At Celebrity Lookalike Competitions, Men (And Women) Deserve To Be Delusional
'There’s a Paul Mescal in all of us,' said Jack Wall O’Reilly from Ennis, County Clare, the winner of the Dublin competition to find the best lookalike for the aforementioned man from Maynooth, County Clare. All the Pauls turned out that day – some mulleted, many in Mescal’s signature O’Neill’s shorts – to pose for the €20 (or three pints) prize, reciting lines from Mescal’s back catalogue. 'You look really well,' O’Reilly said to the shrieking crowd, the present normal people reduced to a mania worthy of an encounter with the real Mescal.
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For the last month, we’ve been in the throes of celebrity lookalike contests. It all started with a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York back in October, where the real Chalamet turned up, the winner wore a Wonka suit, and one wannabe was taken away in handcuffs by the police. Since then, there’s been a Dev Patel competition that scraped the barrel in San Francisco, Harry Styles hopefuls sporting flares and floppy hair in London, Chicago’s Jeremy Allen White-off, and a Zayn Malik line-up that went viral for its disappointing delivery in Brooklyn, NY. Prizes for each have stuck around the $50 (£40) mark. The winning Jeremy also got a pack of cigs.
When will the world get sick of the simulacrum? I doubt the trend will burn out anytime soon. The lookalike contest is a tried, tested, and thrice viral formula. Plenty of people online have stated that they’ll be using the contests as a dating pool – maybe tongue-in-cheek, but dating fatigue is real and the apps are a desert. Why not skulk around Chicago, where you might ‘yes chef’ your way into something special.
And it feels like a pretty innocuous, harmless fad that lets us all get a bit silly together in one place, a rare occurrence. If I’m really prodding at it, it reflects our cultural obsession with the remake – the Timmy simile lives from the Dune (i and ii) reboot, and Mescal’s current turn in the new Gladiator is a soothing of the psyche with a side of ancient city-razing. There’s a comfort in the familiar, the characters we love and the endings we know well, especially when the world is as shock-horror as it is.
Today (November 20), is set to see the first of the viral lookalike contests with a woman at its core – Zendaya. The prize is $40 (£30), plus shampoo and conditioner (?). While it’s TBC on the turnout for the Oakland, California competition, I had been wondering where all the women doppelgängers were at. Where’s our Olivia Faux-drigos, our Sabrina Carpenter similes?
Well, let’s think about the creeps she would have to deal with in a public pageant. And then god help the woman who proclaims their own likeness to a celebrity – what hubris! How dare she think she’s hot. I’m thinking back to the onslaught of ridicule and abuse a Love is Blind contestant had when she said she’s often told she’s Megan Fox’s doppelgänger. I’d say safety IRL couldn’t be guaranteed, and imagine people would be just as monstrous and exaggerated in their response to women in celebrity lookalike contests online, where that pain would live long after the lookalike comp boom.
There’s another cultural terrain the lookalike hype’s lack of women closely surfs: the ever-moving goal posts for beauty standards, and the taunting ‘Instagram Face’. It’s the cyborgian look you’ll know well from the endless scroll, one that countless young women have been reaching for, coveting Bella Hadid’s button nose, buccal fat-removed facial structures and Kardashian-level full lips with pointed cupid’s bows. Juvéderm is du jour, women are exploring ‘tweakments’ and preventative Botox younger and younger, and Facetune has been downloaded over 60 million times. This is a world where women’s self objectification is monetised and where their uniformity is expected, but being seen to be reaching for these aesthetic ideals is disparaged, cringe – why would women want to step up to the podium and be judged any more? Maybe, sadly, no more than they already judge themselves.
Not that the male celeb lookalike entrants have cruised through these experiences. The response to Brooklyn’s Zayn Malik contest was pretty brutal. Women entered the Jeremy Allen White and Zayn contests too – a woman came runner-up in the latter. 'I think you should vote for me because these lookalike contests are very male-dominated,' she told the crowd in New York. But there’s a certain vitriol held for women, especially around appearances, that we’re getting close to unleashing again. We treat men who believe themselves to be attractive very differently than how we treat women who believe themselves to be.
The Zendaya event has been organised by Cassi Simms, a health care worker who told the SF Chronicle that she wanted to plan a fun community event 'for the girlies to get together'.
She said she had noticed how 'male dominated' the trend was, and wanted to give the fast bloating trend a 'breath of fresh air'. In response to concerns about the misogyny and ridicule the event could stir, Simms said: 'Especially as a Black woman myself, seeing other Black women talk about it, I completely understand where they’re coming from.'
'I plan to make it a fun and safe space for everyone... I want to foster an environment for girls to come together and be like, "I’m pretty as f*ck, and that’s all it has to be, even if I don’t look like Zendaya."' Simms says she’ll also be judging as much on a contestant’s ‘vibe’ akin to Zendaya’s, as her appearance.
We should let the men entering these competitions continue to be a bit silly and delusional. And, allow any Zendaya hopefuls to be just as delulu too. If the internet and IRL worlds could guarantee good, honest, fun behaviour, I’d want to see some Saoirse Ronans, Rihannas, Charli xcxes and Daisy Edgar-Joneses step up and live the fantasy. And if we’re going to ‘lean in’-ify feeling the fantasy, there’s a heavily bandied around statistic that says men apply for jobs when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. For now, you can find me enjoying the last embers of this hopefully flash in the pan fad with a ‘mescalita’ at the next Paul Mescal contest in London, this weekend.
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