Timothée Chalamet is richer, more attractive and (probably) younger than you, so it should come as no surprise that he is also a more patient plane traveller.
Yesterday, Twitter user @alankruthahaha wrote a long, long thread about being seated next to the actor on a plane for three hours, breathlessly relaying every detail of their interaction to the internet (“He loves Easy A!” “He eats pretzels quite quickly!”). She was rewarded with thousands upon thousands of likes in return. It’s nice to know that Chalamet is patient enough to spend his flight chatting endlessly to an excited fan, but that doesn’t stop the subsequent reportage from being unbelievably creepy.
This isn’t the first time someone has had their privacy invaded on a plane. Last July, a woman live-tweeted the behaviour of a flirtatious couple sitting in front of her, taking their photograph without consent. By the time she had finished, #Planebae was trending worldwide, and it was equally creepy as hell. Behaviour such as this isn’t confined to planes – see the idiot who tweeted Greta Gerwig’s reaction to the film I Feel Pretty from inside the cinema while the film was on – but they seem to take the lion’s share. And this might be because planes are weird spaces to occupy.
They have the distinction of simultaneously being public and extremely intimate. When you board a plane, you could feasibly be wedged in alongside anyone; a celebrity, flirtatious strangers, a tetchy couple. And you are wedged there for hours. In the street, you would witness only a split-second of their behaviour, but on a flight you get to see an entire narrative play out. It is much more compelling.
But, obviously, that doesn’t give you the right to blab it online, because you have no control over what happens once you do. The author of the Chalamet tweets maybe didn’t expect them to go viral, and she certainly wouldn’t have expected them to be pored over in the media. But her story should be a cautionary tale: if you want to tweet a conversation on a plane, don’t.
