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      in Movies

      How Lip-Syncing Got Real

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      Not long ago, lip-syncing was the domain of subversive drag queens, or pop stars that the media saw as talentless. Now it’s how scrappy amateurs get famous.Sally ThurerFor several weeks, Netflix has been insisting that I watch its gender-swapped remake of the ’90s teen romantic comedy “She’s All That.” This version — naturally, “He’s All That” — stars Tanner Buchanan as the high school outcast who needs to be whipped into prom-king shape and Addison Rae as the popular girl who does the whipping. It is Rae’s first movie, but she is ubiquitous on TikTok, where her central mode of performance is breezily dancing and lip-syncing to clips of rap songs and ephemeral bits of internet video. When I finally relented and cued up Netflix, I realized that I’d never heard her actual voice.It’s not a good movie. The bubbly charm that vaulted Rae from her Louisiana bedroom to TikTok fame fizzles on a studio set. As the resuscitated plot wheezes through its paces, Rae seems to be struggling to keep up. But the meta story interested me. Rae’s trajectory recalls the arc of “Singin’ in the Rain,” the classic musical about a silent-film star who stumbles in the jump to talkies. In that movie, the star masks her horrible voice by lip-syncing to a sweet-sounding actress hiding behind the curtain. The difference is that Addison Rae became famous by overtly co-opting other people’s sounds. And it is her world, TikTok, that represents the thrilling emerging medium.Acting as if you are singing when you are not singing — lip-syncing has been an object of American popular fascination for a century. Not too long ago, it could even prompt a pop-cultural panic. Framed as a weapon of talentless pop stars and their cynical handlers, it came to represent the height of crass media manipulation. But now the opposite feels true: Lip-syncing has been refashioned as a tool of the appealingly scrappy amateur. Addison Rae can don a crop top, perkily mouth along to a lyric about Percocet and be anointed Hollywood’s new girl next door.

