Pete Davidson, c'est moi

novel objects of mass desire & my unexpected link (!) to this one

Hi friends,

At least two or three girlfriends ago, perhaps around the time he was dating Kim Kardashian, I got an adamant text: you need to write about Pete Davidson. In the almost unfathomable event the previous sentence met you with anything short of total comprehension, then first of all, I don’t know whether to offer congratulations or send help, and second, Pete Davidson is a comedian who rose to mega-fame less for his work on Saturday Night Live than by serially dating the world’s most famously beautiful women. He’s The King of Staten Island. This guy:

Universal

There are so many articles trying to parse why—how—him? Listicles of his attractive qualities. BDE speculation. Backlash against this. While such pieces will occasionally, almost accidentally, supply evidence that supports my explanation, for the most part, regardless of their veracity, they’re offering red herrings to his appeal. When I first got the you need to write about him text, though, I wasn’t sure I had much to say beyond this and this; obviously Pete Davidson is an object and beneficiary of mimetic desire! But I also didn’t register anything particularly noteworthy about him or the women he’s dated beyond textbook Girardian mechanics. Hot women want him a because other hot women want him, etc.

My calculus changed recently, when I finally read a comic novel from 1911 I’d stolen from my father on a whim last summer. You may not have heard of it, let alone read it—I hadn’t, initially picking it up purely because I like Modern Library editions. The novel is Sir Max Beerbohm’s one and only: Zuleika Dobson. This lady:

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Zuleika is a governess turned celebrity conjurer who charms the world’s most desirable young men, arriving at Oxford in the novel’s opening lines to the immediate bewitchment of its undergraduates. (“A cynosure indeed! A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.”) She is Pete Davidson’s fictional female forerunner to such an uncanny extent that it crystalized for me the actual reason we’re all so fascinated by him. It’s still not because he defies the laws of desire or has some special list of attributes, but I was also wrong about him being a typical mimetic case, at least in the real world. Pete Davidson’s desirability is literary. He illustrates mimetic desire to an extremity we’re unaccustomed to seeing outside a certain kind of fiction; he illustrates it almost cartoonishly—comically—like a real-life pastiche.

Textual analysis

Pete Davidson’s physical appearance, professional trajectory, behavioral mores, and effect on the opposite sex all directly, almost perfectly mirror Zuleika Dobson’s:

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.

While “not strictly beautiful” (implicitly, by Western standards), there is more than enough here to fill an admiring listicle. Beerbohm is careful in his descriptions of Zuleika’s appearance to modulate the intensity of her desirability vis-à-vis the extent to which young men, and especially the resplendent Duke of Dorset, find her beautiful with the mixed physical evidence to support it.

The Duke’s unwaveringly “pretty” housekeeper, Katie, provides a helpful foil on this score, but it is the Duke himself—the Ariana Grande and Emily Ratajkowski and Kim K. of Oxford undergraduates all rolled into one—who primarily plays this role. In contrast to Zuleika’s nuanced looks and charm and social ascendence to celebrity, the Duke is absurdly gorgeous, preternaturally intelligent, elegantly mannered, obscenely rich, and of the noblest lineage. Both Beerbohm and later, in dialogue with Zuleika, the Duke himself, spend pages and pages cataloguing the various facets of his almost inhuman perfection in hilariously minute detail:

For the rest, he had many accomplishments. He was adroit in the killing of all birds and fishes, stags and foxes. He played polo, cricket, racquets, chess, and billiards as well as such things can be played. He was fluent in all modern languages, had a very real talent in water-colour, and was accounted, by those who had had the privilege of hearing him, the best amateur pianist on this side of the Tweed. Little wonder, then, that he was idolised by the undergraduates of his day. He did not, however, honour many of them with his friendship.

Note that the Duke is idolized, like Kim Kardashian et al, by his peers, while Zuleika and Pete’s appeal is heavily, disproportionately weighted to the opposite sex. Katie and her mother instinctively loathe Zuleika. There are no think pieces pondering why guys dig Pete Davidson. All of this more or less follows mimetic theory: Zuleika and Pete are the objects of desire, while the Duke, Kim, Ariana, EmRata, &c. all model desire for them. Why do the other undergraduates and hot celebrity women so desperately want to possess Zuleika and Pete? Because they want to be the Duke and Kim.

The extra intrigue in these entanglements emerges from the Duke and Kim et al also being serious, Zuleika-and-Pete-level objects of mass desire. Never forget Kim Kardashian’s path to the cover of Vogue was paved by a sex tape—that is, via the male gaze, as an object of desire before a model for it. Similar story with Emily Ratajkowski, who entered the public consciousness in Robin Thicke’s grotesquely heterosexual “Blurred Lines” video years before becoming an essayist and podcaster. As for the handsome Duke:

He knew well, however, that women care little for a man’s appearance, and that what they seek in a man is strength of character, and rank, and wealth. These three gifts the Duke had in a high degree, and he was by women much courted because of them. Conscious that every maiden he met was eager to be his Duchess, he had assumed always a manner of high austerity among maidens, and even if he had wished to flirt with Zuleika he would hardly have known how to do it. But he did not wish to flirt with her. That she had bewitched him did but make it the more needful that he should shun all converse with her. It was imperative that he should banish her from his mind, quickly.

