In a Guardian interview published Tuesday, Cynthia Erivo addressed the public "annoyance" at her friendship with Ariana Grande during the Wicked press tour, via Variety.
Two women held hands on a red carpet and the internet filed a complaint. Not about the carpet. About the hands. "There were a lot of people who had become psychologists from their couches," Erivo says, and that is the exact mechanism. The Annoyance, as she names it, is a real phenomenon with a business model: female friendship only gets a lane in pop culture if it is a rivalry, and when two women actually laugh at the same joke in frame, the character sheet tears and forty million couch psychologists scramble to diagnose the symptom.
The script was written before the first hug. Rivalry. Tension. Passive-aggressive carpet moments. When the hug arrived instead, the machine had exactly one explanation left: the audience must be "annoyed." Which is how you get to Singapore, where a man grabbed Grande on the carpet and Erivo stepped in, and the follow-up coverage is about the annoyance, not the grabbing. The PR machine does not do well when the content protects itself.
The quote to frame is this one: "Why are they showing emotion? How dare they cry! How dare they laugh? How dare they be emotional and alive?" Read it slowly. The dare was never from the women. The dare is from the algorithm, which pays out for tension and has no payout for friendship. Two women being alive on camera is a budget line that does not exist, so someone had to call it a problem.
The Annoyance is now named, documented, and converted into a PR talking point, which is its own special category of failure. You cannot PR a friendship. The tour is over, the drama is in theaters, and the only thing that looks silly in the rearview is the couch.
YOUR TURN: How long until the Annoyance gets its own support group, and who is funding it?
Comments (1)