Howard Hughes. The Departed and Shutter Island continued the work of re-imagining Leo as not a dreamy teen idol but as a deeply committed performer of men haunted by their pasts. This is how you played men in the 2000s. It took tales of snowy mountain-man DiCaprio sleeping inside bison carcasses in The Revenant before the Academy got over itself and handed him the Oscar statue he so deeply desired.

All of that work. All of that grime caked on in makeup and brooding backstory of dead wives and enduring dead animal-flesh for the sake of authenticity, all done so that the biggest box-office star of 1997 could be macho enough for Hollywood to accept him as a man. This is the path we’re setting before Timothée Chalamet.

It’s easy to see why so many of these old relic producers and managers can’t fully buy into Chalamet. He’s a skinny twink who played a prominent gay role very convincingly, and who played a skinny teen poseur who barely lasts a minute in bed in Lady Bird also very convincingly. He’s a goofy enthusiast with vibrant red-carpet fashions. His name is exceedingly French, with all those pansy-ass “thhh” and “shhh” syllables and a damn accent mark. These men still sound like they’re pining longingly for the says when movie stars were walking cock avatars they could strap on whenever they were feeling small. You’d think those attitudes are going away given the current cultural climate. But if these reactions show that if Timothée Chalamet is going to be the perfect movie star for 2018, then 2018 has a long way to go.

If the sidecar to #MeToo’s confrontation of sexual harassment and violence is going to be an attempt to dismantle toxic masculinity in Hollywood (and elsewhere), can we start with not requiring Timothée Chalamet to camp out inside a dead animal before we deem him manly enough to be a leading man?

An old Decider article from 2018 that is very much worth rereading.

Please note: this article does not definitively declare Timmy queer, and I am not declaring that either. I am saying that he has an image problem for the traditional Academy voter.

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