The good thing about a long commute is that it leaves you with plenty of time to think, so you can really pick at those things in the corner of your brain.
I’m about to half-assed pop psychology all over this crap.
So, yesterday was really interesting from a picking apart Chris Evan’s subconscious kind of an angle. I don’t want to look at the still photos montage. I only want to think about the first and third posted video – the mouth video and the Mario Kart video.
We now know from the scare video dump in January and this dump yesterday that there’s a lot of material floating around out there on cell phones. (But, yeah, we already guessed that, didn’t we.) So, we have to really start finely parsing why a person would choose two videos as bizarrely uncomfortable as those he posted to try to sell a “serious love story” on the holiday for the serious love story. Because neither of those videos sold love or even affection – they sold the subtext of disdain.
When you both say in a video you post “you’re not going to like this” or write “she hates this, but I find it funny,” you are communicating an inherent lack of respect for the person you are showing as the subject of said videos. There’s no way you can look at either video and not see that in some way Alba is being portrayed, whether intentionally or not, as somehow inept or incompetent, hapless or helpless. She “doesn’t know what to say” or do in the first one; she is being put physically in a position which has inherent sexualized overtones from porn culture. He is physically holding her down, to a certain way of thinking. In the second video she struggles to play a video game originated before she was ever born(!), and he finds this ineptitude to be hilarious. From my way of viewing, as the audience, I don’t find either video to be indicative of cute couples’ behavior behind the scenes, but rather of an older dominant male putting a younger more inexperienced female into shaming/ridiculing situations. And then blasting those situations to the world via social media.
Why would you ever make those choices for those videos, knowing you probably have others to choose from that show situations far less riddled with open-ended interpretation. (Let’s be real, he could have shown them skiing at Okemo, not much subtext there.)
This is where we get into the pop psychology angle, which I’m probably just going to massacre, but oh well. We all started musing about that “I hate myself” quote the minute we read it in SMA. Now, I invite you to think about the psychology concept of projection.
I think that self-hatred and self-loathing he holds is far deeper and far more insidious than any of us can comprehend. I’ll give him some credit, he’s done a somewhat good job of covering it up and still having career success even while dragging it around.
But it’s bad, and I think he directs a lot of it into his interpersonal relationships with women.
That self-hatred and self-loathing is what keeps him from having true long-lasting and healthy romantic partnerships. He subconsciously detaches parts of it from himself, through his insecurities, and projects those insecurities onto his partner. Therefore, he’s already given himself an out for why the relationship will fail, but it’s not on him, because he’s projected it onto them. However, it is always on him, even if he can’t see that, because he’s never working on the actual root cause of why everything doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, doesn’t fulfill his intense emotional lacks: because he’s never acknowledged that there is some intense trauma there somewhere that set this self-hate and self-loathing into action, and that it needs to be brought into the light with therapy and worked on. Nothing will change until that happens.
Instead, the subconscious cycles and patterns are self-perpetuating, so he will continue to search out situations which feed the cycles. Ergo, always someone he can project onto, not someone self-realized enough to be the kind of person who could actually help him come to terms with his own trauma.
So, whatever this toxic situation with Alba is, it is even more toxic because it serves his subconscious need to project all his own insecurities onto her. And she’s in no way capable of stopping that, because she just doesn’t have the life or relationship experience to do so. So, I postulate that what you see in those two videos, that’s him projecting his own self-disdain, self-ridicule, and immaturity onto her in a situation he has perfectly created for it. If you’re watching those videos and you feel like Chris is viewing her through a lens of shaming or derision, know it’s not just her: he’s viewing himself the same way as well.
So, I’ll end by paraphrasing a great line from Hamlet: Get thee to a nunnery. (Apt, given Chris also has a really off-the-rails Madonna/Whore complex.)
Chris – get thee to a psychoanalyst’s couch.
(Freud's actual couch.)