      @addisonre HES ALL THAT NETFLIX FRIDAY ♬ original sound – Tristen🧃 How did we get here? Lip-syncing was so ubiquitous in early musicals that in 1952, “Singin’ in the Rain” relied on it even as it critiqued it: Debbie Reynolds, playing the actress who sings for the star, was herself partially dubbed with the voice of the unheralded singer Betty Noyes. But while films were using lip-syncing to build pitch-perfect Hollywood numbers, drag performers were doing it out of sly necessity. As Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez detail in “Legendary Children,” their cultural history of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag shows were criminalized in early 20th-century America, and evading harassment meant performing at underground clubs and house parties where live music was often out of reach. While movie musicals hoped their lip-syncing created a naturalistic illusion, drag leaned into the artifice, building a commentary on the source material by challenging its gender norms.In mainstream spaces, that artifice has been eyed with suspicion, wrapped up not just in homophobia but also a fear of technology, which might threaten to reprogram the essence of human culture itself. As the Christian Science Monitor asked in 1990, “Is advancing technology leading us into a musical world where nothing is ‘real’?” Occasionally, that tension builds into a culture-wide authenticity crisis.In the early ’90s, the German pop duo Milli Vanilli scandalized the record industry by lip-syncing to uncredited studio singers, Pavarotti was sued for lip-syncing to himself at an Italian concert, and state lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills attempting to regulate dubbing. The pattern repeated itself in 2004, when Ashlee Simpson was pilloried for her lip-sync fail on “Saturday Night Live,” an online petition begged Britney Spears to actually sing on tour, and Elton John said that lip-syncing artists “should be shot.” Finally, in 2013, the controversy reached the Capitol, as journalists grilled Beyoncé about singing with a prerecorded track at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. This time, when she explained that she was a perfectionist using an approved industry tactic, the press actually applauded.Lip-syncing has since swept American culture both high and low. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” busted drag performance out of gay clubs and cabarets and into America’s living rooms. Along the way, it made campy spectacle into a mainstream vehicle for telling personal truths, and fashioned drag queens into, as my colleague Shane O’Neill has put it, the cultural avatars of being yourself. (So successful was the show that it was swiftly co-opted into heterosexual cringe, via the celebrity reality competition “Lip Sync Battle.”)It is now perfectly acceptable for pop stars to lip-sync in live performances, as long as they supply a fantastical enough show in return. This spring, lip-syncing even ascended to the opera: In Opera Philadelphia’s short film “The Island We Made,” the “Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour appears as a spacey maternal spirit, channeling the singer Eliza Bagg’s voice through her glittery red lips. And this fall, you can take a Zoom lip-syncing course with the performance scholar M.B Boucai, integrating the psychological gesture technique of Michael Chekhov and the mime tradition of Jacques Lecoq.Even as lip-syncing reaches new artistic heights, TikTok has democratized it, encouraging its billion global users to casually sing along. The app accommodates performance styles as disparate as Rae executing basic cheerleading moves and a girl mouthing the Counting Crows’ “Shrek 2” track “Accidentally in Love” over youthful images of the Unabomber. On a crowdsourced app, it makes sense for the central creative feature to have a low barrier to entry. Just as Instagram made everyone a hipster photographer with its vintage filters, TikTok turns its audience into experimental mash-up artists, with self-conscious nods to artifice baked into the experience.Besides, as our experience grows increasingly mediated, we’ve come to appreciate the skills of the people who do the mediating. Much of TikTok’s charm derives from its lo-fi aesthetic, its janky green-screen effects and shaky hand-held shots. There is no longer some suspicious Hollywood power broker pulling the strings. (Or if there is, he has swooped in later, after the TikToker is already internet famous.) The app has taken all of the hallmarks of Hollywood manipulation — dubbing, but also airbrushing and C.G.I. — and put them in the user’s hands, where they have employed them in hypnotic, surprising, occasionally beautiful ways.In the drag tradition, lip-syncing freed the body of the physical demands of singing, cracking open stunning new visual possibilities. Lip-syncing on TikTok is less about testing the limits of the body than exploring the boundaries of the phone. Some of the app’s most interesting content is made by young people broadcasting from under their parents’ roofs, and in a sense they are practicing their own kind of clandestine burlesque, playing with their identities amid nondescript backgrounds The tech may be new, but the performances are as pure as singing into a hairbrush.Addison Rae is not a standout lip-syncer, but that is not the point of her. A drag queen lip-syncs with spectacular effort and razor-sharp precision, but Rae telegraphs the opposite, wearing the practice with a flirtatious lightness and evincing the middling technique of an amateur. Her following on the app (84.6 million) feels unjustified by her skill set, but her approachability is part of the appeal. Perhaps you could be her, if you were born with superior tooth enamel and a preternatural awareness of your most flattering angles. Which is not to say that the actual job of TikTok star is easy: When Rae failed to post for a week in 2020, internet headlines speculated that she was pregnant, or dead.Rae’s earliest TikToks are staged in carpeted rooms featuring bare walls and inert ceiling fans, but as she rose in popularity, her backgrounds grew increasingly glamorous — Hollywood group house, infinity pool, Kardashian inner sanctum. The early frisson of her videos, which played off a girl next door unexpectedly surfing the cultural currents to stardom, has dimmed. Now that the self-reinforcing TikTok algorithm has ensured her hegemony on the app, she is swiftly invading more traditional entertainment spheres. You can find her on YouTube, where she sings the brief yet tedious pop single “Obsessed”; at Sephora, where she sells her branded makeup line; and now on Netflix, which has signed her to a multi-picture deal.Boucai, the Zoom instructor, told me that lip-syncing accesses a transgressive remixing tradition developed among marginalized communities: “It’s a way of being able to perform yourself through what you can’t be — through the impossibility of what you can’t be.” Drag rests on heightening and exposing the contradictions of identity, and the best TikTok material does the same. But the app also serves up a buffet of content that only smooths those contradictions into unnerving new forms.In a piece for Wired documenting the evolution of digital blackface on TikTok, Jason Parham observed that Black culture “works like an accelerant” on the app, driving the popularity of white creators who virtually port Black sounds through their own bodies. Here the casualness of a lip-syncing performance becomes discomfiting: For a white creator, Black culture can be assumed and shrugged off with the ease of a costume change.Speaking of bad makeovers: “He’s All That” should represent Rae’s debut as a fully formed star persona, no longer borrowing other people’s cultural expressions but staking a claim to her own. Instead she looks stilted, vacant, lost. A cleverer remake of “She’s All That” (itself a take on “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”) might have taken a lip-syncing TikTok star and refashioned her into someone who had something to say, maybe with the help of a disciplinarian drag mother. Instead we have Rae, just going through the motions. Through figures like her, lip-syncing has finally become not a scandal, or a triumph, but a bore. More

