The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
You know what? Fuck Chris. Screw him in his chiseled, overpaid, under-shaved, beautiful face. I’m over it. I don’t care how many summer blockbusters he stars in. That dude can truly get bent.
Whew. That felt good. Do you know what I mean? If I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong, but I’m tired of that guy. Aren’t you? Wait, what’s that? You don’t know which Chris I’m talking about? Oh, well, let me tell you: It’s all of them.
Yes, in case the entire facetious nature of this intro hasn’t made it obvious, this is about the fact that the internet decided this week to have its umpteenth fight about which of Hollywood’s Chrises—Hemsworth, Pratt, Evans, or Pine—is the most hateable. Social media being what it is, it’s hard to fully nail down why anyone thought this was a good use of everyone’s time—especially because, you know, there’s a lot of other shit going on—but Rebecca Alter at Vulture points to this tweet (below) from TV writer Amy Berg as Patient Zero in the latest Chriscourse. (Also, it’s been quote-tweeted like 14,000 times, so if this tweet isn’t the source then that means there’s an even more popular Chris-debate post out there and we are truly in hell.)
Now, this tweet is mostly pictures, but please, if you will, focus on the text: “One has to go.” This is where Berg made her most grievous error. One has to go? Yo, how about all four? How about we play F, Marry, Kill, add in a fourth option—Ignore—and pick that last one for each of these hunks and call it a day?
To be clear, this essay is not meant as a jab at any of these guys, or their careers. No harm is intended here, to their persons or reputations. Pine was great in Wonder Woman! Hemsworth might be the most self-aware himbo to grace the screen since, uh, Brad Pitt (?)! Surely Pratt is someone’s cup of tea! WIRED put Evans on the cover for goodness sake! They all have their pros and cons, and it’s not their fault they all have the same name and similar features, and—for a good portion of the twenty-teens—have dominated summer blockbusters. In fact, if everyone started calling them by their character names—James T. Kirk-Pine, Thor Hemsworth, Star-Lord Pratt, and America’s Ass Evans—it’s possible their homogeneousness might’ve escaped public scrutiny entirely.
And yet, it didn’t. As the argument unfurled over the week, it quickly turned into a commentary on whether or not the Worst Chris was the one named Pratt, largely because of his personal views. (It’s a long story, but Pratt reportedly attends the Zoe Church in Los Angeles, which has links to the Hillsong megachurch, which has been accused of being anti-LGBTQ. Pratt, though, has said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. I go to a church that opens their doors to absolutely everyone.”) This then became cause for several of his Marvel costars—including Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Zoe Saldana—to come to his defense.
Well, that’s nice of them. Meanwhile, others—clearly done with debating Chrises—moved on to dudes with other names.
By Thursday, the entire thing was both spinning out and sputtering out. (It went so far off the rails that YouPorn sent out a press release with data about which Chris was most popular based on users’ searches on the site. It was Evans, by a landslide … not that it matters.) But even as it dies down, it’s important to note why it was a tired exercise in the first place. The original discussion of Hollywood Chrises was a way to draw attention to the fact that so many tentpoles were fronted by similar-looking white guys. But, as Alter pointed out in her piece, “films like Black Panther and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse have made the term ‘Marvel movie’ far less white and homogeneous than what the Chrises once symbolized. … To continue to fixate on these four bland vanilla wafers is to perpetuate their centrality in Hollywood, and I, for one, would rather not.”
So say we all. Also, the original tweet that started the debate left out one important “Chris”—Kristen Stewart—and that, as writer and critic Jason Bailey pointed out, is the conversation folks ought to be having.
Photographs by Gregg DeGuire/Getty Images, Jun Sato/Getty Images, Jerod Harris/Getty Images, JB Lacroix/Getty Images
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