Last updated on January 31st, 2022 at 10:18 am
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Before becoming the most famous creator on TikTok — she presently has 132 million followers — Charli D’Amelio competed in the Northeast’s competitive contemporary-dance circuit, using theatrical styles you might recognize from “So You Think You Can Dance?” That kind of dance became an afterthought, a vestige of an old existence, once she started uploading to TikTok in 2019, especially after her videos took off and her family moved to Los Angeles to support her and her older sister, Dixie (56 million followers), viral dreams.
The D’Amelios made the transition from the phone screen to the small screen this year with the Hulu docuseries “The D’Amelio Show,” which captures the highs and lows of TikTok success in sometimes brutal detail. Charli’s side quest to return, at least, is the most intriguing plotline.
briefly, to her pre-capitalist self, squeezing in time to train with a coach to relearn what those old dances demand of her body, and pushing herself to perfect them.
TikTok stardom is a rocket ship for Charli, but it might also be a ceiling. The past year has served as a kind of proving ground for what the app’s biggest creators — the D’Amelio sisters, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers), and others — might do next, either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or simply to satisfy the insatiable maw of demand that their mere existence generates.
It’s been a jumbled mess of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, eager-to-please eagerness, bro impudence, and staged opposition. The divide between the app’s instinctive charm and the long(er) form of seriousness and vision that might lead to a solid, sustained career in entertainment has been difficult to bridge. Reality television, mainstream music, cinema, books, other social media platforms, and even TikTok itself have all been affected.
What’s become evident is that the skill set that propelled the app to big-tent success in 2019 and 2020 is, for the most part, medium-sized. Most of TikTok’s superstars are still working out how to create outside of the phone, despite having greater opportunities to breathe in other media.
Offscreen number-crunchers hope to hang potential franchisees on the heads and necks of these young people, who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fan-aggregation platforms in desperate need of content, as you can see in many of these ventures.
The ne plus ultra of this phenomenon is “Noah Beck Tries Things,” which airs on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel and is a whole two-season series dedicated to figuring out what to do with this uncooked feast of a man.
Beck, a 20-year-old former soccer player, is the most befuddled of the current crop of TikTok crossover stars when it comes to maximizing his fame. “Noah Beck Tries Things” is a sloppily produced piece of material with no consequences. It merely agitates Beck, then throws him in bizarre situations — such as making a steak, dancing the tango, or recording a dis track — while watching him gasp for air. When someone teaches him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard in one episode, his awe is genuine — not the scripted “gosh!” of someone who has been videotaped for reactions, but the off-the-cuff “derp” of someone who realizes he has landed in the deep end and has no idea how to swim.
Apart from that, he’s largely hapless on his show.
Occasionally, an athletic task is required. But it’s his almost rabid commitment to good-naturedness that’s becoming his calling card. Beck’s brow only furrows when Dixie, his girlfriend — she refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a typical TikTok good-boy image — can’t quite conjure the optics of a Reciprocal relationship in scenes from the D’Amelios’ Hulu program. He appears frantic at certain times as if an Apple IIc is being updated with the current operating system. Beck is friendly and gentle, and he’s a palliative in small bursts on the app. However, he never appears to be actually hungry. Addison Rae, or rather, revs Addison Rae, stands in stark contrast to that attitude. She is the most deliberate, the most adamant, and the most determined of this generation of TikTok stars. She has been loosely integrated into the Kourtney Kardashian orbit off-camera. Her parents were avid TikTok users.
(The D’Amelios do as well but to a lesser extent.) Rae, 21, often appeared to have her eyes elsewhere other than the phone, even when she was more fully engaged on her social media presentation — she’s now often embarrassingly late to trends on the app. Rae’s performance in “He’s All That,” a remake of the 1999 adolescent rom-com “She’s All That” (which was itself a remake of “Pygmalion”/”My Fair Lady”), is unsurprisingly the most vivid post-TikTok performance of the year. That’s because Rae sees viral celebrity as an archetype, not merely a job.” He’s All That,” like “The D’Amelio Show,” is a fictionalized metacommentary about the falsity of viral popularity. Rae portrays Padgett (pronounced “pageant”), a social media influencer who lies about her credentials. She sets about rebuilding a surly outcast student (who wears a G.G. Allin T-shirt) as her new best friend after a fall from grace.
Beauty and fame are inventions and have been for a long time before TikTok. “He’s All That” uses such structures to elicit laughs and awws. And the film’s conclusion deftly reflects the shift from polished inaccessibility to Emma Chamberlain-style relatability. Padgett returns to social media, but this time with more naturalistic photographs taken by her new partner: she did, after all, find an Instagram boyfriend. Big Algorithm is still valued and reinforced in “He’s All That,” even converting the punk sceptic. However, some of the app’s most successful users in 2020 chose to shift in the opposite direction: refusenik. Chase Hudson, 19, who records music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who records music as jxdn, have both chosen this path in their attempts to convert into music careers.