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      in Television

      The D’Amelios Are Coming for All of Your Screens

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      TikTok’s most famous family wants to reintroduce itself on TV. Whatever that means now.Peak screen was achieved this spring, beaming into a business meeting with Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, social media’s starriest sisters, and their parents, Marc and Heidi.Three D’Amelios idly thumbed their devices as a masked cameraman swung in for a close-up, gathering footage for the family’s upcoming documentary series on Hulu. With my own phone, I snapped a photo of the scene on my laptop’s display. Four layers of looking-glass: Marshall McLuhan would have turned cartwheels.Celebrity has changed radically since McLuhan declared “the medium is the message,” and Exhibits A and B are C and D, Charli and Dixie. The sisters’ names might elicit either eye rolls of over-familiarity — perhaps you followed along online as their wisdom teeth were removed? — or blank stares, depending on one’s proximity to TikTok.

      @charlidamelio Stay home & do the #distancedance. Tag me & the hashtag in your video. P&G will donate to Feeding America & Matthew 25 for first 3M videos #PGPartner ♬ Big Up’s (feat. Yung Nnelg) – Jordyn, Nic Da Kid In 2019, Charli and Dixie began posting short, playful videos from their bedrooms (bathrooms, too) and accumulating enormous, unexpected internet followings. This has led to deals selling iced coffee and hummus and social-distancing messages (Charli); several song releases, some quite raunchy (Dixie); dancing with J. Lo before the Super Bowl (Charli); hosting a talk show (Dixie) and sitting front row at Prada in Milan (Charli).Together they have joined and left the Hype House, a content-making collective in Los Angeles; weathered periodic torrents of scorn from commenters; started a podcast; worked on a makeup collection that they daub on each other’s faces with Michelangelo-like care; and through it all frequently updated their fans. In the popular imagination, they are very much a unit, even if it was not always so.Dixie and Charli, who practically overnight became TikTok sensations, have spun that success into sponsorship deals, a music career, an appearance at the Super Bowl and a social distancing campaign.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn this video call, they were discussing marketing plans for a line of clothing called Social Tourist: crop tops and pleated miniskirts and items for the dog (the D’Amelios have four). The name refers not to ethical globe-trotting but to online interaction and identity exploration. “We thought about space travel, about digital versus organic and reflecting what life was like prior to having a cellphone in your hand all the time,” said Nathalie Kossek, the brand’s art director.Remember life before cellphones, when everyone could hum the jingles for Cheerios and Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms learned from commercials? To conjure that nostalgia, one white crew neck sweatshirt priced at $60 would be delivered in a Social Tourist cereal-like box to the 100 fastest-clicking customers.Marc was focused on practical matters. “How is this getting shipped?” he asked. “It should be packaged well — within the package — so it gets there looking good.” Besides being TikTok’s First Father, he has worked in the apparel business for 30 years. Now, he is packaging his family. Having seen hundreds of household names become yesterday’s news, “I want them both to appreciate the fact that nothing’s promised, and chances are it won’t last forever,” he told me later.The D’Amelios were joining the call from Los Angeles, where they moved in the summer of 2020 from Norwalk, Conn., to pursue the many business opportunities that arose after their online fame mushroomed. I was languishing in New York. Downstairs, my 13-year-old was screaming at a video game.“Ask her about the Dino nuggets,” he’d instructed, referring to how Charli, during a dinner catered by a private chef and filmed for the family’s YouTube channel, had suggested breaded chicken as a substitute for the escargot that had triggered Dixie’s gag reflex.The gaffe, or the adolescent ingratitude and entitlement it seemed to punctuate, had cost Charli a million-odd followers on TikTok — a minor setback on the way to her current total of 123 million, the highest number on the platform. A freckled and shiny-haired trained competitive dancer, she is 17. In an earlier era she might have been a cover model for the magazine of that name, which at this time of year would be selling many copies of a 300-page back-to-school print issue filled with ads for concealer and tampons and Famolares.

