This part of the semester always makes me long for summer. Fleetingly sunny days are giving way to gray skies and midterms, with which I can cope by imagining myself in another time and place. A simpler, better time and place. Lately, I have found myself mentally returning to a time before I watched “The Bear.”
I had not seen “The Bear” before a trip to Los Angeles this June. LA is one of those places that makes you feel that you have the pulse of pop culture at your fingertips. Decades of traffic-based isolation have caused a petri dish-like effect wherein studio execs have transcended the need for language, communicating solely in sleek-but-sexy logos.
So, upon my arrival in the city, I was bombarded by advertisements for show’s third season. Well, sort of. Save for the combined FX/Hulu logo, the blue billboards bore no text, instead depicting an actual bear with a streak of electric sparks cutting through it. I assumed this was to promote the show, but how could I be sure? Could this be a numetal nature documentary? An ecoanxiety rave? Why not use The Bear himself, Jeremy Allen White? Right? I mean, is Jeremy Allen White even hot?
You could certainly be forgiven for thinking the answer is an obvious yes. You need look no further than his Calvin Klein photoshoot — nothing suggests more American dreaminess than a set of abs that look like they might come from chopping wood or welding rather than a CrossFit membership.
But Calvin Klein can make anyone look hot. They could make Jared Leto look like Heath Ledger. Broody black and white photos on an NYC rooftop in are a surefire way to make the middlingly attractive man seem desirable, nay, irresistible. There must be more.
What about his eyes? The electric blue pierces directly into your soul, and before you know it you find yourself lost in a fantasy of dying in his arms in the 1886 Haymarket Square Riot. Chicago, all of a sudden, has the sexual capital of a 1921 Weimar Berlin.
“But wait!” you say. “Isn’t he not even from Chicago?”
To which I ask you, “How is being from Brooklyn any different?”
After all, is this not the natural conclusion to the Founders’ legacy? To bring the GQ effect westward, expanding its impact on white working class smokers until the entire nation is free to replace a beloved neighborhood institution with a high-end restaurant hemorrhaging money to the tune of early aughts alt-rock? Where does that leave us? What do we make of a Brooklyn-born divorcé making a career out of seeming like he might actually be from Chicago?
Jeremy Allen White was raised in a culture where James Dean, Elvis and Marlon Brando taught him that dangerous men are made all the more attractive for their damage. He is in the next room down the hall in the Heartbreak Hotel, taking pouty mirror selfies with his SAG awards. He is their heir apparent, their natural successor and America’s favorite son.
So why not put him on the billboard? Even if the “hot” question remains subjective, he represents so much more. In these trying times, he is everything our nation ought to be. Because he is not the kind of man you dream of meeting in a nightclub, he is all the more attractive. He looks like he would offer you the last empty seat on the Amtrak next to him, briefly putting down his beat-up paperback copy of “On the Road” to move his coat.
“Okay, but is Jeremy Allen White hot?” you ask, unsatisfied.
For this I can only commend you, reader, for merely to ask the question is to strive for more. Where an LA studio executive does not get to decide what beauty means. Only one man should get to decide whether Jeremey Allen White is hot — Calvin Klein.
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