parasocial-ception
lurking is a two-way mirror
True crime isn’t my thing, so I’m not sure what drew me to Beth’s Dead, the newest podcast from Armchair Expert co-host Monica Padman. The Armchair affiliation is quite the turnoff (Dax Shepherd enlarges his loserdom every time he opens his mouth.) As a result, I didn’t know Padman as a successful podcaster in her own right. Yet there I was, clicking on the newest Dead White Woman to see How She Died, in Graphic! Gory! Detail!
Oh, wait a minute, right there. The real reason I clicked, psychically calling me in. This podcast isn’t a typical true crime saga. It’s a parasocial one. Beth’s Dead follows Padman as she uncovers why her favorite podcasters, Elizabeth Laime and Andy Rosen from Totally Laime, ended the initial run of their show. “End” doesn’t do the premise justice, let me try again. Padman discovers why Laime and Rosen deplatformed themselves out of the blue, staying silent for years before rebooting the show with stringent privacy guardrails. The reason is pretty harrowing. Laime retells the bond she develops over email with a young female listener, the titular dead Beth, during the show’s heyday. As the two women share become emotionally enmeshed through their daily (sometimes hourly, sometimes minutely) correspondence, Beth’s mental state seemingly deteriorates due to Laime’s well-meaning if intrusive advice. She ends up committing suicide, sending Laime into the tailspin of a lifetime.
Except Beth isn’t actually dead. She’s a made-up person.
You see, Laime was a victim of good old-fashioned catfishing. The perpetrator, whom we’ll call Not-Beth since they don’t give him1 a name, created an elaborate web of personas, storylines, and plot beats to wrap poor Laime right around his finger. When the three hosts confront him in the penultimate episode, he blames his behavior on addiction and begs them all for forgiveness, “forgetting” a whole lot of his transgressions on the way. As their interrogation plays out like a deranged Scooby Doo episode, our armchair detectives2 take him exactly by his word. Thus, the show ends with a whimper in lieu of the bang we’d come to expect. The true crime isn’t a real death, simply a fake one constructed from internet lies. Bummer, right? Bloodthirst unsatiated. So why did I, a noted hater of the genre, tune in every episode to discover the culprit, even when it becomes clear he’s a nameless fraudster?
I’m fascinated by parasociality: how it manifests, how it functions, and how fluid its unethical practices can be. Don’t be fooled by my tone of analysis, I can slip into it as easily as the nuttiest of them. I’ve become outraged at a celebrity’s poor choice in partner, critiqued New York City influencers who wouldn’t know me from a fly on the subway wall, and salivated at the micro dramas of the literary elite. Through my travails over the moutains of scandal, I’ve seen up close how parasociality doesn’t solely exist on a one-way street. Celebrities fine tune their online personas to regularly enmesh their fanbases into emotionally-charged relationships (see Taylor Swift’s Tumblr activity, Ariana Grande’s mushy gushy comment voice, every One Direction staircase video.) Beth’s Dead brings up the conundrum of fame in full force: are fans really the crazy ones? Freaks who investigate their obsession’s private lives to the point of invasion due to personal derangement? Or do public figures indulge them on purpose? Do they like being the object of obsession? Do they enjoy their position as the arbiter of taste, culture, and life direction for their army of followers?
Parasociality enhances the reputation and standing of the famous figure in question regardless of how they feel about it. Yes, in the traditional ways, money fame power all grow concurrently with an increase in renown. But there is a kind of social currency associated with it as well. Famous people have become modern-day gurus on topics they know nothing about solely through the sheer force of their platform. Take the pop star. Historically, musicians have been counterculture figures, speaking to the anxieties of the young and poking at the ones of the old. Apoliticism was a dirty word on their tongue; you either stuck it to the man or sold out to Coca-Cola capitalism. They spoke at length on the issues that plagued their nation during their heyday. I mean, Bob Dylan wrote civil rights anthems amongst a catalog venerated as poetry. Can you separate that artist from the art? No. But today? Hmm.
The pop stars of today are all sellouts, yet for some reason they loathe to be seen as one. They don’t create or contemplate anything truly controversial in their music, yet we are supposed to infer that their interior lives, ensconced in cashmere-soft wealth, are profound enough for our attention. I think about this every time I walk past Madison Square Garden and see Harry Styles’ residency advertisements. Styles has always been, shall we say, Queer Lite™ in terms of his aesthetics, and the ads are no different. It’s a host of couples (one including a throuple, ooo la la!) making out, touching each other, tongues out and all over the place. With all the models being tastefully diverse and wholly young, the campaign seems to want us to picture the hedonism and ecstasy of the club. Except Harry doesn’t make club music. His fare is mostly rock derivatives, elevator muzak, and defanged acoustic ballads. So why use these images? Why, for the umpteenth time, has Mr. Styles employed his Queer Lite™ sheen across the fluorescents of MSG?