      @dixiedamelio skinnn thx to my #hideandpeekconcealer now at @ultabeauty 🤍 ps my NEW @morphe2 limited edition personalized bag drops tmrw 4/27! #morphepartner ♬ original sound – MorpheOfficial Mothers then thought those magazines were trash. Now mothers are themselves on TikTok, performing herky-jerky duets and trios with their daughters, wearing loungewear and sheepish grins. That includes Heidi, 49, a former model and personal trainer whose own following is 9.5 million. Marc, 52, a onetime candidate for Connecticut’s State Senate, has a million more. Dixie, 20, has more than 54 million. Belle, Cali, Codi and Rebel, the dogs, are collectively lagging at 850,000.The D’Amelios are not, to use the old showbiz cliché, bigger than the Beatles. But in their toggle between suburban rooms and gleaming event venues, on the moving sidewalk of Instagram and amid the rotten eggs of Twitter, they might well be surpassing the Partridges. The question is, can they sustain the attention of America for more than one-minute online chunks? Can anything?“The D’Amelio Show,” which captures the family’s life at home, follows a well-worn format but with a focus on mental health.Philip Cheung for The New York Times‘A Living Social Experiment’TV no longer really “airs,” the oxygen we all breathe, but “streams” in little rivulets onto computers, phones and other devices. Nor is there really a water-cooler conversation, but rather many little individually filled Hydro Flasks.The electronic hearth of the middle 20th century is now a multitude of electronic hand and lap warmers.But in a way “The D’Amelio Show,” which arrives in a gush of eight episodes on Sept. 3, is a throwback: the latest iteration of a now well-established genre exposing the fights and flaws and foibles of famous families in their habitats. There were the Osbournes; there were the Gottis; and most inescapably there have been the Kardashians, who ended their show after 14 years in June, creating an opening.Sisters sell: the Olsens, the Hiltons, the Hadids and so on. Stabbing at a soup can with a knife in one episode as her boyfriend, Noah Beck, watches dismayed, the dimple-chinned, goofy Dixie conjures Jessica Simpson in “Newlyweds,” wondering if her Chicken of the Sea tuna was chicken. (Also when she wears a glittery cowboy hat and falls off a mechanical bull in the video for a song she released to some censure in May, “F***Boy.”)Like Ms. Simpson’s younger sibling, Ashlee, Charli underwent nose surgery — but in public, for medical rather than cosmetic reasons. And while Ashlee was pilloried after being exposed for lip-syncing her own songs on “Saturday Night Live,” this generation lip-syncs on social media overtly, ironically, often before breaking into self-deprecating laughter and tumbling out of frame.Charli, with her dancing, and Dixie, who studied violin and piano, were naturals at these casual pastiches. Issued MacBooks and smartphones early and sans much parental angst — “something told me this is going to be the future,” Marc said — they grew up watching and imitating YouTube personalities. (“I don’t know if I was a sucker, or what,” Heidi said of Charli’s insistence on doing homework with background entertainment flowing into her headphones.)

