We’re officially in the era of the epic troll.
Let’s review the last week alone: Gwyneth Paltrow, high priestess of pretension, offers a $15,000 gold vibrator on her website, Goop.
“Sex toys have long since graduated from the floppy rubber things you hide in your bedside table to beautiful works of interactive art,” goes the super-literal copy. Gwyneth, who well knows what the world thinks of her, doubled down on her good friend Chelsea Handler’s new talk show, which, by the way, debuted last Wednesday on Netflix.
“We started talking about, ‘Is lube toxic?’ ” Paltrow said. “We’re very conscious about non-toxic products at Goop, and we learned that lube is actually very toxic,” and so go to her site to buy $13 organic lube made from yams.
On “Game of Thrones,” Jon Snow comes alive — despite dying in last year’s season finale, despite multiple, HBO-stamped statements to incredulous fans.
“Jon Snow is dead,” said showrunner David Benioff at the time. “Deader than dead,” said the episode’s director.
In January, Kit Harington, who plays Snow, told the BBC that “all I can tell you is Jon Snow is dead. He died at the end of last season.”
On March 27, six weeks before Jon Snow came back to life, Harington told the Guardian, “I’m really dead. I’m not coming back to life.”
Last Sunday, Jon Snow was up and about, executing the traitors who’d killed him so poorly.
All last week, pop star Meghan Trainor claimed that she was outraged to see her latest video, body much thinner, go online without her approval.
“I was like, ‘Why are the fans messing with my waist?’ And my glam squad was like, ‘That’s not your waist.’ ”
No mere pop star she: Trainor has much larger, more important concerns than “the fans” and her glam squad. Concocting the ridiculous premise that a major record label would betray one of their top-selling artists — and that there aren’t “Mission: Impossible” mechanisms to prevent such a leak — Trainor elevated herself to solo feminist warrior, dismantling faceless, sexist, body-shaming executives in corner offices.
“I had to call . . . and say, ‘Take it down. That’s not me,’ ” she told GMA last Friday. “I need to fix this as soon as I can . . . I didn’t want this song to be the new anthem for Photoshop.”
Queen of the Anthems is, of course, Beyoncé, whose new album and accompanying short film, “Lemonade,” strongly implies that her husband — the equally private, micromanaging, business-minded Jay Z — has been cheating on her with multiple women, including one she calls Becky.
While the internet went crazy trying to guess who Jay’s “Becky” was — and beta celebs like Rachel Roy and Rita Ora inserted themselves in the mix — the true point was lost: “Lemonade” is only available on Tidal, Beyoncé and Jay Z’s flailing streaming service.
As of last Friday, the New York Times reported that “Lemonade” has generated 306 million global streams, with 1.2 million user subscriptions in the album’s first week. In a soapy, concurrent Us magazine cover story, Beyoncé’s agony and artistry got six pages of coverage, with telling quotes buried at the end.
“Everything was planned, and they are both in on it together,” a source close to the couple said. “Everything she is doing is to break records,” said another.
Perhaps inspired, Sharon Osbourne, long-suffering wife of addled rocker Ozzy, leaked word that she was leaving him after 33 years of marriage after catching him with the hairdresser.
In the US, sites such as Twitter and Reddit have deployed mechanisms to reduce trolling, but it seems pointless: It’s bled into the culture at large.
On Tuesday, Sharon — who brilliantly turned her family into reality-TV superstars well before Kris Jenner and her Kardashian clan — dramatically returned to her CBS daytime show, “The Talk.”
There, she shared her rapid emotional arc, from humiliation to fear to courage to independence, with her 2.9 million viewers. It’s something the pop singer-songwriter Sia has called the three-minute “victim to victor” journey, and it kills across multiple platforms.
“I can’t keep living like this,” she told her co-hosts, while simultaneously claiming she was “empowered.”
As she sat, emotionless, she sipped from a tall glass of lemonade, trolling us all. By Thursday, Sharon was photographed cuddling with Ozzy at a promotional event for his upcoming “farewell tour” — which, as his longtime manager, she oversees.
“Sharon is the queen of publicity stunts,” a source told Page Six last Friday. “There’s always deliberate drama going on. It maintains interest in them as a family . . . [she] got him almost as much press as when he bit that bat’s head off.”
“Trolls” first appeared in Norse mythology as cave dwellers, misshapen dwarfs who were dim and destructive. The rise of the internet gave way to a re-appropriation: A troll is anyone who deliberately posts nasty comments in online communities — basement dwellers sparking outrage for personal amusement.
Now we’re seeing a new iteration of trolls and trolling, one that exists in real life, in real time. A troll is now much more likely to be beautiful, rich and famous, and if they don’t quite get off on tricking the public, they at least cut through the daily, unceasing glut of noise and information to get our attention.
Then there are the “diplo-trolls”: senators, Congress members, heads of state who get into Twitter wars. Top Obama aide Ben Rhodes, who helps shape foreign policy, told the New York Times Magazine that he helped craft a false narrative of the administration’s Iran deal.
In the article, published just last week, Rhodes boasted that it was easy to spoon-feed 27-year-old reporters whose “only experience is being around political campaigns . . . They literally know nothing.”
