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Lately, at bedtime, right when I should turn away from screens, wind down and accept the limit of the day, my angst prevails and I whip open YouTube. It’s a terrible habit, and as someone who proclaims abstinence from social media, this makes me both a hypocrite and an idiot.
Sabotaging my sleep is a risk I never properly gauge whilst looking at a screen. Do you? If so, tell me your secrets. I cannot trust the device’s control features, nor my very own thumbs. Late in the evenings, I am always tired, my brain is empty, and the mocking Id outshouts the sensibilities of the Ego: looky, looky, lets YouTubey. It’s textbook and I rarely pass the test.
A few weeks ago, maybe one flick deep into my days-end anxiety, a beautiful horse girl trotted across my screen. She was surrounded by deep green Connecticut fields. Her cable knit sweater caressed her collarbones as she later told me about her online business, her haircut, her grilled chicken marinade. Then her handsome boyfriend appeared bouncing neon balls atop his tennis racket, and that’s when I decided, from the moving images on my tiny screen, that her life is as fun as sport itself. She’s Paige Lorenze. She’s an influencer, and I would watch her pretty face talk horses, tennis, and lip gloss well into the quiet of the night.
Earlier this year, I watched 5 episodes of Netflix’s tennis docu-series, Break Point, in a matter of days. It was enchanting, and if you haven’t seen it yet, let me remind you why we watch great things. Sports and athletes make for excellent documentary film because why they flourish in real life is exactly how they succeed in any narrative form. Sports are the stuff of stories: dramatic plots, embedded tensions, captivating characters, enticing imagery... I could go on. They’re a joy to watch, and that translates no matter the medium. Break Point beguiled me into an obsession with tennis—have you realized that every stroke is simultaneously offensive and defensive? What drama. Tennis is truly a game of suspense. Plus, a few months later, I found Paige on the internet, and she likes tennis, too.
Break Point profiled top-ranked athletes, and I studied them all like baseball cards of a moving picture type. I learned clay vs. grass vs. court and the strengths and weaknesses it brought out of each competitor. It was a world of new stuff. The legacy, the pressure, the outfits, the statistics and the unpredictability. It seemed that tennis was a calling I had missed, perhaps as both a viewer and a player. Bored this past winter, I went to my local high school and volleyed until my ineptitude clouded my initial buzz with boredom. I could try my mid-thirties plight for competitive tennis whenever the capricious inspiration struck again.
One night earlier this summer, Paige showed me all of her outfits she planned to wear court-side at Wimbledon, a fabulous 146-year tradition that I had never watched, ever before. She planned preppy looks to reincarnate Coco Chanel in a chartreuse suit dress. On another day, Americana denim would match her vintage sunglasses in some kind of parallel to the British energy of the court. Otherwise, she’d go full Sporty Spice. I was entranced, and since I knew the leading actors and supporting characters, I would have to watch the tournament from the sidelines of my sofa. Then, right as I began to wonder how I might spot Paige and her oversized sunnies in the crowd, Netflix released Season 2 of Break Point. It was a multi-dimensional vortex of sports media magic. I was bewitched!
Before I tune us into the tournament, let’s turn to the media mechanics here, if I may. The glee of peering through the influence window calls to no one in their right mind, as I’ve established. But what pulls our gaze deeply, beyond the novelty of any virtual fantasy, is possibility within paradigm—it’s an omniverse that could take us anywhere, and that excitement hides the truth that what we’re actually seeing is a life we’ll never be able to claim as our own.
Influencing seems like the new dog in town, but it’s just the old trick of advertising that has adapted to modern mediums. We’re bored by the old stuff of commercials and magazine spreads, so they have lately been the butt of pointed criticism: No one is that happy doing the dishes! I don’t even like ketchup on my burger! The products are too obvious, the characters unbelievable, the worlds too precise to buy into. But traditional advertising and its modern counterparts can feature the same product for sale, of course. Jars of Olay Moisturizer were printed out in magazine ads before they were featured in an influencer’s YouTube video, for example. But it’s not the character on the page jumping into the role of influencer online, it’s that we accept the new realm and everything within it entirely. We buy it all, wholesale. If you do not believe that beautiful woman truly enjoys the moisturizer she’s applying, do you not believe that she recorded herself in her bathroom mirror, sipping a coffee of her own making? Of course you do. You buy the reality whether or not you buy the message or, literally, buy the product.
