The relatability shtick falls flat if you’re too famous
I’ve decided that celebrities should hire me. Not to write their TV shows or movies (although yes, that would also be good), but for a more important social media-based role. My job would be to warn them when they are about to cross The Relatability Line. The Relatability Line is a rope across the entry of your descent into Twitter Hell.
This job may seem needless but we are living through unprecedented times. At no point in history have normies had this kind of direct access to famous people and their thoughts, and vice versa – I do wish I could have followed @maewest. Added into this mix is the fact there is a generation of famous people, or getting-famous people, who grew up using social media just as much as their fans. They are good at it and funny, they like it, and slinging off content comes to them like breathing. It can be hard for them to know when is best to stop.
That’s where I would come in.
The unrelatability of the rich and famous used to be harder to spot. The rise of the internet, of paparazzi culture and constant monitoring has changed that, but often celebrities simply just send social media posts out into the world themselves. There was David Geffen, deleting his Instagram after posting Covid well-wishes from his $590m superyacht. Ellen came under fire for comparingquarantining at her mansion to being in jail. In a 2019 incident, Lizzo got dragged for complaining about a poorly paid food delivery driver to her then 1 million followers. There’s Kendall Jenner, on camera, happy to show she does not know howto cut a cucumber. These sorts of incidents, and backlash to the incidents, confirm to the public that celebrities being incredibly out of touch is common. It means they are primed to look for any sign of it.
A few days ago, I saw a tweet from Keke Palmer that made me concerned for her. If you know who Keke Palmer is, you might find this surprising. She has always been funny and delightful on Twitter, but she is also a multi-talented actor/singer/comedian/writer. She has been working solidly for a long time in the US, but her fame is on the rise in a more mainstream way with her recent star turn in Jordan Peele’s Nope. She’s moving from an international Who?, to a Them. I love her. She’s also pregnant, seems happy, and has a boyfriend so good looking that I, a lesbian, am jealous. She’s thriving! This is why I’m concerned. I saw her tweet the following:
This charming and funny “she’s just like us!” tweet tickled my spidey (web as in online) senses. Keke has played The Sims for a really long time (just like me!), which a lot of people have historically loved about her. I know she is being authentic about loving The Sims, and I think she is within her rights to tweet a company about a payment issue. But I was concerned that she might receive backlash for using her platform to get help, or save money.
Keke is tiptoeing up to The Relatability Line. The buzz around Nope, and the buzz around her for clearly being a star in Nope has kicked Keke a step higher in the direction of superstardom. I get the sense that she’s *just about* too famous to keep posting in the same way she has, aimed simply at her followers.
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When working celebs reach a certain level of prominence, the things they say are no longer just spoken out to an established audience who loves them. They have more eyes on their output, more scrutiny on every word, more people to interpret a tweet, more points of views to keep in mind, more articles to write. In Keke Palmer’s case, there are also the additional threats of misogyny and racism directed at her.
Along with this, once people know or believe that a certain person they follow has a certain level of wealth or even just assumed wealth, they are very unlikely to give them a pass when they discuss money stuff.
Chrissy Teigen, a very funny poster, found this out when she got more famous and tweeted a story about buying a $13,000 bottle of wine. After a long career tweeting, and a growing career outside that, she eventually quitthe platform.
There’s already a bit of that in the replies and quote tweets to Keke’s tweet. Lots of people are complaining that EA responded quickly to Keke and will fix it, when they won’t for normal people. Many people are telling her that she should pay for it herself. It’s not a huge level of backlash, and there are many more tweets still loving Keke’s relatable Sims tweets, but I think this is where I would advise her to take a small step back.
It must actually be very difficult to try and remain funny and normal on social media when your day-to-day outside that (I imagine) becomes quite disconnected from real life. It must be a bit like getting older: at some point you just cannot keep up with what the cool young kids are saying, no matter how hard you try – no cap (not sure if I’m using that right).
Keke has not crossed any lines yet, but it may not even matter in the end. Anna Kendrick is famously funny on Twitter, and did an OK job in her posts of seeming on this side of The Relatability Line, but it still couldn’t work – people will disbelieve and then get annoyed by a relatability shtick if they have also seen you in a feature film.
There is a good chance Palmer will navigate these waters totally fine; she’s quite a pro at hitting the right irony level for the internet. I just think she’s approaching the line, and crossing it could lead to a much worse time for her on social media.
The best course of action is for her to hire me to tell her to take a break, and then take a break. She can put down her phone and go outside to look at sunflowers or run in slow motion on the beach with her labrador, or whatever you people who can put down your phone do. And one day when I start to become famous, and you see me do a tweet complaining about a fancy jorts company – I hope you will be brave enough to warn me.
• Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
es and a broken nose and that she was wearing someone else’s clothes. The cause of death for Places was left undetermined. Their families, who both appear in Murder in Big Horn, have been pushing ever since for answers, with little help from or in opposition to law enforcement.
