The (False) Promises of Image
*Slight Trigger warning, derogatory words regarding women are used in this post as it relates to Kirill Bichutsky’s Instagram handle, “sl__whisperer;” if such content disturbs you please move to another post.
I want to begin this post with something a little different; a challenge. Posted below is a series of varying meme characters, ones anyone who has spent any time on the internet should know; the challenge I offer is this, without Googling it, provide the actual names of the people in the memes.
Admittedly, this may have been an unfair challenge, as only one of these characters have been fully identified, Sammy Griner, aka “Success Kid”, the others either identify themselves only by their first names (Mario and Laura being the couple on the right in the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme) or choose full anonymity as in the case of “Good Guy Greg” and presumably many other’a who have become the subjects of memes.
“Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” (Gen 11:4)*
Genesis 11 offers us a story commonly referred to as The Tower of Babel, in it the people of the world are living in one place together speaking a single language. When gathered the people devise a plan to obtain some version of immortality, an escape from Death, and so they build a great tower into the heavens. Seeing this God comes down and confuses the languages, as previously noted, It serves as a scene in which once familiar people speaking once familiar words are suddenly replaced with belligerent strangers speaking indecipherable tongues. It is a world where words have lost their meaning and where a place and neighbor who was once familiar and comforting becomes dangerous and threatening. Where relationships break down and where people are suddenly divided.
The principalities promise us an escape from Death (a concept I will eventually explore in a later post), they tempt us with false promises of immortality and life, and the problem is that they are so pervasive, so over-arching, that often we become enamored and held captive by them, even without our knowing. These promises though are ultimately false. They are deceptive, because the only one who can free us from Death is God; what we instead get are these principalities, these institutions, ideologies, and images** and although each principality is powerful in its own right, being creatures who are of a higher order than ourselves, there are perhaps none more prevalent in our modern day-to-day lives than those of the images.
There was perhaps a time when images weren’t so all-encompassing, so prevalent, a time when a smaller proportion of people had to struggle with them, people in the pre-internet age, for instance, could more readily detach themselves from their images, if only temporarily, they had a greater chance at anonymity, moments when even the people beneath the great American images of the sex-goddess or King of Rock and Roll could step away and just for a moment be Marilyn or Elvis; could step away from the image and be the person.
These images are something we all carry with us, especially any of us who spend anytime engaging in social media or the internet at large. We carry them to work, to school, to encounters with friends and family, they affect how we present ourselves, how others see us, in some ways even, they possess us, causing us to do and say things in service, not to ourselves, but to the image of ourselves.
And social media, as noted, is perhaps at least in part responsible for this shift, thanks to social media we have a window into each other’s lives 24/7 and some of us have to be consciously removed from it in order to be freed from the images we hold. We reinvent ourselves, or so we think, to whatever degree we want, and as we do so we see the image (or images) change, adapt, become even more demanding. And so in the case of some, escape has reached a point of near impossibility, the person has become captive to the image, the image has surpassed the human.
I use these examples above, these memes, if only as a semi-humorous example. After all, we know these images, these modern icons as the names they’ve been given, not as the names of the people themselves. The personalities and persons aren’t important, what is important is the image of Success Kid, or the image of Distracted Boyfriend. We know, or think we know at least, the image, not the person. As is the case of Marilyn Monroe before our time, we know the image, the woman with incredible sex appeal who, fortunately for the image, died young so as not to inconvenience the eternal youth of that image, or as William Stringfellow more aptly put it, “Marilyn Monroe is not dead because there were two lives that claimed and used that name: one a principality, the other a person; only the latter died, the former is, if anything, livelier than ever.” (W.S. Free in Obedience), in short, through the work of babel, these images have built a great tower so as to make a name for themselves.
This is made readily apparent if one spends anytime on social media. When we enter into this world we create an image of ourselves, a variation that is more-or-less the same or different from our actual self. When we enter into this world we engage with any number of versions of ourselves, we all have different flavors of ourselves after all, we all have different personas, different lenses (my father, for instance who has never quoted or referenced Scripture to me in his life when given Facebook is suddenly an 80-year-old Bible-believing southern woman).
In my previous blog post I noted the nature of the possession of Donald by his own image, and that there are at least two Donald Trumps (though since the presidency the argument could be made there are at least three). The image of Donald Trump is separated from the actual Donald just as the image of President Trump is separated from both, and yet the three are seemingly so interconnected, so dependent on one another at this point that it may be truly difficult, if not impossible, to truly distinguish one from the other.
Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, these all demand we present ourselves, not as the humans we are but rather as heavily modified and curated versions of ourselves, images. Nearly everything we do on social media is a product of this pursuit of image, the posts we make, the things we view and upload and like, our check-ins and reviews, when we are online we are not so much people as we are capital, products, numbers in some algorithm being used to get us to buy and selling us to companies so that we might continue to buy.
Perhaps nowhere in my recent memory is this idea of image more apparent than in the recent Netflix documentary, The American Meme. The documentary follows various internet figures as, among others, Paris Hilton (did anyone know she was still relevant in some circles?), Kirill Bichutsky (slutwhipserer), and Josh Ostrovsky (The Fat Jewish)***; and it serves to some extent as a parable, maybe even as a warning against this concept of image, even though the documentary wouldn’t phrase it as such.
