PicoBlog

On January 25th, actress Sydney Sweeney appeared on the web series Hot Ones, which revolves around a bald man named Sean asking a celebrity thoughtful questions while they eat progressively spicier chicken wings. The idea is that when you’re reeling from the impact of an extremely hot chicken wing, it’s hard to give the canned, artificial kind of answer celebrities usually give.

Sydney Sweeney, who starred in Euphoria, is a pin-up for many Gen Z and Millennial men. She seems to have a playful relationship with what must be a very weird kind of fame — as evidenced by how she promoted her Hot Ones interview. She
“did this one for the boys,” according to her Instagram caption.

The boys (and others) online turned the main promotional image from the interview into a meme. Here’s a paradigmatic example:

This meme’s trajectory is a good case study in a specific pattern that occurs on Twitter (or, *sigh* X). The meme starts out setting up one kind of situation, and then is assimilated into the same big web of references that every meme gets swept up in. Any meme ends up becoming about the larger situation of just “being here with us on this platform.”

In the early versions of the meme, there’s two characters: the sweet, beautiful, smiling Sweeney, and then the (presumably male) “you” or “me” that’s doing something unsavory, something you wouldn’t expect “your girl” to smile about. Maybe the earliest popular post using the meme in this way, seen below (it’s the quote-tweeted one) also assumes something else about the male in the scenario. There’s a hint of edge lord rightwingyness to this meme, and I think that’s very often the kind of vibe memes start from on Twitter, especially since Elon’s taken over.

A point about the photo itself: it’s not a picture of Sydney Sweeney doing just anything. It’s a picture of her looking. If a possessive or desiring male gaze is at play here, what it’s doing is gazing at a woman’s imagined gaze back at him. It’s as much about her, in a way, than it is about being attracted to the idea of him that she might hold. I see the same structure happening in Distracted Boyfriend, and with many memes that involve photographs of people: they center on looking at other people’s looking.

Perhaps misapplying Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida here (see page 25 of this pdf) I would say the studium of this photograph is Sydney Sweeney looking hot, while the punctum is her gaze out of the frame towards an imagined viewer. Studium is the thing the photograph is “of,” which you can study and understand, the more objective side; while punctum is the detail which punctures you subjectively, personally, how the photo provokes you outside of the frame.

The joke here can go pretty far — with a Sydney Sweeney Hot Ones meme, you can narrate yourself doing ever more niche and heinous things. You can make it into a “call-in” for your specific online community (like, for example, fans of Halo).

Once a meme formula gets established, people purposefully break the formula in a creative way. It happens with many kinds of art. In this one the genders are flipped:

In this one, the male character is entirely removed, replaced by the Taco Bell menu: we’re not looking at Sweeney anymore, we are her.

This version of the meme is funny not just as a pairing of image and text, but as a counterpoint to all the memes we’ve seen over the past two days (the meme started on the 25th, we’re on the 27th now) that set up the situation as Sweeney looking at a male narrator/audience presence. The meme works because it’s a rebuttal to the earlier memes. And the “getting high at Taco Bell thing” is already a trope online.

Through this process of counterpointing previous Sydney Sweeney memes and alluding to other memes or tropes, the format evolves as times goes on.

Here, Sweeney’s head is photoshopped into a Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom of Speech.” This image has been a meme for a long time, with people parodying it to show the man (the idealized American citizen exercising his civic rights) giving some niche, inappropriate, or altogether bizarre take. The paradigmatic situation of this meme is essentially “just because you want to say it, doesn’t mean it’s noble.”

The poster also appears to be referencing a viral TikTok which crossed over to Twitter that same week. The TikTok depicted two Millennials talking about how a Gen Z coworker didn’t want to show up at 8 AM when a job had advertised in its hours that it would be 9 to 5. It was one of those ragebait-y podcast clips which go around and get people arguing about differences between generations, political parties, or genders.

There seems to be no joke beyond the layering of allusions — to “get” this meme fully, you have to know the three memes circulating (the Rockwell meme, the Sweeney meme, the TikTok ragebait). It’s not even clear to me whether the original poster actually agrees that 8 AM meetings suck — if they identify themselves more with Sydney Sweeney/the Freedom of Speech man, or the audience judging her. There seems to be no orientation other than “this is content and you and I both know it.”

The allusion-making continues with this one. Here, the meme is split into four images, each a quarter-piece, by the Twitter Image Combination method — a result of a quirk in the way Twitter presents groups of photos, which originated around 2020 and has been used to make many kinds of memes (including Quarantine Couple, which I wrote about earlier). The meme is split into these four pieces and something weird is put in the corner, making it look like that’s what Sweeney gazes towards.

Again, there’s three allusions — the Sweeney meme, the Twitter Image Combination meme, and Nathan Fielder’s character from The Curse — and it’s unclear there’s any meaning or joke beyond just the obsessive layering of the allusions, the counterpoint on counterpoint.

I see this pattern over and over again on Twitter. Memes drift away from their original, specific situation and become about the real-life situation they’re embedded in: we’re on this platform together, we know these memes, and if we’re being honest with ourselves we know too many of these memes. There isn’t even a joke, it’s just that feeling of “oh, I recognize that, I was there for that” is one of the most powerful and algorithmically-attuned feelings.

Here’s my favorite one, which for me is the full-circle ending of this meme format:

This one uses a Seinfeld allusion. It’s the episode where George decides to be entirely honest with women and always do the exact opposite of what he thinks he should do — so he leads with what’s most afraid to confess about himself, and the joke of the episode is that the women all like it. I love Seinfeld and knew the reference right away.

But this post is also good because the allusion actually brings the meme back into its paradigmatic situation: a woman smiling at something about a male figure that she usually wouldn’t smile at. The emotional core of this meme is a wish for acceptance, even if it gets concealed under layers and layers of irony, allusion, riffing. And that’s what being on Twitter is all about.

All posts are really the same thing, when you get down to it: someone shouting “will you please love me” into a void, and making a few computers squirm like leaves when the wind blows through them.

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