16 Comments

Great post! It's interesting to note that Matt and Abby are this generation's version of Halequin Romance Novels. I used to think those books were the bottom of the barrel, but as tawdry and over-the-top melodramatic as they were, they still had some dignity and artistic merit when compared to vlogs like Matt and Abby. Just when you think something cannot get any worse, it gets worse. And not just for the audience, but for the content creators too, where audience capture is a real danger and can turn people into ridiculous caricatures of themselves. Like you, I wish those two well. That kind of 24-7 fame has got to be tough to handle absent some real maturity, spiritual grounding, and healthy relationships and accountability, which would be hard to maintain if you always have to be "on" for the algorithm and your audience.

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Funny: just a few hours after I posted this essay, a two-day old video of theirs from their podcast channel showed up on my YT feed. It's titled, Why Matt and Abby Removed Their Children from Social Media. They briefly discuss setting boundaries with their audience and how their new podcast channel is opening up the option to be more selective about what they share online. It's a most respectable choice, but my understanding is that they have this flexibility because they were able to amass a sufficient following to support a spin-off channel by sharing everything up front, including content featuring their son. I wonder how much they'll back off of sharing now that they're cruising financially and can keep their two channels separate.

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That's good they're drawing those boundaries!

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Thanks for the kind words, Bridgette. I'm extremely flattered and I appreciate you tagging me in this Substack.

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You have a really beautiful style, I love the way you write, and this was a really powerful piece. I enjoyed reading and your message delivered something meaningful, aspirational, and reasoned from first principles — a very coherent, incisive commentary. This is also a really exotic angle to consider the finances, incentives, anxieties, and pressures of a MicroCelebrity romance... definitely a very weird and underexplored subject.

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My criticism would be that some of your prose is inefficient because you use too many commas, which is very easy to fix. I recommend sprinkling in a few short sentences to alternate your rhythm. Single-clause sentences resonate.

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For example, this sentence, "For all its faults, second-rate fantasy, like Pretty Woman, can at least offer an opportunity for debate over the status of our culture a few levels above the trash movies of today that fail abysmally in both concept and execution of any redeemable qualities."

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So there's 3 commas in this sentence, a total of 4 clauses, so it's a little difficult to read, and the way it's presented strains the reader's attention. The content is excellent, and all the words are good. I would just recommend splitting this into 2 sentences, or rewriting it so the text is easier to digest.

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To illustrate this point, if I was going to rewrite the same sentence to make the same argument, I might say, "Pretty Woman may be a second-rate fantasy, but the vulgar pop culture of 1990 seems refined in contrast to modern cinema."

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The strength of this approach is that it's a very simple sentence, very easy to read. But you will notice that we have lost some aspect of your message during the process of me streamlining the grammatical structure. Some of the depth, texture, and flavor has been truncated. Everything involves tradeoffs.

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Another alternative would be to break this material into multiple sentences, such as, "Intellectuals dismiss pop culture, and therefore overlook the symbolic expression of the collective anxieties and ambitions of contemporary generations. Pretty Woman was scorned as superficial erotica. But Pretty Woman encapsulated riveting, prescient truths. Truths that captured the hearts of American audiences. That level of emotional sophistication has been lost. Today movies are empty formulaic sequels reviving dead franchises, a graveyard of shallow diversions... sound and fury signifying nothing."

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On some level, just have the confidence that you have something beautiful and intelligent to say Bridgette, and therefore the patience to say it slowly, performatively.

Hopefully my feedback is useful, and avoids being rude or pretentious — I had to teach all this stuff to myself.

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Now I would like to end by quoting your best sentences, my favorite lines from the essay,

"They put the “obnoxious” and the “cute” in the phrase “obnoxiously cute” in equal proportion. One look at them and you’ll know why they’re cute: They are good looking and charismatic, they have a clean, spacious home with modern furnishings and dress in that laid-back style that makes them the quintessence of upper middle class casual."

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This is just so clever and funny, it made me laugh.

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Beautiful

"For some reason, Matt and Abby's channel is permitted to flourish. The obvious takeaway is that it’s okay to be popular as long as you aren’t controversial. Perhaps a less obvious takeaway is that it’s okay to live vicariously through another family, as long as you aren’t silly enough to put down the soma and pursue having one yourself."

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Really eye-opening epiphany:

"What are Matt and Abby?

Matt and Abby are today’s equivalent of a 2010s rap video staring a man stylized in designer fashion complete with gaudy gold chains and diamond grills, surrounded by his harem of voluptuous women, spitting clever rhymes about how they enthusiastically adore his enormous girth from their lucky perspective at his feet. All this happens poolside at his Beverly Hills mansion where he stores his expensive cars and stacks of cash. Men in these videos glamorize a specific kind of lifestyle that is completely out of reach to the average person. And today, Matt and Abby promote a different type of lifestyle which, despite having the appearance of being easily attainable, is effectively just as out of reach as the tacky estate filled to the attic with bimbos, bros, Lambos, and weed."

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