      @heididamelio My guy @marcdamelio ##EpicRecordsPartner ♬ Beat It – Michael Jackson But broadcasting from the comfort of home has its peril. Where do you retreat when the calls for cancellation come — when the audience feedback is instant, constant, pinging in your palm?Weirdly, TV, the erstwhile idiot box, has become not the place for further exposure, but a safe — or at least safer — space, where professionals set boundaries, supply context and order the chaos of online interaction. In the show, negative comments the sisters receive on social media pop up onscreen like the annotations of VH1’s music video heyday, taking the audience into the psychic cage of the phone; each episode is bracketed with public service announcements about mental health.“Inside a phone, on an app, people can be dehumanized — not just us, everybody,” Marc said. The television show, he hopes, will give people “a fair assessment of who we really are.”Belisa Balaban, the vice president of original documentaries at Hulu, said she hoped “the show inspires dialogue between parents and kids about social media. It’s evolving so fast. They are a tight-knit family, and we know a lot of kids aren’t lucky enough to have that.”Sara Reddy, the showrunner and an executive producer who previously worked on “Toddlers and Tiaras” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” assembled a small crew that filmed from four to eight hours on weekdays and stayed out of the girls’ therapy sessions — though they were allowed in when Dixie broke down in convulsive tears over negative reactions to a video diary she did for Vogue. “Wanting to not be part of the problem, that was really important to me, because I could see that the girls were struggling with all the scrutiny,” Ms. Reddy said.When first pitched the D’Amelios, Ms. Reddy “had no clue who they were, none,” she said. “I’m not a teenager. I really found it easy to roll my eyes at social media during Covid. Then I dug in, and what really struck me was I felt like the family was a living social experiment that they didn’t necessarily sign up for. I came into their life right as fame was changing for them. They had the fun rise up — and as we do to people we put on a pedestal, people were starting to take them down. And I thought this can be a much more complete, interesting story than just, ‘Hey, this family’s famous.’”“I felt like the family was a living social experiment that they didn’t necessarily sign up for,” said Sara Reddy, the showrunner.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesCharli and Dixie, IRLWhen they aren’t dolled up for something like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards, where Charli in a strapless formal gown was doused in green slime like a latter-day Carrie, the sisters seem to recede into soft, blurry situations: dipping into ice cream, disappearing into hoodies and under blankets, hugging Squishmallows. Charli is scared to drive. “Curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs,” she mutters on the show, practicing. “Every time I’m free, I just want to be in bed on my phone, which is so bad,” Dixie says. The only sign that they might be ready to fight back is their manicures, which are incongruously sharp and pointy — talons, really.These they waggled at me in person one morning after rainstorms flooded the subways of Manhattan, in an enormous penthouse apartment with views of the Hudson River — and, Dixie noted, dramatic lightning strikes. The obvious metaphor hung in the air.Asked not about Dino nuggets but the moment when it all changed, Charli said, “I don’t know. It wasn’t like a snap that happened. More like, ‘This is happening, but I still feel the same.’ And now it’s happening on a much bigger scale, and I still feel the same, so I don’t know.”Dixie would like eventually to settle in New York, where her parents courted a quarter-century ago, before cellphones became commonplace, rollerblading in Central Park. “I want to be here,” she said.As for Charli: “I have no idea. I like everywhere. I kind of want to live in the middle of nowhere.” she said. “On a farm. Or like in the middle of L.A. Who knows. I go back and forth.”Any anxious parent of quaran-teens, sequestered for so many months with their portals to heaven-knows-what — their temporary avatars out there for all eternity like so much space junk — could sympathize with this impulse to vanish into the pastoral. And also not hold her to it, on the eve of a Hollywood debut.

      @charlidamelio @dixiedamelio ♬ Be Happy – Dixie “I think people are going to be surprised about the maturity of the show,” Dixie said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh my God, watch us do TikToks all day.’ It’s very deep, it’s very true, it shows our emotions, it’s caught us in real time having breakdowns and not wanting to do social media anymore. And the thing is, I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, they’re doing this for sympathy or attention.’ We just want you to take a look into our lives and take what you want from it.”“I’ve heard that people like to come to our pages for a little bit of an escape,” Charli said dryly.And should that escape feels like a trap, the most popular girl on TikTok offers the simplest of solutions. “I feel like it’s very important to take some time off whenever you feel like you need it,” she said. “You don’t even tell yourself, ‘Time to take a break.’ You kind of just let it go.” She waggled her fingers again, as if sprinkling magic dust. “Drop your phone for a little bit.” More

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      in Music

      Where Is Country Music Making Room for Women?

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      For the last several years, the obstacles female performers face in country music have been widely documented and discussed, yet conditions haven’t improved much. The genre favors a handful of big stars, and offers few opportunities for growth to younger ones.That said, recently some rising singers — Gabby Barrett, Carly Pearce, Ingrid Andress, Lainey Wilson — have found success on the historically inhospitable country radio airwaves. And TikTok has provided an avenue to getting heard that elides Nashville infrastructure altogether, allowing performers like Priscilla Block a side door to a wide fan base, and then a record deal.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the myriad ongoing barriers faced by women in the country music business, and the ways they are manifested in the music itself.Guests:Marissa Moss, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and author of a forthcoming book on women in country music, “Where Have All the Cowgirls Gone?”Natalie Weiner, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and writer about music for Billboard and others More

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      in Music

      When a TikTok Influencer Dances, Who Gets Credit?

