The Response to Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner’s Relationship Has Broken Our Brains

Last week, the world briefly stood still when Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner were spotted together in the audience of Beyoncé’s Los Angeles stop of her Renaissance World Tour, cozying up to one another in the little celebs-only playpen of SoFi Stadium. If you’re an average person, like myself, you simply remarked at the nonchalance of Kylothée’s relationship going public after months of headlines and speculation about their dating. If you’re a Timothée Chalamet superstan, it was as if you just learned that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. That’s fitting, because World War III has begun: It’s Timothée Chalamet fans, storming the beaches of social media, fighting a one-sided battle.

Until Jenner and Chalamet made their official debut, fans had been suspicious of their romance’s veracity, and rightfully so. The only real updates since the supposed news leaked in April were a constant barrage of planted press items, claiming that the couple was “taking things slow” and “getting to know each other.” The covert nature of their relationship was the correct move, it seems, given how the most fervent base of Chalamet’s fans have reacted. Claims that this is just a PR stunt have been the most rampant, despite my claims that neither party really has anything to gain from tonguing in public. A few days before the Beyoncé show, even British Vogue was debating the legitimacy of the Jenner/Chalamet relationship; in an article that has since been scrubbed, a Vogue writer wondered: “What do they do together? Does he hold her makeup brushes while she contours?”

That thinly veiled misogyny, which paints Chalamet as some great, sage thinker and Jenner as a little more than a vain makeup influencer, has been echoed in the musings of Club Chalamet, perhaps the most active and unreasonable of Timothée stan accounts. Club Chalamet is operated by Simone Cromer, a 56-year-old freelance film critic who has been active in the superfan scene for quite some time—dating back to at least 2018, when she was allegedly skipped over by Chalmet during an audience Q&A at a screening of Beautiful Boy. Most recently, she found herself under fire for coming out against the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, following the delay of Dune: Part 2.

Cromer’s posts take fandom to an entirely new level. It would be admirable if it didn’t verge on creepy. And yet, it’s often quite funny: One could spend days poring over her response to the footage of Chalamet at the Beyoncé concert. (If you’ve got a free hour, I would recommend listening to the Twitter Space conversation that Cromer held last week, which she ended by reassuring listeners, “This will pass, this will pass.”) To Cromer, Chalamet is the victim of the Kardashian-Jenner family’s “relentless” pursuit, giving into their all-powerful influence after becoming too exhausted by their chase to fight back. “Congratulations Kris, congratulations Kylie,” she said in the Twitter space. “You got the No. 1 actor in Hollywood.”

Cromer’s fixation has itself become a point of obsession online, with Twitter users turning her into the latest meme following her outsized reaction to Chalamet and Jenner’s public appearance. Some have compared Cromer to Dominique Fishback’s character in Swarm, who goes to bloodthirsty lengths to get close to her idol, a singer not-so-loosely based on Beyoncé. It’s nearly impossible to not fall down the Club Chalamet rabbit hole once you peer over the edge; Cromer has a unique knack for crafting her preoccupation with her favorite actor into a truly wild content. The night of the Beyoncé concert, she took to Instagram to quell the fears of any other Chalamet fans who were experiencing as much torment as her. “If you’re feeling distressed by the video, it’s okay,” she wrote. “But please take care of yourself. Step away from social media for a couple of days.”

Parroting the kind of language used in the event of actual tragedies is certainly a bold choice. But to Cromer, the Kylie/Timmy sighting is akin to 9/11—something she would know intimately, as she has just recently revealed that she turned down a job offer in the World Trade Center two months before the Twin Towers fell. Whether that’s true or not, it’s reflective of her penchant for oversharing online, crafting lengthy captions in response to her Twitter space and posting awkward four-panel memes about the Chalamet-Jenner “PR stunt.”

Cromer’s deluge of posts speaks to the ever-growing toxicity of online fandoms, specifically when there are famous women caught in their crosshairs—something we saw recently with the way fans of Jason Sudeikis and Harry Styles treated Olivia Wilde amid last year’s Don’t Worry Darling kerfuffle. There’s an alarming lack of agency allowed to the men in these situations; they do not have free will when it comes to their choices. Rather, the men are victims of the women in their lives, helpless insects caught in the webs spun by these deviant black widows. Cromer even claims that Jenner’s camp stalked Chalamet’s residence, all as a ploy to get the two celebs together so the Kylie Jenner brand could be redeemed in the eyes of the public.

What’s most puzzling to me is that there seems to be a narrative here that Chalamet is some aloof intellectual or cinema’s savant, one who will only associate himself with the most highbrow things. I’m not saying that Jenner isn’t cultured; I’m saying that line of thinking is fundamentally incorrect. This is the guy who spent his time at LaGuardia High School writing raps for extra credit in his statistics class and spitting Nicki Minaj bars on a talent show stage. He wears flame-print basketball shorts to Coachella sets (where, in fact, Club Chalamet met him). For God’s sake, he talked about the importance of vaccination by referencing a Family Guy episode! You show me a man who does all of those things, and I’ll show you a man who would date Kylie Jenner.

But mostly, the one resounding thing that I keep landing on is: Who cares? Being invested in the state of celebrity relationships is so 2005, something the media seems to have not caught on to given the perennial interest in Taylor Swift’s dating life and Sophie Turner’s divorce. It’s laughable to think that there was a time in my life when I remember being absolutely shocked that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had broken up. “But they were, like, the perfect couple,” I remember saying to my sister. Meanwhile, I was all of 11 years old. Looking back, it’s downright side-splitting to think I knew anything about the inner workings of a celebrity’s personal life, and I’m going to go out on a limb to say that Cromer doesn’t know much about Chalamet’s either. (Case in point: During her Twitter Space, she questioned why Chalamet and Jenner didn’t simply go to Olive Garden on a date, because “he loves Italian food.”)

I’m not sure what a Gen X Timothée Chalamet fan has to gain from an obsession with his relationships, other than a few more followers and an ulcer. But it may be wise for her and any other Chalamet fans distraught by recent events to temper their disgust sooner than later, given that Jenner was just spotted running her hands through Chalamet’s hair at the U.S. Open. The prevailing consensus on Twitter after those pictures were released? “Club Chalamet is gonna have a rough couple of months.” If the last week is any indication, “rough” is putting it mildly.

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