The day Heated Rivalry premiered on Amazon Prime Video, my For You page was flooded with edits of its two leading men: beautiful, intense, and instantly magnetic. Honestly, a treat to the eyes. The queer romance story steeped in ambition and rivalry, with the masculine world of professional hockey serving as the backdrop, was poised for acclaim– and it received it. But almost immediately, the applause was subsumed into a version of fame where the masses’ envy became disguised as realism: a classic hate train.
What was striking was not just criticism itself, but where it came from. Many of the most horrendous critiques targeting the acting abilities of actors came from a subsection of the audience with adjacent career fields – people who felt that they could’ve achieved the same success under different circumstances. Here, their achievements were sanitised by luck, success became undeserved, and therefore fair game for ridicule.
I feel that the way internet has made everything accessible plays a big role in how celebrities who obtain overnight success are digested.The immediacy with which they can be dissected and trolled has been made easier too since social media has collapsed the distance between celebrities and the audience. Now, there exists an illusion of intimacy. With celebrities doing instagram lives, PR interviews with content creators, and one-on-one interactions with fans, celebrities are marketed as ‘just like us’. However, at the end of the day, this accessibility is just a performance. They are unattainable and the contradiction of wanting them to be ordinary while treating them as extraordinary creates mercurial tension.
Hudson Williams, who plays Shane Hollander in the series became the first celebrity victim of Letterboxd, where his reviews of Lolita, Dune, and Hunger Games resurfaced – exemplifying this dynamic. His viewers expressed vexation based on stuff he wrote years ago. Despite studying Film, he was mocked for articulating perspectives on a medium he was well-versed in. The internet’s ability to exhume every fragment of a person’s digital footprint is deeply concerning. It happens to the best of us – our old Facebook photos from 2015 being the talk of group chat material even when you’ve outgrown your smokey eye look. So one can imagine what would happen to someone who appears, at least in the public imagination, like the universe favoured them unjustly.
As it turns out, the idea of putting someone on a pedestal exists so it can be kicked out from underneath them.
On the algorithm front – sorry to burst your bubble – it lies to you. It will never confront you with opposing thoughts or with perspectives you might not foster to keep you hooked. Hostility may not be ethical and yet it brings the most views, keeps the numbers up, and the engagement sustains celebrities’ relevance. In this economy, controversies become more memorable than art, and the celebrities are dehumanised not despite backlash but because of it.
So, does the internet hate success? Perhaps not inherently. But it has built systems that struggle to coexist with it. Today, success no longer arrives alone, but shows up with a target on the back.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash