A bit of me time: the best music, film, books and more about narcisissm
FilmBen Stiller’s satire on the fashion industry, Zoolander, is more a satire about media and celebrity generally – about people deeply in love with themselves – and it is a key text on modern narcissism. Stiller plays the “ridiculously good-looking” model Derek Zoolander, an empty-headed idiot, neurotically obsessed with being toppled from his status as the world’s No 1 runway model by an up-and-comer, Hansel, played by Owen Wilson. Derek has plans for an educational legacy project, a Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good. But Derek’s masterpiece is his Blue Steel, the specific face he puts on for the cameras, a kind of intense, magnetic pouting stare. Blue Steel preceded social media by years but it is the great ancestor of the selfie craze that dominates Instagram and everything else. When we gaze lovingly into our own faces, framed by our smartphone screens, it is Derek Zoolander looking back at us. Peter Bradshaw
Art
Looking good … Caravaggio’s Narcissus, 1596. Photograph: Leemage/UIG/Getty Images
Caravaggio’s 1596 imagining of Narcissus is steeped in Renaissance literature but it has a queasy resonance for today’s culture of selfies and scrolling. This master of darkness and light has placed the beautiful youth in a gloomy abstract void and his arms form a circular frame: his self-love is a prison of his own making, a loop that can’t move on. Light falls with full force on his knee of all places, recalling the proud penitents bent low with stones on their backs in Dante’s purgatory. The doomed boy looks away from the glow, into the black pool. It presages the waters of the Styx that will soon carry Narcissus to the land of the dead, and into which he continued to stare. Skye Sherwin
Music
Arguably her finest single to date, Lily Allen’s The Fear, a takedown of celebrity culture and social media self-obsession, plays like something of an early predictor to the kind of Instagram vanity that has spawned an entire new “influencer” profession. Lampooning the industry and her own reluctant role in it, the magic of The Fear is all in its delivery: a gently insouciant melody that wouldn’t offend a big brand partner, rubbing up against the Veruca Salt-obnoxiousness of her most damning couplets: “I want lots of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds / I heard people die while they’re trying to find them.” Rarely since has chart-friendly pop satire been so able to laugh at itself. Jenessa Williams
Books
“If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give everything!” says the titular hero of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Of course, he comes to regret this Faustian bargain. The picture is ravaged by age and sin while Gray stays young, but his conscience is harrowed. It’s a story so famous that it’s even been pathologised. (People with Dorian Gray syndrome suffer from extreme pride in their personal appearance and related difficulties in facing up to the ageing process.) But the appeal of Wilde’s novel doesn’t just lie in its moral fable. There’s also the delight he takes in describing “this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves”. And then there are the famous witticisms. If you’re wondering about reading this decadent classic don’t hesitate. After all, as Wilde writes: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Sam Jordison
Television
Love costs … Cecilie Fjellhoy, Ayleen Charlotte and Pernilla Sjöholm, victims of The Tinder Swindler. Photograph: Joshua Wilks/Netflix
When Shimon Hayut changed his name to Simon Leviev in 2017, he sought to align himself with the dynasty of Lev Leviev, the Israeli diamond magnate nicknamed the King of Diamonds, even fraudulently claiming that he was Leviev’s son and heir. It’s a fantasy born out of an obsession with obscene wealth, which Simon Leviev seems to view as his divine right to accumulate, regardless of talent or business acumen. In the documentary The Tinder Swindler, Leviev cons beautiful women across Europe, charming them with the promises of luxury, private jets and, the key ingredient, love, only for the women to find themselves footing the bill with six-figure loans. In this true-crime documentary, love is exposed as a dangerous game and, fuelled by delusion, vanity and self-interest, Leviev plays to win. Jason Okundaye