The plotlessness of the pandemic has prompted people to reimagine their lives within a definitive narrative arc. But does the desire to see ourselves as protagonists deflect from the structural forces that shape our communities?
Tiktok star Ashley Ward is lying on a multi-coloured beach towel wearing activewear. Friends surround her, but as she gazes upwards—the scene is shot from a camera drone—hers is the only visible face. The intro to ‘A Moment Apart’ by Odesza, a fixture on Spotify’s algorithmic ‘good vibes’ playlists, underlays Ward’s voiceover: ‘You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.’ The video has over 534K likes.
‘Main Character Energy’, a trend where users perform their lives online as if they’re the main character in a film, has propagated all corners of the internet, from the sincere to the satirical, since 2020. While some use the trend to poke fun at self-obsession, others echo Ward’s earnestness, with even a new wellness-focused iteration emerging recently. Writing for Electric Literature, Amy Zimmerman suggests that the plotlessness of the pandemic has prompted people to reimagine their lives within a definitive narrative arc. And in the midst of a crisis with no clear resolution in sight, it’s surely comforting to adopt, even just for a moment, the archetypal trope of the hero’s journey in which the main character is destined to overcome all odds. However, the trend’s popularity stems less from a literal interpretation and more from the hopeful sensibility—energy—it evokes. With Main Character Energy, the vague anticipation of an exciting narrative arc becomes the aesthetic, the #mood, we seek to cultivate.
Like the belief that an entrepreneurial spirit is all we need to prosper under capitalism, Main Character Energy is cruel in its optimism.
The late literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argued that affect and emotion, rather than rationality, determine our ways of belonging in the world. In their 2011 book Cruel Optimism, they describe a form of attachment where what we desire is actually an obstacle to our flourishing. Driven by a fantasy of ‘the good life’ that is unlikely to eventuate, these attachments aren’t necessarily logical, but they’re always affective—underlined by feelings transmitting our ‘body’s response to the world’. Like the belief that an entrepreneurial spirit is all we need to prosper under capitalism or that it’s possible to individually consume our way out of climate change, Main Character Energy is cruel in its optimism. By dwelling in the algorithmic impasse of TikTok’s affect-laden snippets of anticipatory good life fantasies—sipping wine at a brasserie in Paris, or joking about romanticising our train journey, listening to Lana Del Ray—we might ignore for just a little while longer the absurdity of prioritising our own narratives in a cultural moment that is defined, at least in part, by a crisis of individualism.
This all might sound a bit dramatic, especially given that many use the trend as self-satire. However, Main Character Energy as a storytelling device is more pervasive in contemporary culture than by what’s implied through a hashtag. Writing on Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, a collection of essays on contemporary feminism, critic Lauren Oyler laments the profusion of contemporary writers who ‘make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round’. Her essay problematises our attachment to a literary iteration of Main Character Energy, where political commentary folds neatly into personal narrative, prompting us to question what edges and ambiguities have been smoothed over in the process.
For Oyler, ‘the moral obviousness of most contemporary fiction—and of most movies, art, music, television, politics and internet culture’ has been made popular by writers ‘who tend to find simple things complicated and complicated things simple’. Tolentino’s approach to political issues, she argues, is characterised both by the tone of melodrama and ‘the elegant avoidance of stating her conservative opinions directly’.
Described by Variety as the ‘perfect talker for the #MeToo era’, Emerald Fennell’s celebrated film Promising Young Woman encapsulates the cruel optimism of moral obviousness, where our desire for moral simplicity in fact obstructs us in some way. The film follows Cassie—a medicine school dropout, as we are repeatedly reminded—as she enacts revenge for the rape of her best friend. Cassie’s trek to martyrdom, scored by an instrumental version of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, has serious Main Character Energy. It’s imbued with pastels and dark undertones reminiscent of the ‘dark pop’ pseudo-nostalgic aesthetics of musicians like Dua Lipa (apparently, Fennel emphasised the words ‘beautiful and dangerous’ when briefing the cinematographer). It is, ostensibly, a vibe. Like Tolentino and Lipa, Fennel uses melodrama to mask the fact that she has nothing new to offer.
Promising Young Woman’s pastel-hued earnestness takes ‘lean in’ feminism all the way to the grave.
Unlike Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, which explores the nuanced spectrum of subjectivity produced by sexual violence, Cassie’s character construction is entirely one-dimensional. Perhaps Fennel, remembering that a character must always have a motive, felt the only way to justify Cassie’s revenge ending in her own death was by constructing a character defined so exclusively by her trauma that she resembles an avatar.
