What is Sydney Sweeney’s deal?

Not to be that person, but the first time I saw Sydney Sweeney on screen was in the 2019 arthouse film Clementine. She plays a young, frivolous girl who strikes a brief and homoerotic friendship with a woman who’s retreated into the wilderness. The film is, to my best recollection, an unsatisfying collection of slow-song montages. Sydney Sweeney does a woman’s eyeliner. She is tender, she is great. So imagine my shock when I witnessed her as Cassie, writhing to “Dead of Night” beside Jacob Elordie. Whenever I imagine Sydney Sweeney, it is these competing ideas of her which war with one another.

Maybe a part of the public anger towards Sweeney comes from a place analogous to these warring concepts. Euphoria is lib central. Queer youth, drugs, and makeup that reflects a generation brought up on NikkiTutorials. When brought to stand against the morals the modern right espouses, Euphoria seems like a bastion of woke. I think people are disquieted by the idea that in a piece of media they consider to be ‘in’, a core figure could be so ‘out’. No one is as scandalized by the blatant racism of Karoline Leavitt as they are by the nougats of conservatism Sweeney litters around the zeitgeist. I think people forget that she is an actress, and that actresses, too, can dogwhistle.

Before the American Eagle ad, there was the HEYDUDE campaign. Before the HEYDUDE campaign, there was the MAGA birthday party. At every turn, she faces the public on the side of plausible deniability. Her jeans deal wasn’t an implicit assertion of white supremacy, it was jeans! She’s not a pick-me, she just likes cars and ugly shoes. And those hats didn’t even say Make America Great Again. When the public inevitably tweets in anger, she retorts with the line echoed by beautiful white women everywhere: I don’t care about politics. I care about kindness❤️. The left can make themselves dizzy listing the reasons why this is politically incorrect, but they shouldn’t say it’s disingenuous. Sydney Sweeney is a successful, blonde bombshell, the furthest you can crawl from the margins of society: why should she care? Why should we? In a culture so inundated with extremist, right-wing rhetoric, Sweeney sits, at worst, right of center in our topsy-turvey Overton Window. Her implicit messaging, which riles the public so effectively, is spelled out in explicit terms on every other corner of the internet. How insidious is the wink-nudge of a notion when it’s been beating you over the head from all other angles?

It seems like at every media stunt, every marketing campaign, Sweeney is doubling down. When I saw the Euphoria season 3 trailer, and realised they made her character into an OnlyFans model, I felt a pang of injustice. Sydney Sweeney is, too, a woman who’s been subjected to the irrelevant scrutiny faced by women everywhere—I don’t think I’ve ever held a conversation about her among peers where the words ‘mid’ or ‘rack’ didn’t surface. But she said yes to the role, and said yes to the GQ interview, and she continues to imply what she knows we all know. I almost have to respect her conviction. She refuses to acquiesce to the woke mob. She’s an American Beauty, good genes and milk-fed.

She’s ringing in American Eagle at the NYSE, she doesn’t even gaf.

Sydney Sweeney, you do it to yourself.

Words by Kalie Minor. Image via Wikimedia Commons.