Everyone in America is a Marnie now

On my way to see “M3GAN 2.0” over the weekend, several moments caused me to stop and ponder whether I’m invisible and I just don’t realize it. I held the door open for people on my way into the shopping complex that houses the theater, yet the person ahead of me couldn’t be bothered to do the same. Trying to make it up three stories to the top level of the building involved multiple stop-start instances that required me to freeze in my tracks so as not to bump into people who halted in the middle of the walkway between escalators to look down at their phones. Another person was loudly recording a TikTok using their front-facing camera outside the theater, not paying attention to whether anyone needed to get past them. Strangely enough, after the movie, an entirely different person stood in the very same spot, taking a phone call on speakerphone for some ungodly reason. “What’re the chances of that?” I thought to myself, before realizing that the chances were actually pretty good. Coming from an Allison Williams movie, a tangential query popped into my head: Is everyone a Marnie now?

Marnie Michaels, Williams’ equally adored and derided, often cringe-inducing character in Lena Dunham’s similarly contentious, hit HBO series “Girls,” once stood as the paragon for contemporary narcissism. Even more than Dunham’s Hannah, Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna and Jemima Kirke’s Jessa — all self-absorbed twentysomethings taking turns making bad decisions — Marnie was the definition of vanity. She was a privileged, WASPy woman with a superiority complex and a misjudged view of her own talents. Marnie was ambitious in the way that involves talking about your ambitions but doing little to achieve them besides chronically posting things online and hoping for the best. Yet despite how high-strung she could be for no good reason, Marnie was and is lovable. Even when she’s acting like the worst person in the world, her foibles are earnest, and Williams is uniquely gifted when it comes to finding a relatable level of humanity, one she’s brought to all of her characters since.

But what kept Marnie from being completely insufferable is that, for all of her bouts of egomania, she was still self-aware enough to know when she was being obnoxious. “No one wanted to be a Marnie,” Williams recently recalled while promoting the “M3GAN” sequel. “I think with a little time and distance, [her] selfishness is less barbed and offensive.” It’s true that “Girls” has been in a long-deserved reappraisal, finally being seen as the prescient cultural document it always was. But it’s not just time and distance that have made Marnie’s selfishness feel less caustic; it’s the fact that she was merely Dunham’s conduit to track where culture was headed. Marnie represents a kind of narcissism that has exploded since “Girls” went off the air, the kind that has exacerbated personal isolation by sharpening self-importance into something so thorny that it pricks anyone who gets too close. It’s not just that everyone’s a Marnie now, it’s that they’re so much worse than she ever was.

Take one of Marnie’s most notorious disasters. After bottoming out and abandoning her art world career to make a move toward her dream of becoming a musician, Marnie shows up to a launch party for her ex-boyfriend Charlie’s (Christopher Abbott) app. As a “surprise treat” — read: to steal the spotlight — Marnie directs all eyes to her as she erupts into an impromptu piano cover of Kanye West’s “Stronger” with a few key lyric changes. Marnie’s so self-absorbed that she doesn’t realize how mortifying this little show is, or how obvious it is that she’s using the event for clout. The performance, of course, backfires completely, and Marnie at least tries to own her mistake.

But imagine if this scene were set in 2025, amid a growing right-wing bubble that prioritizes the self over community, and a whole new era of social media designed to keep users doing outrageous things to gain viewership, and the audience glued to their screens watching. Marnie’s “Stronger” performance would be viral within hours, and she’d be faced with the choice to double down or put her tail between her legs publicly. Knowing Marnie’s penchant for taking a mile when she’s given an inch, she’d almost certainly do the former, and her “Stronger” version would be one of the top TikTok sounds in days and be added to Spotify playlists soon after, right beneath her cover of Edie Brickell’s “What I Am” and deep cuts from her Jazz Brunch era. In no time, Marnie would arrive at a fork in the road: Take the route of Heidi Montag and parlay the attention into semi-ironic, blonde, trash pop superstardom, or perform at Trump’s second inauguration. Either way, Marnie would find that her dreams are well within reach in a moment when garnering fame — or rather, attention — is as easy as being tactless and impolite while holding your phone five feet from your face.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

To her credit, Williams was the perfect fit for Marnie because she grew up self-aware in a world of narcissists. The daughter of former news anchor Brian Williams, she’s always been the first to acknowledge her privilege and power as an actor working in a field dominated by nepo babies. “If you trust your own skill, I think [privilege] becomes very simple to acknowledge,” Williams told Wired. In an industry where those whose careers have been influenced by the favors of nepotism often decry the nepo baby label, Williams stands as an outlier. And it’s that confidence that has made her characters — who often have shades of Marnie-level narcissism — so watchable. In films like “Get Out,” “The Perfection” and “M3GAN,” Williams has successfully leveraged the public’s perception of her breakout “Girls” role into a collection of characters whose charm belies their selfishness. In “Get Out,” Williams made Marnie’s ambitions of being the perfect girlfriend into a waking, narcissistic, racist nightmare, while the “M3GAN” series took Williams’ deft ability to play up relatable shortsightedness and used it to unleash a bloodthirsty robot. Other people in Williams’ films may literally lose their heads, but hers always seems screwed on tight.

If only the same could be said for everyone who has been coming up to Williams and telling her that they’re a Marnie, which Williams has brought up while talking about the “Girls” resurgence. Granted, the first step to knowing you’re a Marnie is to own it, but if you ask me, part of the problem with the larger move toward abject narcissism is that everyone’s a little too comfortable “owning it.”

Instagram and TikTok have encouraged their users to live their lives in interesting, brandable ways, modes of living that can be easily commodified if the algorithm randomly makes a video or post go viral. Teenagers are filming daily “get ready with me” videos just to go to biology class. People without brand deals are tagging Cetaphil in their makeup tutorials to try to get sponsorships. You can’t go to a movie anymore without someone taking a picture of the screen during the feature to post on their story. Taking photos of people in public and posting them online has become de rigueur behavior. I can’t walk a block in Manhattan without having to maneuver around someone with a tiny microphone filming a video on the sidewalk, let alone have enough room to walk past a couple who refuse to let go of each other’s hands to make way for someone else. Common decency and consideration have flown out the window in favor of non-stop branding and thoughtless cruelty, performed with ease. Individualism is a sickness, and it’s killing our empathy faster than we ever could’ve imagined.

If anything, it’s a shame that “Girls” ended before the front-facing video era really took off, given how many people could stand to be made aware of how loathsome and inconsiderate their behavior has become. Had the show lived long enough to see Marnie get a ring light and a TikTok account, it could’ve possibly done enough parodic damage to quell the rise of narcissism before things got as bad as they are. While it’s nice that viewers can reclaim the Marnie title and own their egos, perhaps it’s not Marnie that we should be modeling ourselves on at all, but rather, Williams’ level-headed conviction and self-scrutiny. That kind of introspection, the type that allows Williams to forge forward with her career, owning her nepo baby status, proving herself every step of the way, is a refreshing antidote to the upswing in Marnie-ism. But then again, Williams herself hasn’t posted on Instagram in five years. And it seems that for most people, being unplugged and out in the world would be a dealbreaker. How else would everyone know what brand of face wash is best to get that all-day glow?