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      Late last month, the TikTok influencer Addison Rae went on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and casually performed a suite of recent viral dance routines in a comedic skit. Critics reacted with cries of appropriation — the dances’ creators, many of them Black, were not credited — and with dismissals of Rae’s dancing ability.What the producers of the skit failed to acknowledge is how dance credits have become integral to TikTok, as they have been on apps where dance was previously popular, like Instagram and Dubsmash. Influencers like Rae and Charli D’Amelio might be the most well-known dancers on TikTok, but they are vessels for dances created by a range of others, from professional choreographers looking for a jolt of virality to teenagers working out new moves in their basement.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ways dance has been central to the spread of TikTok, the relationship between Black choreographers and white influencers and a pocket history of dance credits on social media.GuestTaylor Lorenz, The New York Times technology reporter More

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      in Music

      TikTok and the Pop Music Rough Draft

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyPopcastSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsTikTok and the Pop Music Rough DraftThe wildly popular platform has reshaped pop during the coronavirus pandemic, and changed how record labels grapple with unpredictable virality.Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.More episodes ofPopcastMarch 13, 2021  •  More

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      in Music

      Scenes From a Marriage, Patinkin-Style

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      Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody were mystified when some of the videos they made with their son while waiting out the pandemic in upstate New York were viewed more than a million times.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesThe Great ReadScenes From a Marriage, Patinkin-StyleMandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody’s charming, irreverent pandemic-era posts led to unlikely social media stardom. Will the vaccine end their run?Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody were mystified when some of the videos they made with their son while waiting out the pandemic in upstate New York were viewed more than a million times.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 3, 2021Updated 1:27 p.m. ETMandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody have been together since their first date nearly 43 years ago, a giddy daylong romp through Greenwich Village that began with brunch and ended with them making out on a street corner. “I’m going to marry you,” he declared. “You’re going to get hurt, because I’m not going to marry anyone,” she replied.Their wedding was two years later, in 1980. But like many long-term couples, their partnership has thrived in part because they are away from each other so much. Grody, 74, is an Obie Award-winning actress and writer; Patinkin, 68, finished the final season of “Homeland” last year and spent the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 on a 30-city concert tour.In March, they left Manhattan for their cabin in upstate New York and embarked, like so many of us, on something radically different: months of uninterrupted time together. The result is a matter of public record, because scenes from their marriage — in all its talky, squabbly, emotional, affectionate glory — are all over social media, courtesy of their son Gideon, 34, who started recording them for fun and then realized that there was a vast demand for Patinkin-related content.Patinkin said that “being with my family holed up for 11 months has been one of the true gifts of my life.” Grody urged their son Gideon, who made their videos, not to portray them simply as an “adorable older couple” but to “get some of our annoyance in there.”Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesFor months, people have scrolled through Twitter, Instagram and TikTok to watch Grody and Patinkin debate, declaim, snuggle, bicker, horse around, play with their dog, Becky, obsess about politics and display their (lack of) knowledge about such topics as text-speak and the New York pizza rat. More recently, the world has followed along as they got their first doses of the vaccine (“one of the few benefits of being old,” Patinkin wrote).Now, as they near the first anniversary of all that togetherness, they say that except for desperately missing their older son, Isaac, who lives in Colorado and recently got married, they feel lucky to be together. “There’s no question,” Patinkin said. “Being with my family holed up for 11 months has been one of the true gifts of my life.”As this phase of the pandemic nears its end, do they plan to turn their unlikely social-media fame into a family sitcom or reality TV show? No, says Gideon, although they have gotten endless inquiries. For one thing, his parents can barely operate the video functions on their phones, and eventually he will again have to leave them to their own devices. “Once the world is vaccinated and living life is back in vogue, I might have to teach them how to do selfie videos,” he said. “That should be something.”After the first few videos last spring, Grody exhorted Gideon not to portray them simply as an “adorable older couple,” she said. “You have to get some of our annoyance in there,” she told him.What annoyance? In dueling interviews, the couple outlined the many ways they irritate each other. Patinkin hates the way his wife amasses old newspapers, like a hoarder. Grody hates how, when she fails to answer her husband’s calls, he redials incessantly — three, four, five times — until she picks up. She likes podcasts; he likes rewiring the house. She is a “social maniac,” Patinkin said; he “likes humanity in general, but very few specific people,” Grody said.In one video, they tell Gideon how they celebrated their anniversary the day before.