Your daily Don't Worry Darling update
I can't believe I'm doing this again.
I hit “publish” last night roughly thirty seconds before Twitter lost its collective mind over “Spit-gate,” so I guess we have more to talk about!
Chris Pine, whose choice to have no social media and own an ancient flip phone* is looking smarter every day, became a meme over the weekend for looking like he would rather be on the surface of the moon without a spacesuit than doing DWD press.
He also has a degree in English from UC Berkeley, where he took an erotica writing class and his TA said he was great at it. That has nothing to do with any of this; it’s just my favorite Chris Pine fact.
Anyway, he got used as a child-of-divorce-like human shield between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh and Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles (who I guess didn’t interact much, possibly because they still haven’t officially confirmed that they’re dating. Someone should tell them that strategy has officially failed.)
So, and I’m just going to describe this without linking to it because I’m sure that if you’re reading this newsletter you’ve already watched the video roughly sic thousand times, Chris is sitting down at the premiere, clapping. Harry walks over, looks down at Chris, then flops down in his seat like he’s in someone’s rec room and they’re all about to enjoy a game of beer pong. But when he looked down at Chris, Chris stopped clapping and made a series of faces that might best be described as “quizzical.”
Then someone said it looked like Harry spit on Chris. And the problem is that it kind of doesn’t, but it also kind of does? But obviously that would be bonkers. But everything else about this movie’s rollout has been bonkers? So maybe? No. But maybe?
No. You guys: no. You all know in your heart of hearts that the most famous pop star in the world did not publicly spit on the non-transphobic Captain Kirk!
But society is collapsing and no therapy llamas have escaped into the streets recently, so Twitter just fucking ran with it, leading us to the present moment, where both Chris Pine and Harry Styles’s reps have been forced to deny that there was any spitting. Well done, internet. Well done.
Anyway, I am with Linda Holmes, in that this is the thing that really bothered me about that video:
Seriously, what is this nonsense:
A few more links: The Independent provides us with a timeline that explains nothing, Lainey Gossip also can’t believe what a mess it all was, Tom & Lorenzo give Chris Pine kudos for looking “like the villain in a John Hughes movie,” and look at the tiny font Go Fug Yourself had to use to recap the drama!
*He has an iPhone, but watching “Chris Pine and his flip phone” become shorthand for “staying out of the drama” has been so entertaining that I haven’t had the heart to be pedantic about it (until now).