The people in the documentary offer some insight into what their lives look like and largely, despite all the fame and fortune coming off the meme status, the internet stardom, there’s a level of outright melancholy and oppression clearly at work in the lives of these folks. Brittany Furlan, an Instagram model provides her voice as one of dissent (one might even say lament) at times saying things like, “this is the sort of things we do for social media,” or, “I don’t have to be myself.”
Brittany, like many on social media, doesn’t have to be herself, given the wide array of platforms she, like the rest of us, can be anyone she wants. The young girl from Pennsylvania is replaced by someone other than herself, someone sexy and funny, someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her, someone who can make tens of thousands off a single Instagram post.
But no one steals the documentary quite as much as Kirill, or as he is known on Instagram, “slutwhisperer.” Throughout the documentary Kirill talks about his being absorbed into the nightlife scene and likewise his transition from Kirill Bichutsky, the young immigrant from Moscow, into slutwhisperer, the “champagne facial” giving, eternally drinking, center-of-attention, woman-laying party animal with a 1.3 million Instagram following.
“I got sucked into the nightlife and a part of me wishes I didn’t, but that’s the foundation of what everything is now.”
Kirill speaks in such a way as to seemingly indicate that he is both disgusted by the image of slutwhisperer, and yet trapped; hating the part he plays and yet altogether unable to escape it, he speaks as a man possessed, held captive to slutwhisperer, an image who demands he offer up his entire self to the image.
Stringfellow notes this idea of possession, of the demand of the Image in his work, Free in Obedience, where he writes that the image:
“not only requires recognition and adulation… but also demands that the person of the same name gives us his life as a person to the service and homage of the image. And when that surrender is made, the person in fact dies, though not yet physically. For at that moment he is literally possessed by his own image. The demand… is one in which the whole life of the person is surrendered to the principality and is given over to the worship of the image.”
Considering these words, they seem strangely prophetic when Kirill laments,
“Slutwhisperer has taken over me, I think over time I have found a way to have a split personality.”
The documentary ends with a scene of the future of this idea of image, perhaps the culmination of the promise and the lie of the principality of image, that we can escape Death, that we can achieve immortality and make a great name for ourselves. Paris Hilton describes her work in ensuring that her image outlives her, that somewhere somehow she can remain young and beautiful forever; she shows off her work with various game developers who are working to create her own digital world, a sort of Second Life where she is eternally youthful, eternally sexy, eternally the Paris of the early 2000s, eternally DJing a party which never ends, a party where trolls can easily be ejected so as not to disturb this Paradise; it ends with her words overlaying her own now digital and “eternal” image saying,
“A lot of people don’t understand, you need to be sustainable forever.”
Disrupting the Image
Like the Medieval concept of Guardian Angels we all carry one, if not more, images with us. They are inescapable. The problem arises though when we begin to make sacrifices in order to appease them, in order to do things that align not with us as individuals, but with the images we work to maintain. After all, this very blog is one that is a product of image, after all I portray myself in a certain light and you in turn read something into me. Even as I may try to be genuinely myself I am still affected by the image I seek to present. And so the best recourse is not to simply pull away from social media altogether but rather it is to remember our own humanity and especially to remember the humanity of others in our social media interactions.
When we encounter people online may we seek to first and foremost remember that we are dealing with people not things, not merely images. We are doing more than just interacting with an adversary when we fight with someone on Facebook, we are fighting with a person, someone we all-too-often have the habit of dehumanizing. How many of us have had relationships which have been harmed by a post on social media? Would that have happened had the interaction taken place in the non digital world? I absolutely need to take myself to task here for I am absolutely guilty of this. After all it is much easier to other someone on Facebook, much easier to write someone off with some dehumanizing label.
Remember then, when interacting online, that you are dealing with a person. You are likewise being perceived by people. And people are predominantly interacting not with you but with your image.
Lord, we come to you as a people so often held captive by our images. So often willing to dehumanize another because we’re so concerned with the image we encounter that we forget the person behind it. And so may we be slow to speak and quick to forgive, quick to show grace, quick to lay down our manifested and image-related internet rage and divisions and more readily work towards rebuilding the relationships, towards healing. Free those who are possessed and unable to escape. Return their humanity that they might remember the freedom and life that you alone can offer. Amen.
*Unless otherwise noted the Scriptural quotations use either Robert Atler’s Hebrew Bible translation or David Bentley Hart’s New Testament translation, sources below.
**William Stringfellow expands on the idea of the Principalities most accessible in his book, Free in Obedience (citation below), specifically naming them as Ideologies, Institutions, and Images; these are (ontologically-speaking) beings, created by God with the intention of our holding dominion over them, and yet due to the world’s fallenness, these principalities now hold a degree of dominion over us within the world of the Fall.
**I’m not linking these Instagram accounts, you can Google them yourselves if you so-please.
- Atler, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, vs 1–3. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2018.
- Stringfellow, William. Free in Obedience. New York: The Seabury Press, 1964.
