The Auraboros

The Entity wants you to think it's cool

A little over a week ago, Tyrese Haliburton “broke out the celly.”

It was, of course, a reference to Reggie Miller’s iconic gesture, broadly directed at the city of New York but mostly towards Spike Lee. In the postgame interview, Haliburton admits, mere minutes after busting it out prematurely (his foot was on the line, and so they had to go win the game in OT), “I tried to hit the celly…it didn’t work.”

In recent seasons of Great British Bake-Off, bakers will use precious talking head interview time to buzz over the possibility of receiving the vaunted “Hollywood Handshake”—and when Paul, that blue-eyed devil, finally lowers his voice, finishes chewing, takes a moment to pause/aura-farm, and raises that hand, the miscellaneous uncs positively shoot poison all over that white tent.

Later seasons of Survivor feature contestants explicitly talking about past players and strategies, referencing specific seasons and hidden idol plays. Steph, during the Olympics last year, was pressed multiple times about when he’d “break out the Night-Night celly,” and when he finally did, he was asked even more questions about it afterwards. And if you really want to recoil in despair, consider that there is ample evidence that “Nicepool,” a considerably important character in last summer’s Deadpool and Wolverine, was a hastily inserted parody of Justin Baldoni’s male feminist credentials, which were impugned by Ryan Reynolds due to how he treated Reynolds’ wife, Blake Lively, on the set of It Ends With Us, and which is now the subject of a highly protracted legal back-and-forth. The audience is supposed to pick up on all of this.

This character is named “Nicepool” in a movie

I am collecting examples of recent phenomena that might reflect a culture turning inwards on itself. Lost in the years-long discussion about our culture’s lack of originality is the sobering fact that, in the art we do actually happen to produce, most of what people latch onto are the self-referential symbols to past iterations of the thing itself. Everything is a snake eating its own tail, and similarly, it all disappears the moment it is consumed.

There is something uncouth and undignified to me about the word “celly.” The idea of explicitly talking about something that was organically developed in the course of the competition—the Hollywood Handshake—leaves a bad taste in my mouth (and I’m not talking about the flavors..!). We seem to be activated by signals and symbols, organically produced and defined, and then delighted when the institutions reference them explicitly: Yes, we see it, too, they seem to say. And yes, we will monetize it. There is nothing we love more than being seen, being heard, being represented. The dominant mode of 2020s cultural consumption can be, I think, boiled down to this image.

Objectively, there is a cheap thrill to this: before the Knicks-Pacers series began, all anyone could talk about was Reggie Miller and the rivalry and The Choke and Spike Lee and 90s-era bully ball. And I guess if you’re thinking about The Choke constantly while watching Game 1, wondering if/when Haliburton is going to bust it out, and then he does it, it’s kind of cool. And of course, to have him talk about it so explicitly afterwards—referencing The Choke, talking about having the same thought process as you, essentially, equivocating on what would be the best moment to do it, to harvest the most aura—would give you a momentary high of recognition. But it takes the air out of the room, undeniably, and what becomes more memorable than the symbol itself is the idea of Haliburton knowing when to (in)authentically deploy it.

What is lost in the midst of all this? Subtlety, restraint, authenticity, organically developed coolness—a sense that big moments can come into the world standing on their own legs, rather than being propped up by mountains of prerequisite context. I recognize that I once sent out a newsletter about how awesome it was when Steven Soderbergh pinned the whole climax of Ocean’s Twelve on the joke that Julia Roberts’ character looks like Julia Roberts. And for that I will not apologize, because that was honestly funny as fuck for him to do.

But this all just seems to be the only way we can engage with the culture now. We can all laugh for a second, sure, when Luther, in the latest Mission Impossible, tells Ethan “you better start running,” but I think we need to draw the line somewhere: Eagles players wearing “Exciting Whites” t-shirts in the pregame tunnel; Sydney Sweeney monetizing her bathwater because the fellas on Instagram said they would like to drink it; SNL’s insistence on reminding you that Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson are married. We are a culture of memes, hyperlinks, and “getting the reference”—Barthes would be eating…

Ritam’s Footnote

Remember when Workaholics referenced The League? I’ve never soyfaced harder in my life than when I saw this live.