In a recent New Yorker article, Jia Tolentino addresses the phenomenon of the "Instagram face."

This social media-optimized visage, she writes, is a "single, cyborgian face. It's a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella."

If you've spent any time online, you probably know what Tolentino is talking about. "Instagram Face" is a term that refers to any of the artificially beautiful faces we see that could only exist online and thanks to a great deal of surgical enhancement. It's deeply linked to money, to plastic surgery, and to the utilization of light, texture, and power through image manipulation. It's inspired by Kylie Jenner and her brood. It's white but tanned, often freckled and always pouty-lipped. It is "as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism," writes Tolentino. It is everything and nothing at the same time.

Handsome Squidward and Bella Hadid: Beauty as Pain

While thinking about these faces—shaped by highlighter and lip kits and edits and plastic surgery, blown-out and contoured and often captioned with Lizzo lyrics or quotes about either sadness or female empowerment or some combination of both—I began to realize that they reminded me of something.

Admittedly, they reminded me of a lot of things. Humans have always idealized unattainable beauty, and, in a way, the Instagram Face is like a modern iteration of ancient Greek sculpture. They symbolize humanity's aspiration to physical perfection, refracted through capitalism and technology—but they also resemble the iconic Handsome Squidward from the SpongeBob episode "The Two Faces of Squidward."

In the episode, Squidward gets hit with a door and after two weeks in the hospital, he finds himself converted to a Chad-type, complete with a very strong jawline. He is immediately photographed and thronged by groups of fans who attack and injure each other in an attempt to steal his clarinet and clothing. Unable to escape the rabid crowds, Squidward runs to the Krusty Krab and begs SpongeBob to change him back, so SpongeBob smashes him in the face with a door until he becomes...something surreal and bloated, something doomed and too beautiful for this Earth. He becomes Handsome Squidward.

As a crowd of onlookers gazes on in awe, Handsome Squidward dances across the screen. He moves like a drugged ballerina, bogged down by the weight of his beauty.

Handsome Squidward ~ The Short Versionwww.youtube.com

He bears a striking resemblance to Michael Phelps in stature and Bella Hadid in features. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Hadid is the first result that comes up on Google when you search "Instagram Face." Hadid, like Handsome Squidward, didn't always look like she does.

Instagram Face is a product of money—of plastic surgery, injection, or incision. Like Handsome Squidward, its beauty is artificial and painful and precarious.

Perhaps Handsome Squidward's defining characteristic is that he is always falling. He carries an air of doomed glory around him. His beauty is apocalyptic and self-annihilating. In the modern world of the Instagram Face, beauty is pain, collapse, falling, breakage. It's breaking one's face open and filling it with collagen and chemicals and projecting it through software in hopes that what blooms from the wreckage might garner attention, acceptance, adoration, and eventually, compensation.

The Instagram Face and Capitalism: Beauty as Collapse

When I see Instagram faces, digitally manipulated and paid for in order to sell, I experience a feeling of falling. Instagram faces are inherently doomed, as we all are, to age out of their beauty, to fall prey to the passage of time, to slip down and hit the earth. The bearers of Instagram faces, I assume, are forced to deal with the ugliness of the ordinary: the way faces peel and breathe and sweat and bleed, the way bodies contort and sag and excrete. For a brief moment, in the free-falling sphere of the online vortex, they are beautiful. For a moment, they are infinite, immortal, not-alive.

In that, they bear a resemblance to the most elusive and tantalizing aspects of capitalism, which—for all I criticize it—can look truly beautiful. That's part of its charm. Though, of course, we know that capitalism is killing people and killing the planet, brainwashing us into idealizing completely arbitrary traits, and always has been. Capitalism has motivated everything from colonization to trauma on the Internet, because it works. It is so difficult not to aspire to its promises and not to hoard the wealth and objects that one has. It is so difficult to extricate ourselves from it, even though we know it's killing the planet and so many people.

Still, the idea that we might be able to streamline and photoshop and buy ourselves into a life that feels like a Goop catalogue looks will never stop being tantalizing. No matter how much we preach self-love, our culture is still confused by a desire to transcend our human limitations even at the cost of our humanity. No matter how much we preach radicalism and liberation, we still live in a society built on competition. This sick mindset may be guiding us towards total climate collapse; but then again, have we ever not been falling?