Lackluster responses and languishing cases are the norm for many families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), an epidemic in the US and Canada that has in recent years received significant national media attention, though few answers for loved ones. Investigations “usually end up having to be done by the family and the community members themselves”, Lucy Simpson, the executive director of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, told the Guardian. “In so many of these cases, it’s the family that finds their loved one, that does the search to find their loved one because law enforcement doesn’t participate, or doesn’t feel that it’s a priority, or makes excuses based on generally accepted stereotypes about Native people.”
Over three episodes, Murder in Big Horn examines the MMIW crisis in microcosm and in context, through four families still seeking answers and through the history of cultural and physical violence against Indigenous people in the US. Montana has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country – according to a state report from 2017-2019, Indigenous people comprised about 6.7% of the population but accounted for 26% of missing persons cases. Big Horn county, in which 65% of the population identifies as Native American, has the worst rate in the state; by the time Selena Not Afraid disappeared on New Year’s Day 2020, she was at least the 28th missing Indigenous woman in the county for the prior year.
Benally, who is Oglala Lakota and Diné, and Galkin, who is white, began work on the series in 2020 after the disappearance of Not Afraid. The 16-year-old was last seen alive in a broken-down car with friends at a rest stop along I-90, the high-trafficked interstate the cuts through Big Horn county – Montana’s sixth-largest, spanning parts of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations. Her disappearance marked a turning point in anemic public responses; within hours, there were drones, dogs and officers searching for her. Not Afraid’s family camped out at the rest stop, bringing media attention to her disappearance. The New York Times and other national media covered the case. Her body was found nearly three weeks later, less than a mile from the rest stop, in a patch of open land with shrubby grass. Like with Scott, Montana officials ruled her cause of death to be hypothermia.
The grassroots attention for her case, building on outrage over the handling of Scott’s and Places’, represented the “sort of groundswell of advocacy [that] grew to the point that these cases are what got the national attention on the MMIW issue”, Galkin said. Along with sibling producers Ivan and Ivy MacDonald, of north-west Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, Benally and Galkin traveled to Big Horn county to meet family members seeking justice. The film-makers explicitly avoided “extractive storytelling” in which outsiders parachute in, report quickly and leave, and instead “tried our best to tell the story as ethically as possible, and also with honor, to ensure that the families were able to speak their truth”, said Benally. “Because let’s be real, this issue needs a platform, and we needed to ensure that the families had a chance to be heard.”
Murder in Big Horn is thus cleareyed on the crisis, though less attuned to dire, often faceless statistics than the personal experience of families – Scott’s, Places’, Not Afraid’s, and the loved ones of Shacaiah Harding, who disappeared and was likely trafficked via I-90 in 2018. “These cases are not true crime stories to us. These cases are our relatives,” says Luella Brien, a Crow journalist with Indigenous-led Four Points Press whose aunt Deedee Brien was likely killed – the case was never solved – at 17 in 1977, and whose sons attended school with Not Afraid. “These are not only our sisters, our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunties, our daughters, but they’re human beings,” said Simpson.
The series also examines, episode by episode, the perfect storm of legal, cultural and historical factors which contribute to disappeared women and girls and unsolved, unhandled cases. There’s the immediate factors: the ability of I-90, which bisects Big Horn county, to swiftly move trafficked women and girls out of state. A jurisdictional tangle between state, federal and tribal authorities that allows most cases to fall through the cracks, and prevents the Department of the Interior’s newly formed missing and murdered unit from having sufficient power. (Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous US cabinet secretary, announced the launch of the unit in 2021; it has since faced criticism for inefficiency and ineffectiveness.)
More broadly, there’s the history of violence, discrimination and forced assimilation against Native people by the US government, including the reservation system that, the series argues, was designed for Native Americans to fail rather than thrive. The roots of the MMIW crisis, and pervasive indifference to violence against Indigenous women, are found in the history of colonization and “the lack of respect and humanity that Native peoples have been treated with historically”, said Simpson, which “still have a holdover in a lot of these federal policies, and as well as some of the ways in which our own communities have internalized some of that”.
Whereas most true crime series usually wind through leads and red herrings and contested interpretations, Murder in Big Horn hits a wall early and often: there are no theories, because there was never an investigation. (The Big Horn county sheriff’s office, as well as any active law enforcement representative, declined to participate in the series.) “The mystery is that there’s no mystery,” said Galkin. “If you look closely enough, it’s clear why these things are happening.”
Benally recalled filming during the search for Gabby Petito, a 22-yearold white woman who disappeared while vacationing with her boyfriend in Wyoming, and whose case became a national news and social media fixation in stark contrast to many missing Indigenous women. “As we’re interviewing families and we’re listening to them talk about how there was no urgency from law enforcement to do any sort of search and rescue, to file a missing person’s report, it really had me thinking, ‘Well, what does it take?’” she said. “What does it take for there to be this urgent response from law enforcement, from society, when one of our girls goes missing?”
“I’ll always have hope for some kind of justice,” she added, for the series to reach people who could re-examine the crimes against Scott, Places, Not Afraid and Harding, to “see if there’s something that can be done to find justice for these families. The families deserve some answers.”
Murder in Big Horn starts on Showtime on 5 February with a UK release to be announced