Little Timmy Tim

Idolization is a dangerous intersection. It can deviate from a motivating force to a defeatist mindset. So often, inspiring people and celebrities become untouchable entities, representing an unattainable way of being. In the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the character of Joanne Rogers, Fred Rogers’ wife, states that she rejects when people call Fred Rogers a “saint.” To grant him sainthood is to imply that his kindness and gentle nature were such that real people could not attain. His very existence seemed an impossibility rather than something he worked hard at, and something that anyone can achieve. The pedestal that icons and idols are placed on creates a conception of them that reinforces the separation rather than the connection between idol and idolizer.

A modern object of intense idolization is none other than the bottled essence of art school king and skinny legend, Timothée Chalamet. How did you read that name? Did you accent the Timothée? Did Chalamet roll softly off of your brain tongue? The Manhattan-born, brown-haired it-boy is a cultural reset. Things are different now that people know his name and have taken the time to learn its French pronunciation. Timothée Chalamet has revolutionized the artsy, white boy aesthetic while simultaneously infiltrating the world of high art and auteurship as the subject of much interest by A-list filmmakers. As an outsider to the Chalamet cult, I find his rise to fame and his mythology captivating. Despite his Oscar-worthy acting chops and hypnotic hot-person energy, there is an attainable and familiar side to Timothée. Recently, videos of the star in his formative years have circulated the web, exposing his rapper alter ego, “Little Timmy Tim.” This manifestation of Timothée Chalamet exists at high school talent shows and in sub-par statistics projects, and it depicts a coveted performer’s infantile stages of performance. 

The video that will be dissected in this critical analysis is titled “Timothée Chalamet - Timmy Tim - Rising stars 2012” and has over 1 million views on YouTube. It includes a 4 minute and 18 second long-form rap and dance performance, headlined by Timothée Chalamet, and it is hypnotic. This video demonstrates the complexity of Chalamet’s fame. Are these videos actually good? Is he talented, or is he just doing something and not being bad at it? Do I like to watch them because I’ve seen him have on-screen sex with both Armie Hammer and Saoirse Ronan? Or because he reminds me of my high school crush? We may never know, but one thing is certain: there is an undeniable sense that this video could have been taken in any American high school. There is a clear and present attainability to the video, even when its subject has become enigmatic. 

Art by Madison Marzano

Let us begin with the setting of the performance: a dimly-lit auditorium. The only backdrop is the traditional red curtain, an homage to the early days of the stage, a historical convention of live entertainment. For Timothée’s performance, this incomplete set decoration is intentional. The performance recognizes itself as a performance. To take away the red curtain or to more efficiently light the stage would be in the effort to convince the audience to suspend disbelief and view this performance as something to take them into another world. No, this talent show intends to remind the audience of their own reality and to insert Timmy Tim into that liminal space between performance and reality.

The choice of costuming and color palette speaks volumes about the intention of the piece. Timothée wears a bright pink T-shirt. It’s the kind of T-shirt you buy at Michaels craft store and decorate with puffy paint for your eighth grade dodgeball tournament—go Hawks!—a down-to-earth statement piece, rejecting luxury. This same person will one day strut down the Paris red carpet in a magenta Stella McCartney suit. This same person will also wear a homemade shirt from a fan underneath another Stella ensemble. A callback to his pink beginnings? A reassertion of relatability? Be it intentional or not, the parallels between Chalamet’s 2020 and 2012 style choices reiterate the integrity of the roots of one’s creative career. Though he may cringe when interviewers mention these moments, they represent the engendering of Timothée’s evolution into an Academy Award nominee and pop culture icon. These moments exist as seedlings in the flower of artistic excellence. The choice of pink acts as a rejection of the masculine norms of the 2010s. This rejection of heteronormativity may have been Chalamet’s first defiance of sexual conformity that would open the door to roles like Elio in Call Me By Your Name. Yet, his 2012 baggy gray sweatpants juxtapose the pink shirt. These sweatpants represent the unofficial uniform of a high school boy, while simultaneously quietly yelling for acknowledgment beyond the size of the imprint in his sweats. Timothée was experimenting. His vision was clouded. Do I break the rules or please the crowd? This is the essential question all young artists must wrestle with.

The choice to cover Nicki Minaj, the queen of rap, is almost too critically loaded to unpack. As an overview of such a choice, dear reader, I simply ask this: would you, as a wispy, pubescent, white male teen, have the courage to cover the discography of such an icon in an auditorium of peers and authority figures with the fervor that young Chalamet did? This is not to say this was a good or bad decision. But this decision does speak to the society in which he exists, a society that imbued him with the conviction to do so, loudly. I wish every individual the unabashed confidence of a 17-year-old white male attending a performing arts high school. 

The climax of the performance comes at 1:58. Timothée is on his hands and knees, almost as if he is praying. He licks his lips, several times, and eventually mimes a thrust. He stands up and strips off his pink t-shirt. Underneath, he wears a white tank top with the words “txt me” and a phone number painted across it in red. This act was explicit. He imitates sex and strips, but not to his skin. He refrains from complete vulnerability, crutched by his call for approval in the “txt me” tank. Every young artist experiences this trope. We put ourselves out there, we grind on our high school stage. We fear backlash, but bound to our own ambition, we strip; however, we make sure to always keep up the wall of our white tank top. We want the world to think we’re vulnerable and confident, so we advertise our phone number, despite knowing at our rawest forms, we would advertise our bare bodies. 

Timmy Tim articulated the growth of a young creative in seconds. Whether he knows this or not is unimportant. He likely does not. What should be taken away from this 4 minutes and 18 seconds of rapping, dancing, and self-discovery is that every great has a beginning, and often these beginnings are not quite so great. And so the youth must trudge on, forge our own path, and unabashedly growl “dungeon dragon” until someone listens, just as young Timmy Tim has done before us.