Berlant argues that the lens of trauma theory, where trauma is an enclosed ‘event’ that defines someone’s personal narrative arc, fails to capture how violence is embedded in ordinary life. While the film does present an unsubtle yet affecting account of how various institutions are complicit in upholding rape culture, Promising Young Woman’s ending epitomises Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. As Rebecca Lui points out in Another Gaze, it is the police, the most troubling institution of all, who execute the final iteration of the dead Cassie’s revenge plan. Such a film, Lui argues, is ‘ideal for the Academy, which loves to slickly gesture at subversion while leaving the core tenets of the establishment unchallenged’.
The film’s success exposes our cruelly optimistic attachment to art with a ‘strong female lead’, even while it upholds institutions responsible for structural violence. While films like Gillian Horvat’s brilliant satire I Blame Society examine the cultural contradictions of the post #MeToo era, Promising Young Woman’s pastel-hued earnestness takes ‘lean in’ feminism all the way to the grave.
*
So where to next? In a conversation with Lauren Berlant for e-flux, critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli asked how we might construct a compelling narrative ‘outside liberal heroic tropes of the overcoming of all odds’. Berlant suggested that such a narrative should have a temporality that exposes the ‘ordinary’ modes of violence encountered every day. By foregrounding the precariousness of living in the political present, a writer might explore the myriad ways structural forces shape our lives.
Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby finds such a temporality. As Lau constructs a social world defined by a sort of banal interconnectedness, it reads as an antithesis of Main Character Energy. The character construction is thick with ambiguity, rejecting the moral obviousness that Oyler argues defines much contemporary fiction. Unsurprisingly, given the tropes seem to reproduce each other, Gunk Baby also rejects the notion of overcoming all odds, reflecting a crisis of the present that cannot be resolved through one character’s narrative arc.
Set in the eerie fictional suburb of Par Mars—where palm trees are mandatory on the nature strips and parents mount digital billboards outside their houses depicting their child’s acting showreel—Gunk Baby follows Leen, a twenty-something who has opened a ‘wellness clinic’ at the local rundown shopping centre, Topic Heights. Leen’s involvement in her own narrative is dissociative at worst. At best, it’s molded by the people or discourse closest to her at any one point. Under the fluorescent daylight of the mall, Leen is consumed by the various aesthetic and affective requirements expected of her labour, like making the clinic more ‘oriental’. By night—enacting a more dramatic version of liking Marxist memes under the desk at our shitty 9 to 5—she moonlights as a member of an anticapitalist organisation called the ‘neighborhood watch’ who perform violent acts of ‘resistance’ on Topic Height’s managerial staff. Meanwhile, Topic Heights is slowly being taken over by a minimal lifestyle brand called K.A.G, selling everything from beige pyjamas to aesthetically pleasing doomsday prep. As the brand begins to encroach on Leen’s subjectivity, it also becomes the prime target of the neighbourhood watch.
Gunk Baby rejects the notion of overcoming all odds, reflecting a crisis of the present that cannot be resolved through one character’s narrative arc.
Lau’s storytelling style has prompted some Goodreads reviews to insist the novel is ‘long and pointless’. However, it is the meandering temporality that exposes the subtle modes of violence—like the emotional abuse of managers, the physical ailments stemming from care work or the affective labour of self-branding—embedded in life under neoliberalism. Puncturing this temporality of late-capitalist suburbia is a more obvious violence produced by the neighbourhood watch group. Led by the Heidegger-obsessed Jean Paul—whose calls for anti-capitalist resistance are creepily entangled with HR-esque platitudes—their ‘resistant acts’ range from teenage-like pranks to actual torture (‘with the right intention, what is seemingly violent… becomes an act of sacrifice’, Jean Paul proclaims). The viscerality of violence in Lau’s world expands and contracts between banal and horrific; oppression and resistance while denying us the purgative resolution we are so attached to. While Promising Young Woman basks in the Main Character Energy of cathartic violence, Gunk Baby explores the cruel optimism of enacting personal revenge for a structural issue.
*
The dystopia of Main Character Energy is how it contrasts with contemporary social and political upheaval and the existential threat of climate catastrophe. As Oyler writes, ‘What’s truly amazing about these times is that we have more access than ever before to material that demonstrates the continuity and repetitiveness of history… yet so many still buy into the pyramid scheme that we are special’.
The limits of individualism aren’t hidden in contemporary storytelling—Promising Young Woman’s protagonist literally has to die to resolve her narrative arc and achieve some warped sense of ‘justice’, while Oyler’s review of Trick Mirror temporarily crashed the London Review of Books website. Like the mass emotional labour needed to sustain a pyramid scheme, it is our affective attachments—often imbued with a melodramatic sensibility—that sustain the Main Character Energy of much contemporary literature and film. In a culture emotionally attached to narrative-first storytelling promising moral obviousness and a clean resolution, we need more ‘long and pointless’ works that expose the cruel optimism of these attachments.
