Are you friends with Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes film festival? Is your friendship a serious, considered affair, or do you entertain each other with pranks and japes?
If it’s the latter, try this, courtesy of Twitter user @ehdannyboy. 1. Using an iPhone, open your last iMessage from Frémaux (or another good friend) and hold down the camera icon. 2. When the camera loads, you’ll see a smaller camera icon at the bottom of your screen. Slide your thumb up to it. Congratulations! You have just taken a terrible selfie and automatically sent it to Frémaux, who hates them more than just about anyone – so much that he has tried to ban them from this year’s film festival. “You never look as ugly as you do in a selfie,” he commented, adding for good measure that he finds them “ridiculous and grotesque”.
I can’t condone any kind of harassment of the man, but I do think Frémaux might lighten up a bit if he recognised that selfies are now an inescapable part of life – and there’s a lot of fun to be had with them.
Nothing cheers me like the sight of a celebrity being papped on the red carpet, while snapping a picture of themselves – especially if the celebrity is gurning with glee and pressing their face into that of an even more famous celebrity who looks as if they’re desperately trying not to think about head lice. One of my favourite pictures of all time comes from a Vogue shoot by Annie Leibovitz and features Kim Kardashian taking a selfie with her baby, North, while Kanye West captures the image on his iPad, as the whole family stands in front of a giant mirror. I think we can be confident that North is being read the Greek legend of Echo and Narcissus as a bedtime story, with the tragic payoff – Narcissus being so transfixed by his own reflection in the water that he becomes a flower growing on the river bank – presented as a happy ending.
Essentially, we all have a childlike fascination with our own faces, and it doesn’t matter how many billions of people are looking at Kim, Kanye and the Cannes crowd. The admiring gaze that matters most to them is their own.
It’s comforting to think that celebrities take as many selfies as we do, as it suggests that fame doesn’t necessarily entail ennui. You can be the face that launched a million magazine covers but still think, as we would, “ZOMG! I’m six inches away from Meryl Streep! Must document this!”
However, maybe celebrities take selfies because they want to be a little more like us. When your image is endlessly circulated, criticised and commented on, you want to reclaim it. Selfies allow you to choose how the world sees you, and to make sure it matches up with the way you see yourself. When you’re feeling less than confident about your face and body, selfies can soothe you. If you’ve just seen a picture of yourself with a bit of a double chin, you can take 10 that give you the jawline of your dreams, just by holding your phone high above your face. Feeling a bit spotty and self-conscious? The Instagram Mayfair filter hides a multitude of sins, as well as giving people a bit of a tan. Frémaux is wrong – even if he thinks you look ugly in a selfie, as far as you’re concerned you’ve never looked better.
I despair of critics who slam selfies as the ultimate modern ill. Following the series of selfie-stick bans at various festivals, social media users were quick to point out that revellers at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight festival and Lonnie Donegan’s early skiffle gigs would have been desperate to snap themselves dancing and pouting, if they’d had the technology. At family gatherings, I find that the younger generation are not necessarily the ones who spend all their time on their phones. It’s the 65+ crowd who flip their camera lenses to the front, photobomb their grandchildren and beg, quite endearingly “Go on! Take a selfie of me!”
Of course this means we’re all terrible narcissists and the only thing limiting our self-obsession is the amount of storage space available on our phones, but Frémaux can’t end our appetite for self-documentation any more than Canute could stop the tides (even Canute would have uploaded a quick Instagram post tagged “Me and the tides! #LOL #Wet” given half a chance).
When we take a selfie, we’re at our most gorgeous, goofy and gleeful. We get a moment to pose, perform and be a little camp, and surely camp is what Cannes is all about. I recommend that Frémaux takes his phone out and starts having fun. He can capture any expression as long as he isn’t po-faced.
