Bear with me here, but I’m beginning to suspect Sydney Sweeney is a very fine actor. It’s a skill she has been recognised for in the past, of course, winning nominations for Emmys for Euphoria and The White Lotus, but I mean it in a deeper sense, related to her work in advertising rather than drama – can she do more than play a role? Can she make you feel what she’s feeling?
In her “controversial” new ad for the sports prediction site Novig (the scare quotes are because, when you’re begging for controversy this hard, you shouldn’t just be handed it on a plate), she adopts the garb of various sports. Her face, body, aspect, gait and mien are all carefully configured to amp up the erotic overtones to the maximum degree, and yet the feeling that beams out of each image is: “This is really going to piss people off, and I couldn’t be more delighted.” Her expression is so speechful that you cannot help but share in some of her hellion joy.
In brief: the proposition of the betting site is that it’s only for betting on sports – no wars, no deaths, no politics, just sports. Even the captions, absent the Sweeney, are a red rag to a bull, since betting on wars and death is a disgusting and inhumane thing to do – the surge in people trying to spin cash out of deaths in Iran, in Ukraine, says something profound about where we’ve got to in late capitalism. Whatever that profound thing is, it’s definitely not funny.
However, we are where we are, and that’s not Sweeney’s concern. She is there to wrinkle out the double entendre from every conceivable crevice. Do spherical things remind you of breasts? What if I get these two American footballs and put them in front of my actual breasts? Would it help if I was naked to the waist? Ah, better still if I were wearing no clothes at all and only the footballs stood between me and my modesty? The age-old tennis shot, immortalised by the 80s Athena poster in which the viewer is invited to consider just how nearly they can see a player’s butt – well, that’s here, only this time minus the skirt.
Sweeney’s facial expressions are like a WikiHow gallery, “how to: soft-porn” – they often feel quite old-fashioned, pert or faux naive, more like 70s graphic novel erotica than modern, up-to-the-minute pornography. Yet, throughout, there is a layer of knowingness: “I know exactly how much I’m going to drive you mad, and why.”
Truthfully, it’s hard (as a card-carrying member of the wokerati, just out here in the world, trying to keep up) to figure out what the fundamental provocation is. Sweeney famously last made headlines with the “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” ad for American Eagle Outfitters. It was taken by many to be a call back to Donald Trump’s “You have great genes, you know that?” speech, which itself was taken as a densely layered challenge to the world, that his supporters were better human specimens than everyone else. Was the speech white supremacist or simply Trumpian-supremacist? You couldn’t really stick anything on him because, as ever, it was only atmospherically decipherable. Sweeney, however – with her very blondness, her unarguable whiteness – people did stick a white-supremacist agenda on, one she soon decried, saying she was against “divisiveness”.
Ever since, Sweeney has been taken as an anti-woke poster-girl, though since nobody can agree what “woke” means, still less what “anti-” it entails, this poster is more confusing than an avant garde typographer’s ball. She seems to want to kick that hornet’s nest with this Novig ad, but is it by inviting her own objectification? Or is there a complicated message in there about femaleness in elite sport, which has become such a lightning rod for anti-trans activism? Or are we supposed to disapprove of the pornification of the visual realm?
None of the above! Ariarne Titmus, four-time Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer, explained on Instagram: it’s “a kick in the face to every woman who had dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is – teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity”. And now she says it, yes, that makes perfect sense. What Sydney Sweeney’s game is, beyond almost-naked tennis, is anyone’s guess.