Empowerment and Shifting Possibility: Beauty as Power

Of course, not everything about the Instagram Face is bad, or, at least, it's not implicitly worse than the beauty standards we've always glorified. The Face is becoming increasingly attainable to all genders. In a way, it does level the playing field, offering people the opportunity to change themselves on many levels. And it can offer confidence boosts. "On one hand, some people may find that conforming to a beauty standard can help with confidence and self-esteem," writes Julia Brucculieri for The Huffington Post. Still, even that self-esteem and confidence (like most of what gives us thrills within beauty-obsessed capitalism) teeters on thin ice. "That confidence boost, though, will likely be short-lived, especially if you become increasingly obsessed with presenting an altered version of yourself on social media."

There is, of course, the argument that we shouldn't criticize girls and women for posting selfies or for editing themselves, which makes a valid point. There is a tremendous amount of sexism inherent in a lot of criticism of women owning and celebrating their beauty, sexuality, and flesh prisons.

Still, when I see these faces I can't help but feel like capitalism has devoured female empowerment, regurgitating it just like it's capitalizing on social justice without really changing anything while whiteness has remained in power; it's just morphed. The modern era was supposed to be post-feminist, a time of body positivity and liberation. When did it become about mutilating ourselves, about endlessly deifying "glow-ups"? Has the human algorithm always leaned towards competition, and will we ever successfully hack it?

Are the Kardashians' billions a sufficient balm for knowing that their fans are harming themselves and ingesting toxic diet products in order to achieve a look similar to theirs? Most likely.

But when I scroll through Instagram, I still can't help but feel like those fish watching Squidward fall through the glass. I can't look away from this dazzling, collapsing world.

Ducktales

Twitter has been abuzz today about which cartoon theme song is best.

This is no doubt a ploy by Disney to get everyone nostalgic enough to sign up for Disney+, and everyone has been predictably biased to focus on the shows that they loved when they were kids. But as someone who grew up in the 1990s—the true golden age of Saturday Morning TV—I felt the need to step in and provide the objective analysis the topic required. Without further ado, here is the definitive list of the greatest cartoon theme songs of all time. Don't even try to argue.

11.Batman: The Animated Series

This one has the distinct advantage of being composed by legendary film composer Danny Elfman, and borrows heavily from his work on Tim Burton's Batman, for which he won a Grammy. The dark, orchestral intensity sets the tone for one of the most serious and intense children's cartoons of all time.

10.Ducktales

Life is like a hurricane. If you don't already have the words "here in, Duckburg" playing in your head, you are a broken soul. Hughie Dewey and Louie, along with their uncle Scrooge, were the definition of cartoon adventure in the early 1990s, but the simple, catchy lyrics of the theme song are truly what keeps this show alive in our hearts. It's the reason I can't hear the word racecars without immediately thinking of lasers and "aeroplanes."

9.Darkwing Duck

Synthesizing the previous two entries with a duck-themed slapstick parody of the Batman universe, we have Darkwing Duck. While the content of the show was less memorable than Ducktales, the driving bassline and the high-energy vocals of the extremely 90s theme song are somehow timeless. The refrain of "When there's trouble, you call DW," and Darkwing's interlude, "Let's get dangerous," will live forever in my memory.

8.Arthur

Arthur was always kind of boring compared to other cartoons, yet I watched it a lot as a kid, because it was boring in the same way a big comfy sweater is boring on a cold day. It's a show full of sweetness and optimism, and never has a theme song so perfectly captured the hopeful and positive message of a show better than Ziggy Marley's "Believe in Yourself." You know you want to sing along to this one.

7.Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls taps into the weirdness and mystery of childhood to deliver one of the best cartoons of the past decade. And the instrumental theme song somehow manages to be eerie, mysterious, and madcap all at once, in a way that only the supernatural adventures of Dipper, Mabel, and Gruncle Stan could live up to. The snappy, fast-paced percussion combine with the playful penny whistle to instantly put me in a good mood.

6.Teen Titans

Teen Titan's Go! has gotten a lot of love and a lot of hate in recent years, the latter coming mostly from fans of the show's 2003 predecessor. Whatever you think of the two shows, there's no denying that the original show's high-energy Japanese surf rock theme song by Puffy Ami Yumi absolutely slaps. It's worthy of a listen even if you don't care about the show.

