I wrote this essay early last year when I was deeply invested in DeuxMoi and thinking about the visual culture of the pandemic. I haven’t looked at the account in over a year at this point but I don’t find anything below to be any less relevant.
At the onset of lockdown in March 2020, I can’t think of anyone who was thinking about the fate of celebrities. Even me, known celebrity obsessee, couldn’t find time to think about what Ben Affleck was doing as I was trying to get over the worst cold of my life (whether it was actually COVID I’ll never know). Of course, celebrities were probably a lot more concerned about their fate than I was. Lockdown demanded a retreat from public life and for celebrities, whose careers depend on living publicly, the pandemic was a real threat. How else to explain their antics?
Anti-celebrity sentiment appeared early in the pandemic after the actress Gal Gadot released a video of herself and other well-known celebrities singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The video was Gadot’s attempt to encourage solidarity at a divisive and isolating time; it came off as out of touch. Excoriated across social media, the video seemed to reveal the fallibility of celebrity and, more so, the unimportance of it. For many online, the pandemic had put things in perspective: if everyday life could be so easily destabilized by a deadly virus, who cared where the Kardashians were taking a vacation?
This feeling wouldn’t last for long. Whether it was disapproval or admiration, people couldn’t keep their eyes off what Hollywood’s elite (and often, not-so elite) were up to. In fact, people seemed more fervently obsessed than ever. This couldn’t be more obvious than in the popularity of DeuxMoi. Although the account had existed since 2013, it wasn’t until celebrities began feeling elusive again, and more people had time on their hands, that the account exploded.
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