Unlike Rae, who released a peppy club pop single, “Obsessed,” a perfectly textureless workout anthem this year, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) swerved hard into the dissident territory, embracing pop-punk and, in some cases, the grittier textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They’re extensively tattooed, dress in high-end mall goth fashion, and paint their fingernails – their opposition to TikTok’s centralism is extremely aestheticized (as opposed to, say, Bryce Hall, he of the Covid-era partying, drug arrest and boxing match, whose post-TikTok direction seems inspired by Jake Paul). It’s a deliberate choice for creators who want to make it obvious they’re not constrained by TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm. “Tell Me About Tomorrow,” Hossler’s debut album, explores anxiety and addiction. He has a reedy voice, and he nevertheless sounds like an approachable teddy bear despite singing self-lacerating lines like “I don’t like taking medications, but I took ’em anyway.”
“I’m not sorry I crashed your party,” sneeringly says the sneerer. Hudson plays Fenix, a ghoulish loner with the punk appeal, in “Downfalls High,” Machine Gun Kelly’s surprisingly puckish long-form music video-film that accompanies Machine Gun Kelly’s current album “Tickets to My Downfall.” When his popular, wealthy, and slacker girlfriend asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but ineffectively, “Dead.” It all feels like one big Halloween show. (Hudson is also one of the numerous TikTokers featured in the upcoming Netflix reality show “Hype House.”)Hudson and Hossler’s records suffocate two desires with a single groan: the need for these TikTokers to find a viable path ahead in music, and the music industry’s need to highlight and promote the still-emerging TikToker culture.
Given the seeming need for safe places, it’s worth noting how nonwhite characters are used as foils in both “The D’Amelio Show” and “He’s All That,” who are significantly more knowledgeable and worldly than the white protagonists. They act as reminders that the world beyond the app is significantly more diverse and complex, whether on purpose or not. “Noah Beck Tries Things” does the same thing with queer partners, which is surprising given that queerbaiting has been one of the most common criticisms of Beck’s rise. (However, the first episode of the show, in which Beck learned how to apply cosmetics from James Charles, has vanished from the internet.)It’s difficult to say how intentional these critiques of privilege are – they usually support the series’ plots while reifying their stars, who are portrayed as receptive to personal improvement.
“The D’Amelio Show,” on the other hand, often comes across as quietly ruthless toward its stars, whether through its cast of more experienced secondary characters, it’s lingering on the excruciating challenges of growing up in public on the internet, or even the fish-out-of-water talking head shots juxtaposing the family’s relentlessly normal members against their relentlessly grand Southern California mansion.” The D’Amelio Show” is ultimately about the dangers of viral popularity, as well as child labor. (Charli is currently 17 years old, however, she was 15 and 16 when the episode was taped.) Dixie is 20 years old.) Near the end of the season, it is presented as a moral victory when Charli decides that she will only work three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
On TikTok, though, life is work in and of itself. Perhaps nowhere is this responsibility more palpable than in Dixie’s handling of her celebrity. Dixie is a little older, a little cynical, and a lot less at ease. She decides on music as her next move, and the show conveys the difficulty of that decision, both artistically and emotionally, with disconcerting sensitivity. Her voice is scratchy, she lacks confidence, and she is surrounded by internet haters. (The show’s on-screen pop-up graphics portray a constant Greek chorus of harsh online comments, which is both powerful and twisted.) “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I’m down just leave me there, let me be sad,” she sings in the first lyric of her debut single, “Be Happy.”
Perhaps the final legacy of this TikTok crossover age will be this painful honesty. It’s in Charli’s new book, “Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real,” which juxtaposes workbook-like chapters about friendship and style with personal essays. (In “Backstory: My Life So Far,” the biography of TikTok celebrity Avani Gregg, 19, a close friend of Charli’s, there’s a more in-depth treatment of this underlying viral-stardom contradiction) (38 million followers). Gregg’s work is notable for its straightforward discussions of self-doubt and mental health.)
Charli’s nervousness is a recurring theme on “The D’Amelio Show,” which frequently feels like a crisis video, with Charli having a panic attack in the car when she sees cameras waiting for her, or Dixie crying after being ridiculed online. Charli’s most intimate content, however, may be found on her private TikTok account,@user4350486101671, which she started in April while in Las Vegas for, of all things, a Jake Paul boxing match. It only has 15 million followers, and Charli treats it as if it were a hobby. The videos are looser than those on her official account in general. The videos are looser than those on her primary channel, showing a larger spectrum of emotions, from elation to annoyance. The dance is a little more relaxed and less choreographed.
The chasm between the two accounts is sometimes as wide as the one between burden and freedom, and other times it’s only wide enough for her to zestily lip-synch a curse word that wouldn’t fly on her main account. She may owe the most commodified version of herself to TikTok, but she’s experimenting with many personalities here, and her smile is broad and easy in practically every video. She seemed to be completely at ease.
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