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Anyone who's seen Frozen and who is part of the LGBTQ+ community understands why the idea that Elsa might be gay is so tantalizingly appealing.

There's never been a queer Disney princess or even an overtly queer animated Disney character, after all, and since Elsa wasn't immediately paired with a male love interest (and since "Let It Go" has a very coming-out-of-the-closet kind of feeling), it became almost inevitable that people began to speculate about her sexuality.

To the great disappointment of many, Elsa definitely won't have a gay love interest (or any love interest at all, for that matter) in the sequel. Frozen II songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez confirmed this when she explained, "Like the first movie, Elsa is not just defined by a romantic interest. There's so many movies that define a woman by her romantic interest. That's not a story that we wanted to tell at this point in time. What we really wanted to tell was if you have these powers, how do you grow and change and find your place in the world and find answers that haven't been found before?"

Still hasn't stopped viewers of the Frozen II trailer from falling in love with our favorite ice queen. Speculation about Elsa's queerness has thrown Twitter users into a frenzy, mostly because in the preview, we see Elsa with her hair down for the first time.

Though Disney was given an F rating for LGBTQ+ representation by GLAAD, there's a long history of queer-coded Disney characters who have ignited speculation among the company's many gay fans and their allies.

Because of this and Disney's history of queer-baiting, having Elsa's queerness explicitly highlighted and celebrated would certainly be a victory for the gay community, and it would definitely be vitally important to all the little kids struggling to figure out their sexuality while watching the film, as well as for their families (and really, for queer people of any and all ages).

It's also possible that Elsa could be asexual or some variant of that. No matter what, Disney would be remiss to refrain from using their massive platform to create representation that honors LGBTQ+ people and their stories, which are too often kept buried within secret codes and silence.

As great as it would be for Disney to openly discuss Elsa's sexuality, none of this is to say that she must have a romantic relationship. Getting to watch her come into her own independently is extremely powerful proof that we are never defined by love affairs, by our partners, or by our sexualities.

Zack Gottsagen (L) and Shia LaBeouf at the Academy Awards 2020

Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI/Shutterstock

Shia LaBeouf's story is also the story of the Internet's history.

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"Love, Death & Robots" Is a Master Class in Short Film

Ferocious alien creatures, nudity, and fiery robot battles wrapped in surprisingly smart stories.

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Image by Maksim Filipau (Shutterstock)

Tim Miller and David Fincher's short film anthology Love, Death & Robots is the ideal series for the YouTube generation.

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Who's the New Character in the "Frozen 2" Trailer?

No matter who's joining the cast, Olaf is the best dim sidekick since Ben Affleck to Matt Damon.

Princess Elsa and Anna from Frozen 2 Magical Journey

Photo by Faiz Zaki (Shutterstock)

These marines are going to lose their minds when they see the new trailer for Frozen 2.

Disney demonstrated their global domination when it paused everybody's Wednesday by releasing the first teaser trailer. In 1:59 minutes, we see Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) channeling her inner action hero as she battles the sea with her powers. Scenes of Anna (Kristen Bell) racing toward an icy cliff reveal the sisters have been separated once again. Meanwhile, Kristoff (Jonathan Geoff) and Sven appear to be racing towards an emergency that the sisters can probably handle on their own, but their efforts are appreciated. Olaf (Josh Gad) also returns as Disney's best enchanted inanimate object since Rex in Toy Story.

Frozen 2 already seems like a promising follow-up to the original's $1 billion phenomenon. While it's only a teaser, we get a reminder of Elsa's penchant for dramatic costume changes (like the one that stole the hearts of these marines in the original) and that family will fight against the odds to be together. "Let It Go" composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez return to provide the music that will haunt our dreams for the next year and a half.

Excited buzz surrounds an unfamiliar character who appears in one frame of the trailer. Disney's confirmed new additions to the cast include Sterling K. Brown and Evan Rachel Wood, so perhaps the mysterious character is Woods'. Whoever she is, we hope she's welcomed by the Arendelle royal family better than Meghan Markle's been received by the Windsors.

Frozen 2 will debut Nov. 22.

Frozen 2 | Official Teaser Trailerwww.youtube.com


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