What’s the difference between buying into a realm made by modern multimedia, versus buying into some print advertisement’s message about a specific product? The potential: the limitless possibilities made by the intermingling, arbitrary randomness of reality itself. The media of today is prismatic, and it outshines the feeble, narrow beam of yesterday’s singular output, no matter what is for sale.
This is why, right now, I buy the idea that tennis may be the greatest sport on earth. Products may be pushed to me from pretty girls online and the plot points of an athlete’s dream may be dramatically captured in a TV episode, but when a theme reverberates throughout every shade of media, onto the screen of any medium that my eyes may land, I am the one who’s bought and sold into the story.
So onto my screens Wimbledon was broadcast, and I watched every match that I could catch. I cried when Novak Djokovic honorably received his second place prize. His 20-year-old competitor, Carlos Alcaraz Garfia, gallantly pried the trophy from Djokovic across the near 5-hour match. I knew nothing about these two athletes prior to watching them compete, as they had not been featured in Break Point. Ons Jabeur, a star of the show, fell apart as the coveted title flew past her grasp for the second year in a row. I wondered if every spectator, real and virtual, knew her story as it had been made out to me—the one that bounced throughout the halls of the tennis internet I kept peering into. Was her narrative and significance in the tournament identical throughout the minds of every viewer? Wouldn’t that would mark the success of the system, the medium and the message? It’s creepy how open minds may think alike.
I think we willingly don the frames of influence, because media allows us to believe we can see the world anew. We wear them as long as the magic lasts, as long as the algorithm holds our gaze. What we are led to believe as a result of the zeitgeist, an effervescent pulse, is that somewhere, hung in the net of cyberspace is a beating heart. That realms are something to be a part of, to plug into in the most engrossing way possible. This is where belief is built: I could become a competitive tennis player. I could become blonde. I could write as a sports columnist, curating profiles on the athletes of the court. I could partake in a world I have never accessed. The spell holds its grasp, plots impossible points in my mind. But this is the realm that cannot be shared, because no matter how accessible it appears, I am just the user; because through a screen, it is individual, it is just for me to believe in.
Synchronicity is the defining feature that zests any kind of modern screen-watching. Everything seems to come together in some harmonious way, alluding to some grand omnipresent culture, giving it, whatever it may be, veracity. This, ultimately, is the zeitgeist’s greatest trick, its bloodline—that the world it’s helped create is accessible, everywhere, shared evenly and worth your time. And it haunts just enough to get you to buy a tennis skirt, steal back all the tennis balls from your dog.
So when you sign up for tennis lessons, remember: how exactly did you get here? Don’t be disappointed if tennis doesn’t look good on you, if you get bored later on. It’s not your fault the only thing media gives you is something to believe in! You had to buy in wholesale from the start, and you will do the same when cowboys charge through your screens riding in on nostalgia and zeitgeist energy, selling a new dream built on the mechanics of reality.
I watched Paige again late last night. Did you know her boyfriend, Tommy Paul, beat Wimbledon’s winner, Carlos Alcaraz Garfia, two sets to one at the Canadian Open? In my recent success at keeping the screens at bay, I completely missed the moment of synchronicity. Paige told me that she and Tommy have been interviewed quite a bit by Netflix for the third season of Break Point. Be still, my heart! Maybe Tommy’s world-rank will continue to rise this year, so that when the next Break Point series is finally released, the terrycloth and neon yellow vortex will suck me down deeper, howling in metaphysical laughter, as I yearn, once again, to believe in all the possibilities it empowers in my mind.
How often do you plug in? What’s the biggest purchase your subconscious has driven you to buy? I’m dying to know who else the zeitgeist haunts, and the worlds you’re obsessed with watching from the sidelines of your sofa!
Thanks so much for reading. It means a lot to me!
-Nicole
This was such a great piece Nicole!
I really enjoyed the way you explored both the effects of the zeitgeist as pushed through different forms of media and your newfound interest in tennis. You made some excellent points, which really made me think.
And just incase your interested the writer David Foster Wallace wrote 5 or so great essays on tennis for different magazines like the rolling stone etc., and all the essays were later compiled into a book called “String Theory” if you wanted to check it out.
Thanks