In a recent article published by French weekly L’Express, the critic Louis-Henri La Rochefoucauld – the white, heterosexual, male, prize-winning author of a novel about a white, heterosexual playwright – interprets the awarding of last year’s Booker Prize to David Szalay’s Flesh as a sign of Trumpian times. According to La Rochefoucauld, if Szalay’s social-realist tale about the rise and fall of a traumatized young Hungarian in today’s globalized capitalism could achieve such success, it has to be because wokeism and feminism are on the decline. Whether or not you agree with La Rochefoucauld, his review proves the opposite of the point he’s trying to bring across, stressing the fact that, as far as cultural debates and literary criticism are concerned, we’re already locked up in today’s ideological argument: Novels are no longer discussed for their intrinsic stylistic or literary quality, but with regards to what they say or what people think they are saying about the state of wokeism, feminism and the decolonized Western mind.
One of the many qualities of Jasmine Lee-Jones’ play Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner lies in how it doesn’t shy away from explicitly taking a stance within this debate. Her play is, to pastiche Lee-Jones’ language, both politically and stylistically radical af. Half of the scenes are so-called Twitterludes and take place in the digital world of social media, with an abundance of hashtags, acronyms, memes, GIFs, and the Internet’s linguistic atrophies apt to render suicidal any of the (mostly white) gatekeepers of Oxford English. A quick browse through the text” of the play reveals a wild amalgamation of irl dialogues and verbal squabbling on the TL (timeline) – definitely a challenge for both the director and the actors.
Breaking up with the dichotomy opposing Academic English and Internet slang, Cleo (Céline Camarra), the main character of the play, is both an academic doing research for a PhD on structural racism and an online activist called INCOGNEGRO. She sets loose after discovering that Forbes qualified Kylie Jenner as the world’s youngest self-made millionaire. WTF is “self-made” about a privileged white woman whose wealth is built on a family fortune?, asks Cleo. Her research revolves around how the female black body has been ostracized for centuries, racist speech heavily targeting features such as thick lips or pronounced body curves – features white influencers nowadays appropriate themselves with a little plastic surgery, transubstantiating racist insults into new erotic trends just because they have the “right” color of skin.
To Cleo, the Forbes tweet metonymizes “hundreds of years of anti-blackness” and “colludes”, in under fifty characters, “in the systematic historical and present-day dehumanization of the black female body” as well as “the idolatry of white womanhood in abusive hegemonic white infrastructures”. Where Percival Everett’s novel Erasure showed how the fictionalization of black lives by black writers can readily lead to cultural appropriation and white voyeurism, the amalgamation and hierarchization of different linguistic styles – for every “that nigga dead”, there’s a word such as “gender-neutral” – used by Lee-Jone’s characters nips any such recuperation in the bud.
Her anger only inflates in the echo chambers of social media, where cognitive biases meet unfettered hate. Cleo starts imagining seven ways of inflicting a brutal death on Kylie Jenner, those imaginary deaths by shooting, poisoning, burning, skinning, drowning, disgrace and displacement structuring the play in about the same way the seven deadly sins structured David Fincher’s cult movie Seven. Lee-Jones suggests (structural) racism, tokenism, misogyny, homophobia, cultural appropriation, digital hatred and body shaming might readily qualify as the seven new deadly sins.
Her best friend Kara (Nora Zrika) is flabbergasted to see her friend throwing herself as well as her intellectual integrity into the arena of social media debate – if she’s used to not understanding Cleo, it’s usually because of her profuse use of academic jargon rather than her erratic posts. But when Kara says Cleo’s posts are too unnuanced, the latter explains her teacher marked down her recent essay on slavery because she had failed to present the two sides of the argument, suggesting nuance is, in some cases, just another white privilege. As the debate on the TL evolves and echoes of Cleo’s past get boomeranged on her thread – back in the day, Cleo published two homophobic posts – her friendship with Kara is put to a test: It turns out Kara once declared her (unrequited) feelings for Cleo, who is seemingly not at ease with her friend’s sexuality.
If people usually equate seven dog years to one human year, the short-lived nature of everything on the World Wide Web would call for an even greater divide between the Internet years and our biological ones. Taking us back to the early days of the Twittersphere, years before Elon Musk metamorphosed the social network into a platform where hate speech proliferates even faster than Covid infections in February 2020, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner almost diffuses something as superficially oxymoronic as Internet nostalgia: In the same way you sometimes indulgently look back on a past toxic relationship because your mind suppressed the bad memories, Lee-Jones’ depiction of Twitter feels almost humane, with its occasionally humorous threads and memes. However, beyond the humorous tone looms a comment on the commodification of black lives through the very memes representing them: One culture should only borrow or quote from another if the general context and frame are ones of equal respect and acknowledgement, of horizontality rather than verticality.
In David Fincher’s The Social Network, there’s a line uttered by Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) that goes something like this: “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet.” Continuing her reflection on the transposition of digital realms designed for practicality and efficiency rather than aesthetics, a reflection that began with Opera Go and she pursued with Spring Awakenings, director Anne Simon has found a way both semantically poignant and visually satisfying to render the Internet’s chaotic synchronicity of everything happening at once. Thus, one of the best things about Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner is Lynn Kelder’s stage design and the way Simon and her cast use it throughout the play: here, the World Wide Web is represented as a large net continually woven, repaired, and cleansed by Twitterbird Marie-Christine Nishimwe as soon as the noise, the bickering and the hate recede.
During the Twitterludes, Camarra, Nishimwe and Zrika stick their heads through the meshes of the net and chirp in a wild choir, an impersonation of the digital world most aptly described as something between Tex Avery and the tragic choir in Ancient Greek plays. The three actresses remind us of Macbeth’s witches, of the mythological Parcae no longer weaving and recording, but rather unravelling and cutting the threads of life. Simultaneously pillows are also used as punching bags which turn into screens on which threats poorly disguised as threads are being projected, alternating with all sorts of memes and GIFs.
Jasmine Lee-Jones’ play also points at the current shortcomings in intersectionality: Whereas right-wing hatred usually comes as an all-inclusive package, fascists hating the LGBTQIA+ community quite the same as they despise people of colour, the voices of those who’ve been (and sometimes still are) marginalized, silenced or killed for their color of skin or/and their sexual orientation still struggle to be heard, sometimes leading to friction and dissonance. Thus, Cleo blames Kara for playing her part in the game of discrimination by taking advantage of being a “lightie”. According to her, all black women considered universally beautiful, such as Beyoncé or Rihanna, are lighties, to which Kara replies that Cleo doesn’t “own blackness just because [she’s] dark-skinned”, later scolding “Ms Perfect Woke Queen” for never talking “about queer stuff on [her] TL”. Those verbal fights in particular lead to very intense moments for lead roles Camarra and Zrika and the spectator momentarily forgets English isn’t their mother tongue.
Last week in France, a RN MP wanted public money to stop going into the Trans Musicales Festival, the said member of parliament being convinced Trans Musicales is a festival by and for the trans community (which it isn’t). In times where reality more and more takes after the hilarious news of The Onion, The Daily Mash, Der Postillon, or Le Gorafi, radical, angry and clever plays such as Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, even though preaching to the converted, are the best possible remedies to the reign of the moronic.