Memo 43: Lookalike Ultra
can we? and if we can, should we?
This will be a lean, mean, small little post. I have been accidentally subjecting those around me to Jouissance-esque ramblings in real-time, and I need to reign it in by putting it all back here. I went on a tangent about the meaning of earthquakes to a friend the other day; it did not make sense to me, least of all to her. These moments are what pen and paper are for.
It’s the lookalike contests that have been getting under my skin lately. There has been a host of contests since the first Timothée Chalamet contest almost a month ago exactly — from Harry Styles and Jeremy Allen White to Jack Schlossberg and Glen Powell. These aren’t completely new, as lookalike contests were hosted even back in the 1930s a la this Shirley Temple contest. But they do replicate the lifespan of an internet idea made physical: everywhere, ever-replicating, over before it’s done.
Other interpretations of the contests say that it is because we want to live in a world where we know what everything looks like, that it’s an opportunity for third-spaces off the internet or that it’s a mixture of democracy and grassroots happy genetic accidents. These points aren’t wrong per se, but they also don’t feel entirely right. It feels like there’s something else unsettling about these contests that I can’t name.
And then I found this article on backyard ultras, which took over my brain’s single-minded focus completely. Imagine the core concept of a marathon — you know, running for an extended period of time. Take that principle and complete break it apart into a new form: find an area where you can run one 4.167-mile loop in an hour. Have everyone do it each hour on the hour, until only one person is left standing.
Does this sound like it could last days? It can. As an excerpt from the first story in the article:
Bo Shelby was 40 hours into last year’s Summit Backyard Ultra in Marble Falls, Texas, when he realized that only one other guy was still going. Shelby, a then-27-year-old who lives outside Denver, thought to himself, “Oh my gosh, I’m about to win.”
In reality, he had 16 more hours to go. The other guy was Greg Fall, a 42-year-old father of three from Carlsbad, Calif., and an experienced runner of 50- and 100-mile races.
The Wall Street Journal article is not meant to be a deep dive by any means, but it is interesting that it names a pro of backyard ultras as such: unlike a real marathon, anyone can finish this one. There is no failure of “not finishing,” as it’s more of a matter of how far you can go. But again, to me, this one-step-deeper analysis felt wrong. This felt incomplete. There was more about this that I couldn’t fully put my finger on.
What really unlocked things for me was none other than Piglet’s Big Game, which was rediscovered on Twitter a few weeks ago.
I have been haunted by this game for 20 years. I played it as a kid and could not remember the name of it for the life of me, but the haunting imagery stayed with me. And it is genuinely creepy; people are drawing parallels to the horror survivor series Silent Hill. Look at this clip — the dim lighting, the out-of-body POV, the soundtrack — and tell me you think this was for six-year-olds.
And because no experience is a unique one, thousands of other people on Twitter also had this game stay with them for decades. After everyone realized what it was, the game is now essentially sold out everywhere.
To refresh myself on why it was so creepy, I read through the various plot versions¹ of the game (the plot depended on which game format you had). Most of them revolve around Piglet entering his friends’ dreams to help them solve their real-world problems. But it was this line from the Game Boy Advance plot version that stood out to me:
Piglet runs towards his friends warning them of the monster before Christopher Robin calms him down. He explains that the nightmares can teach him how to be brave…
That is an objectively nice thing for a child to learn. That is a lesson that should be learned. And yet, the game was creepy. Not because of its message, or its overall plot — but because of the tone. Piglet’s Big Game is haunting because it was purposefully given a foreboding, dreadful tone. If we could divorce the tone from the message, we could see the gameplay itself is maybe befuddling, but not a categorical horror survival game.
My issue with the lookalike contests and the backyard ultras is that if they were introduced to us with another tone — say, the tone of Piglet’s Big Game — everyone would be terrified. Holding contests to see dozens of people that look like you? Running around a loop for up to days in a row? These novel trends might feel fake-deeply bizarre instead, rather than the fake-deep “anything is possible” optimism that we view it with now.
On one hand, tone and substance are intertwined; you can’t just imagine one part of something tweaked and judge it on that. But maybe tone is more impactful than we’ve given it credit for. Maybe it changes the substance, just a little part of it, along the way.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
I guess I missed the meeting where we all decided on “manosphere” as the word of the month, but I appreciate the swiftness in which everyone has gotten on board: in articles on politics to articles on marketing to this somewhat erroneously-labeled profile on Connor O’Malley.
Apparently French Bulldogs are now America’s favorite dog, snagging that title from Labrador Retrievers which held the title for 31 years. This feels like the latest indicator of Millennial culture taking hold but in a darker, more ominous way.
This Eliza McLamb piece on infantilizing media is not perfect (some of it feels a little too wordsmithy), though it does remind me of Julio Torres’ comedy show from last week. I won’t spoil his bit, but at one point he mentions how the current export of America is nonthreatening boring positivity — and that reminds me of this Search Engine episode, as they talk about how there’s no cultural center for teenage American boys nowadays.
Forgive me for linking a Wikipedia article as a source, and forgive me for feeling guilty over this but still doing it anyway.