“It began lovely, and turned into an absolute fight,” Patinkin says. “Both of us lost.”“I apologized and that made dad cry,” Grody says. “We’ve always connected through weeping.”The response was so positive, with people posting that the couple reminded them of themselves or their parents or just brought joy at a dark time, that Gideon now advises other young adults confined at home to embark on similar projects. “I became astonished at how much I could get out of them,” he said.Their efforts expanded this summer and through the election. Patinkin has long volunteered for the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, and Gideon encouraged his parents to use their growing social media base — now 250,000-plus on Twitter, 155,000-plus on Instagram, 940,000-plus on TikTok — to work for Democratic candidates in the presidential and Senate elections.The couple took part in virtual fund-raisers; did endless phone banking; danced, sang, cooked and goofed around. Enlisting the services of the writer and director Ewen Wright, they recorded TikTok campaign spots, like one in which Patinkin tells young people to get their parents and grandparents to vote, and then twerks to a remix of the song “Stand By Me.” Mystifyingly to them, some of their videos have been viewed more than a million times.Will the show go on? After their cameraman — one of their sons, Gideon — is vaccinated and returns to his daily life, Patinkin and Grody will be left to their own devices, literally.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York Times“I don’t understand this stuff,” said Grody, who on one video can be seen trying to explain what she thinks TikTok is: “a communication tool” that encourages “young people to meet various kinds of other young people.”All the while, Gideon kept filming, adding new nuances to what has turned into a portrait of a complex marriage.It has not been without its adversities. (“They are an exquisite mess, but theirs is a deeply rich joy,” is how Gideon put it.) For one thing, there is Patinkin’s self-proclaimed moodiness. Once, he related, he was so unpleasant in the car en route to visit a relative that Gideon, then a teenager, said, ‘Dad, if you can’t get it together, don’t come in.” (He didn’t come in.) Another time, he felt so trapped and sulky before Thanksgiving — a difficult time of the year for him — that he decided to fly to New Orleans to spare his family, only to change his mind and demand, successfully, to exit the plane before it took off.“Everyone in the family knows I’m a (synonym for jerk),” Patinkin said. “But they know me and they love me and they forgive me, and that’s why I feel safe. The word ‘safe’ is such an operative word at this moment.”By that he meant the pandemic, and how lucky it is to be with someone who makes you feel secure in a time of insecurity.“There have been times during this whole period — sometimes I don’t even know what triggered them — there are times when I wake up and I find myself weeping, and she holds me and no words are spoken,” Patinkin said of his wife.“I married a woman who knew a guy was nuts, and she has loved me and stood by me and educated me and politicized me,” he continued. Or, as Grody said: “I used to say that I was supposed to marry a rock so I could be the lunatic, but instead I married a lunatic and I’ve had to be the rock.”They have separated twice in the course of their marriage, once for six months, the other for eight months.“We spoke to each other every day; we saw each other every day,” Patinkin said. “We couldn’t be apart.”“It was ridiculous, to tell you the truth,” Grody said. “I would say, ‘Don’t you know we’re supposed to be separated?’ As difficult as our problems were, it was far more difficult to be without each other.”They love describing how they met. They told the story in separate interviews, each observing that the other would focus on totally different details.Her version includes noticing her future husband in a 7Up commercial, circa 1970, a full eight years before they met. She then noticed him again in 1975, in his debut theater performance — the premiere of “Trelawny of the Wells,” which also starred Meryl Streep, Mary Beth Hurt and John Lithgow. She found the young Patinkin so appealing from afar that she turned to her then-boyfriend and said, “He’s my type — what am I doing with you?”Patinkin’s version includes how he went to her house for dinner soon after their fateful initial brunch and found that, living in a tiny walk-up in Little Italy, she stored her sweaters in the oven. Mis-following a recipe, she served him chicken covered in raw bacon.“I felt that I had lost my mind,” he said. “I was knocked out by her.”“When I look at Mandy, I see all of the Mandys I’ve ever known, from the person he was then to the person he is now,” Grody said.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesPatinkin brought up “The Princess Bride,” in which he played Inigo Montoya, a swordsman trying to avenge his father’s death — and which at heart is about the search for true love.“I have found true love,” he said, “and first and foremost, I have it with my wife.”Grody feels the same way.“When I look at Mandy, I see all of the Mandys I’ve ever known, from the person he was then to the person he is now,” she said. “I’m still in love with his face.”In November, the couple appeared together in a video for the Jewish Democratic Council of America. They toasted the election results, exhorted everyone to stay safe. And then he sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in Yiddish, as his wife wept quietly beside him.“To have known somebody all these years, and to have lived this life together, and to have weathered the brutalities of intimacy — it’s a daring thing,” she said. “It’s an astonishing thing.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More