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Let Josh O’Connor Be Extremely Filthy in Everything
If cleanliness is godliness, the Challengers star’s dirtiness is perfectly profane.
La Chimera ’s Arthur is one of the most depressed men ever to grace the screen; he spends most of the film mournfully trudging around fantasizing about his missing girlfriend, Beniamina, while emitting such a dark scent that, in an early scene, a traveling salesman who stumbles past him on a train pauses to insult him for a while. But in our AI-poisoned, motion-smoothed, deep-faked, Instagram-filtered, catfished, holographic, Zoom-pilled, Apple Watched present reality, it is a revelation to see a beautiful man onscreen with three-day-old facial hair, sweaty lettuce tucked behind his ears, his dirty shirt unbuttoned, moodily grilling corn outside a lean-to, as O’Connor does in La Chimera. In the era of the “Clean Guy Aesthetic,” where there exist endless YouTube tutorials about “How to Dress Like Patrick Bateman,” and where billionaires siphon the blood of their teenage sons to live forever, Josh O’Connor is a sensual monument to human mortality, a stubborn salute to defilement, a paean to pungency.
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