You could say, well, he’s kissing all the time and discoing occasionally now, so it fits with the rebrand. That’s just it, though. He’s a regurgitator of past iconoclasm. He isn’t an arbiter from output alone like a real great artist, shirking off trends to make something weird and wonderful. The production is always too lackluster to make an impact on the culture, the lyrics are incoherently vague on every album, the dance moves are embarrassing, the vocals never hit the right notes, and the artistic vision is- Artistic vision? What artistic vision? He doesn’t have anything to say. Ever. He seems desperate for the general populace to enter his world, one of excessive privilege and horny admiration since his teen years, and see it as a site fraught with narrative tension and real stakes. But where can you find tension when your private chef cooks whatever you want in your Italian villa? What could possibly be the stakes when you’re a millionaire high school dropout with all the critical thinking skills and fluency that status entails (helloooooooo, it feels like a moooooooovie?????? Jeez louise.) People may criticize Benson Boone as a dollar store Harry, but let’s be real. Our obsession with the uber-heartthrob of the 2010s gives him a pass for mediocrity that many artists can’t get.3 Therein lies his need for parasociality. If the foundation of your artistry can’t stand on its own two feet, you build a brand for the masses to buy up in droves. Styles has become a master of the hearthrob cipher, maintaing his image as generic crush while feigning the motions of a truly great artist. He gets away with it every single time because we let him get away with it. We reward the banality because he is a cardboard stand-in for desire, nostalgia, and the image of the “safe man.” He becomes a Star of the Show through our attention, not through his art. He needs us much more than we could ever truly want him.
Laime is essentially the Harry Styles of the Totally Laime universe, looking to us for validation as a notable figure in her sphere of influence. What is her sphere? She’s a television writer in name, but ended up a podcaster who encouraged her fans to share their darkest secrets to be mined for episode filler. Was it any wonder that a deranged one created a labyrinth of lies to get closer to her? That’s what she asked them to do. Share a secret. Tell a story. You’ll get a segment or five, promise. Don’t think I’m being too harsh, she literally admits it during the series! She entertained the deeply personal and borderline inappropriate relationship with Not-Beth because she understood it, on a subconscious level, as a treasure trove of content without the need for hard creative work. Totally Laime’s advice section was simply a way to expand the runtime when she and Rosen ran out of conversation topics. Not-Beth was a weirdo, that’s for sure, but the couple just couldn’t create enough interesting conversation on their own chat show without the input of other stories, other ideas, other lives, chopped up and decontextualized for entertainment. And without Rosen’s knowledge, Laime specifically chose to cross that parasocial line herself with numerous fans for the sake of this practice.
Yeah, that’s another issue to address. Not-Beth wasn’t the only pen pal. Padman was a former fan who corresponded with Laime over email as well, asking for a therapist recommendation. She’s a co-host officially, a friend in practice, and a spiritual adherent to the Laime-Rosen relationship. For a podcast about the dangers of fan interaction, there isn’t a lot of self-interrogation for her own role in the story. Is it strange to cross another parasocial boundary, moving from solitary listener to active participant in her favorite podcasters’ lives? Did she identify with Not-Beth in this capacity? Does her role as a former fan compromise her position, even her authority, as co-host? She never addresses any of it. Her infatuation with the couple is played off as a funny origin story to their current professional relationship, not as a potential site of critical analysis. A missed opportunity.
Beth’s Dead reveals the amorphousness of parasociality. It isn’t only reserved for the common man; a relationship occurs as frequently on the celebrity’s side. Whether on top of the A-list or at the bottom of Z-list internet infamy, they need to figure out how to capture our hearts if they can’t stand on talent alone.4 So the next time you share your opinion in a comment section, or critique a public figure in a video, or email your beloved’s company-sanctioned address, there’s a good chance that they might see it. And if they respond to you, take care in what they say. You are as real to them as they are to you.
yes, Not-Beth is a man, THAT discovery veers into a whole different level of disgust
no pun intended 🙃
i promise i don't hate mr. styles, he does seem to be a nice guy. it just drives me a little crazy to see how disproportionate the attention he gets (a whole lot) is to the effort he makes in his music (very little) and the thoughts he shares in his interviews (even less! i'm sorry, he's just boring)
and maybe that's another angle to the chappell roan discourse: she doesn't need to peddle for likeabililty, because she's confident that her art is interesting enough to bypass the need for idolatry cultivation. and tbh... i can't blame her!