As
Social Media democratizes the experience of celebrity, this year’s documentaries put a new spin on a familiar, often tragic tale
There’s a moment in The D’Amelio Show, the Hulu reality series about teenage TikTok stars Charli and Dixie D’Amelio and their parents, in which the 17-year-old Charli – who shot to fame on the platform as a 15-year-old sophomore in high school with chipper, lithe dance videos – tries to make sense of the rupture in her life: “I don’t consider myself famous,” she says in a standard reality confessional. “I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason. I think it was the right place, right time. I think it was a vibe, maybe, that I give off.”
I thought about this response for weeks after the show’s September premiere, first because it’s ridiculous for Charli D’Amelio to be considered “not famous” – she has, at time of writing, over 131m followers on TikTok – her name and face synonymous with the platform at the forefront of pop culture. But also, I get it. Over the course of a few months in 2019, Charli D’Amelio went from high schooler in Connecticut with today’s version of anonymity – a figure to your first and second hand connections, visible online with attention proportional to your peers – to global celebrity, the face of cultural forces (the
explosion of TikTok, the bland algorithmic medium of everyone’s taste) outside of one’s control or full understanding. How could anyone make sense of that? How could you see yourself?