When the administration was criticized for the talks and subsequent deal, Rhodes admitted he trolled high-profile reporters, sending them crafted, fact-free narratives that they’d unthinkingly post or retweet.
“I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of weakness,’ ” Rhodes’ assistant said, adding that he’d instead tell reporters the opposite. “Next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”
Trolls conflate. What is Donald Trump if not a version of Kanye? He’s a reality TV star who trolled every other serious Republican contender off the stage, then had his aides tell RNC leaders, in a closed-door meeting last April, that he’d been playing a character and that his character would be maturing.
“He gets it,” Trump’s chief strategist Paul Manafort said. “The part that he’s playing is now evolving into the part that you’ve been expecting.”
Yet Trump still goes on Twitter, on Cinco de Mayo, and posts a picture of himself dipping into an enormous taco bowl with the tweet, “I love Hispanics!” It’s a perfect troll, one designed to both elicit and explain away outrage — after all, he simply said he loves Hispanics.
“I’ll admit it, I like Donald Trump’s speeches,” Ricky Gervais wrote in this week’s Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve made my fortune out of playing delusional, middle-aged men who say stupid things, and people love them . . . It’s just a really odd thing to have this man who’s meant to be the most powerful in the world act like a Twitter troll.”
Hillary Clinton’s no troll, but she and Trump have the highest unfavorables of any two presidential nominees ever. What does this say about us, as a society and a culture, that we’d nominate people we don’t even like? Are we victims of troll culture, so used to contempt we’ve come to somehow enjoy it?
We hate-watch. We follow people we dislike online. Celebrity blogs post stories of pregnancies, marriages, divorces, rehab stints, gender reassignments, with commenters wondering if any of it’s real, or if it’s all just part of one massive troll.
A sampling from tabloid news of the week: Online commentary concerning Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s on-off divorce narrative, free-verse by reader QQ at Celebitchy.
“Dear freaking God please STOPPPPP [these] dual leaks to the press
Jen is Sad
Ben is Devastated
Jen is Moving On
Well I Didn’t F—k the Nanny
Well It’s OK Cause I’m Moving On Look I Curse Now
lets appear together in public but continue doing press salvos
Oh But Now I’m Happy FYI
It’s OK I have a Movie and I’m Sad, You Wanted Me Sad
No Not Really You Were the Love of My Life
Oh GOOD I was thinking we could get back
LOL No.”
The public may consume your narrative, but they won’t necessarily believe it anymore.
So much of pop culture now plays out like one big reality show — and now that we know that’s all scripted, reality TV itself feels like an epic troll.
Which Real Housewife is faking her marriage, her wealth, her career, her illness? Did “The Bachelor” really fall in love with the girl he chose, or did he do it for ratings? Or did the producers trick him into it, the way they show you on “unREAL,” that fake show that’s supposed to be the real behind-the-scenes “Bachelor”? Do Kelly and Michael really hate each other that much, or is this a publicity stunt for May sweeps? Are Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton really a couple, or is this a publicity stunt for “The Voice”? Because Blake’s ex Miranda Lambert thinks so. And how many times can Jennifer Lawrence trip on the red carpet before we think it’s an act, you guys?
“I was crying about the Kardashians the other night,” Lawrence told E! News last Monday. “They’re under a lot of pressure. Even if it’s elective — it’s pressure!”
This brings us, regrettably, to the Ground Zero of reality TV trolling: the Kardashians.
The ultimate proof? Someone’s on the verge of trolling his way into the White House.
As the culture has evolved and viewers have become more sophisticated, matriarch Kris Jenner has done a brilliant job of constructing storylines for the cameras, then allowing viewers to feel they know what’s actually going on by feeding a shadow-narrative to the tabloids.
At any given time, a Kardashian or Kardashian-adjacent person is feeding at least four beasts: on social media, on television and in tabloids, and the larger, multi-headed hydra that is the clan itself. The idea that any of them have the time or resources to devote to an authentic, actual private self seems vanishingly small.
“We may be closer to the perfect storm of a spin-off now that Rob Kardashian has seemingly reconciled with his momager and over-exposed siblings,” People reported this week. In moving the narrative along, 18-year-old sister Kylie announced she had dumped her 26-year-old boyfriend Tyga, who has a child with Blac Chyna, who’s pregnant with her brother Rob’s baby after one month of dating.
“They’re really going to accept [Chyna] into the family,” a source told People, adding that Chyna is currently negotiating her salary: $1 million a season, with perhaps the first baby ever conceived as a reality TV plot device in tow.
Curiously, in the online world, there’s been a recent backlash to trolls. Last year, the UK Independent reported that the British government is aggressively prosecuting internet trolls, with 1,209 found guilty in 2014. “Troll Hunter” is a Swedish reality show dedicated to tracking down and unmasking internet trolls.
In the US, sites such as Twitter and Reddit have deployed mechanisms to reduce trolling, but it seems pointless: It’s bled into the culture at large. It’s no longer something to be ashamed of but something to master. It really doesn’t matter if what you do or say is fake, as long as the emotion and reaction you evoke is real.
The ultimate proof? Someone’s on the verge of trolling his way into the White House.