All the viral people

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Jameson Rich on yet another way social media is eliminating the barriers between different spheres of public life.

Late in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the 2021 high drag biopic on proto-telepreachers Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, Jessica Chastain in the title role––burdened with a duo of Oscar-winning prosthetic cheeks taller than her hair––confronts a group of college boys who’ve been snickering behind their hands about the fallen icon who has somehow ended up as their neighbor. Watching the movie for the first time, as Chastain shook hands with the boy staged closest to the camera, my eye snagged on his face. Recognition chimed softly, as if a bell had been struck in a distant room of my brain. 

The movie is forwardly about performance and its many layers. The Bakkers were early practitioners of a strain of theatrical authenticity disseminated via broadcasting that has since burned through the culture. So it felt fittingly metatextual when I realized the face that had jolted me to a remove belonged to TikToker Joe Ando-Hirsh (2.3 million followers). Ando-Hirsh and his girlfriend Niamh Adkins (2.2 million followers) preciously document their relationship and lives in New York City; I know them not as a follower but from having their faces served to me from a gallery of other yelping characters in the brief moments when I’ve navigated to Instagram’s search bar. Their faces snuck into my subconscious without invitation and now Ando-Hirsh’s had leapt mediums. Disorienting, like walking out of one’s college apartment to see a woman who’d once had her own Christian theme park climbing out of a beat-up car. 

But online, such rupture is everyday. Over the past few years, a raft of young and viral social media stars have made their feature film debuts. And contra to the forced attempts to push charm-anemic, high-net-follower individuals into crossover fame––TikToker Addison Rae (88.8M followers) stretched herself by playing a TikToker who isn’t named Addison Rae in Netflix’s He’s All That––these recent debuts are full of genuine potential. To launch oneself toward greater heights from a low perch is not a novel practice in American fame, but at a time when television––formerly the devalued minor leagues to film’s majors––is attracting the biggest stars and the highest budgets, the path from one level to another is no longer so clear. And this shift has confounded my own stalwart actor radar. I used to be able to answer a friend’s question, “Where do I know them from?” with precision, but now when it concerns a young, faintly unplaceable face in a new movie, my default guess is “TikTok.” 

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