Every personage in both of these dramas has two crucial things in common: hyper-familiarity to the point of exhaustion with being an object of mass desire and, as a result, an unusually credible and thus especially alluring indifference to it. I would posit this indifference is the real “energy” of “BDE” and whatever its female equivalent. Zuleika falls in love for the first time with the Duke precisely due to his nonchalance at their introductory dinner. The minute he professes his love for her, though, she renounces him:

“You stirred my heart to its very depths. Yes, you made me love you madly. The pearls told you no lie. You were my idol—the one thing in the wide world to me. You were so different from any man I had ever seen except in dreams. You did not make a fool of yourself. I admired you. I respected you. I was all afire with adoration of you. And now,” she passed her hand across her eyes, “now it is all over. The idol has come sliding down its pedestal to fawn and grovel with all the other infatuates in the dust about my feet.”

Predictably, but with brilliant literary execution, her rejection only inflames the Duke’s resolve to have her. It is truly the early twentieth-century equivalent to Kim Kardashian’s response to Pete, per Harper’s Bazaar:

Though she was interested, Kardashian said that Davidson came across as indifferent toward her.

"But Pete does not come to my after-party—everyone was at my after-party—[he] does not give me the time of day, so a few days later, I called the producer at SNL and was like, 'Hey, do you have Pete's number?' And they were like, 'Yeah,'" she said. "I text him. I wasn't even thinking like, 'Oh my God, I'm gonna be in a relationship with him.' I was just thinking, 'Heard about this BDE [big d--- energy], need to get out there, I need to jumpstart my …'"

Kardashian added, "I was just basically DTF [down to f---]."

While they did end up in a relationship, like most of Pete Davidson’s relationships—like most relationships founded on mimetic desire more broadly—it did not last for long. Beerbohm has Zuleika herself explain why:

“My dear Duke,” said Zuleika, “don’t be so silly. Look at the matter sensibly. I know that lovers don’t try to regulate their emotions according to logic; but they do, nevertheless, unconsciously conform with some sort of logical system. I left off loving you when I found that you loved me. There is the premiss. Very well! Is it likely that I shall begin to love you again because you can’t leave off loving me?”

I won’t spoil the rest of the novel—it’s too good, and besides, the Pete Davidson dating saga is also very much ongoing, which brings me to a . . .

Personal twist

In my “research” for this post, I happened upon these lines in reference to Pete’s recent fleeting relationship with Emily Ratajkowski:

Following their spilt, the Saturday Night Live alum reportedly ditched Ratajkowski for his Bodies Bodies Bodies co-star Chase Sui Wonders.

Meanwhile, the model has been linked with artist Jack Greer, DJ Orazio Rispo and comedian Eric André in recent days.

The name struck me as if it had been in bold, underlined, and italicized all at once. Orazio Rispo. Orazio Rispo. There was no way the article could be referring to someone else, someone other than the Orazio Rispo I briefly dated in high school. He was a DJ even then.

It was, the more I thought about it, a humiliating development. I had not expected to be implicated in this piece, imagining myself, rather, like a haughty Beerbohmian cloud, floating above the novelistic foibles of these celebrities with, if not superiority, then at least narrative disinterest. I couldn’t have asked for a better reminder of how little the understanding of cognitive phenomena insulates one from their impact, especially in the desire department. Orazio Rispo? This Adonisian DJ, in the tabloids for dating one of the most beautiful women on earth? Reader, as a teenager I dumped him.

For the silliest, most mimetic reasons imaginable, too. He was two years behind me in school, which didn’t really matter to me—he was gorgeous even then, and no less mature than the boys in my year. He was also from New York, and had that precocious sophistication well-to-do City kids often have, particularly when it came to music—a genuine shared interest as I was a violinist. But my friends made fun of me for dating a younger boy, for “robbing the cradle”; they didn’t want to include him in group settings, and I was self-conscious of my desire for him.

And then there was the forthrightness of his desire for me, eschewing the indifference game I’d become all too skilled at playing. I can’t help but picture, in contrast to Orazio Rispo’s unequivocal handsomeness, my oversized eyes and anarchic curls, imitation-marble neck. My hands and feet are disproportionately large for my height. I’ve never had a waist to speak of. My confidence in diagnosing Pete Davidson’s appeal lies less in literary analysis than in that, at least at one point, I was him.

Wishing everyone a lovely Sunday, but especially Luke Burgis, the friend who sent me that original text, and my husband, who continues, unbelievably, to put up with me (happy birthday! lol),

Natasha