Hey, do you need to hear the whitest sentence within the English language? It’s “Justin Randall Timberlake was arrested on a DWI cost in Sag Harbor on a Tuesday.” God, simply typing these phrases is sufficient to summon the phantom style of potato salad with raisins in it.
Poor Justin Timberlake. He’s had a tough few years, hasn’t he? He’s possible not used to all of the dangerous press after many years residing within the gentle as favored *NSYNC son. However certainly, on June 18, he was arrested in the Hamptons on suspicion of ingesting and driving. His mug shot—bleary baby-blue eyes—has already been republished a thousand instances. His reported phrases upon being arrested—a pitch-perfect setup and punch line, if Page Six is to be believed—have additionally already been remodeled into an limitless roll of memes. No argument there: This will certainly ruin the world tour.
Gen Xers and millennials are hard-pressed to recollect a time when Timberlake wasn’t a dominating cultural drive. When *NSYNC’s first album charted in 1998, he was the clean-cut, well-liked boy-band idol who had ramen for hair. When he went solo in 2002, with Justified, the general public was too distracted by how good “Cry Me a River” was to appropriately acknowledge how silly an album identify—and his accompanying fedora—that was. Since then, Timberlake has remained considered one of our most enduring celebrities. He charmed together with his tearful nervousness on Punk’d (somebody put Ashton Kutcher instantly underneath a jail) and delighted together with his Barry–and–Robin Gibb routine with Jimmy Fallon on Saturday Night time Reside. He dated Britney Spears, then publicly accused her of cuckolding him; he may as nicely have branded her with an enormous ol’ SLUT straight throughout her brow. In 2004 he carried out on the Tremendous Bowl halftime present with Janet Jackson; in an incident that taught the world the phrases wardrobe malfunction, Timberlake ripped off Jackson’s high and uncovered her breast, hurling her right into a vortex of public shaming. Within the aftermath, he gained two Grammys.
For a great decade and a half, it appeared as if Timberlake was untouchable. He was on the outskirts of a thousand scandals however by no means confronted any critical repercussions himself. He was impish, was conceited, and had been well-known since childhood—there didn’t even appear to be penalties from his spouse, Jessica Biel, after he was photographed in 2019 holding palms together with his Palmer co-host Alisha Wainwright. “I ought to have identified higher,” Timberlake wrote in a Notes app apology, which I can solely assume was seen by tens of millions extra folks than ever noticed Palmer.
Timberlake, whether or not or not he realized it, had been strolling on fractured ice for the previous few years. The tide first began turning on him after Spears’ conservatorship was covered in Framing Britney Spears, and her personal public reckoning took the type of celebrities, comedians, and common folks on the web apologizing to her endlessly for the way we mocked her within the early aughts. Shouldn’t her ex-boyfriend, responsible of serving to kick off the pattern within the first place, additionally apologize? Her memoir, in addition to the a number of documentaries chronicling her media therapy, painted Timberlake as, at greatest, a hapless Caucasian goon yelling “fo’ shiz, fo’ shiz” at Ginuwine. At worst, in hindsight, he was merciless and egocentric, allegedly dishonest on Spears privately whereas dragging her by means of the mud publicly, burying her within the distinctive type of dangerous press that solely a girl can undergo from. Jackson’s scandal additionally obtained the documentary treatment, equally reminding the world that Timberlake was half of the equation of the bottom level in her profession and but had borne not one of the penalties when he ripped off her high. His apology to Jackson was 17 years too late.
It’s not essentially shocking {that a} very wealthy, very well-known man was arrested on suspicion of getting just a few too many and driving round Sag Harbor, a city beloved by rich elites trying to escape Manhattan for the summer time. What’s putting right here as an alternative is the schadenfreude being squeezed out of this story. No element is simply too small for the gossiping hordes to contemplate: the baby-faced arresting cop who allegedly didn’t even know who Timberlake was (mortifying), the bartender who confirmed that the singer had certainly ordered just one drink, the New York Occasions reporter who was dispatched to Sag Harbor to cowl this very important story, solely to get dogged by locals.
However the on-line glee round Timberlake’s downfall may by no means have occurred in a single day. For years, quietly then more and more vocally, a swath of pissed off popular culture followers have resented Timberlake. They grew up with him, like he mentioned not too long ago on the Chicago cease of his aforementioned world tour, as he thanked the crowd for “driving with” him after his arrest. These spectators have sat entrance row to the truth that he’s now not a cutie-pie 24-year-old whose album we by no means take out of our CD participant—he’s the 43-year-old man out of your hometown who gained’t cease speaking about that one large play he had as captain of the soccer workforce. Because the mainstream tradition’s collective understanding of gender and racial politics has shifted, we see Timberlake’s function with extra readability. He’s not the idol anymore. He’s out of step with the zeitgeist; the general public can higher view his murky historical past with girls, from Britney to Janet to, after all, his long-suffering spouse, who did nothing fallacious apart from stealing from her siblings’ piggy financial institution on seventh Heaven.
A loud, comical backlash has been brewing for years, ready for yet one more misstep to interrupt the dam on these many years’ price of pent-up emotions about Timberlake. Ingesting whereas driving is an ideal one for a now-resentful viewers to latch on to; it’s an simply preventable crime that means entitlement and a scarcity of consideration for different folks’s well-being. Timberlake’s downfall, as urged by the breathlessness of tabloid protection and on-line reactions, is tinged with delight; if he can tumble this low, which means nearly any beforehand invincible man can. And, hey, perhaps they need to.
It’s tough and even somewhat painful to guess at what runs by means of Timberlake’s thoughts when he has moments to himself, within the wake of this string of nadirs after a profession that went up and up and up. Does it trouble him that his Madison Sq. Backyard live performance—which takes place tonight—hasn’t bought out? What concerning the even-emptier Wednesday present? Is he haunted that his most up-to-date album, supposedly an enormous comeback after years of inactivity, outright flopped? Does he yearn for the times when he may current himself as a cup of soup on SNL, or in some brain-dead sketch with Jimmy Fallon (who has equally been battling bad press after years of being the nice man), and the viewers would fall over themselves with pleasure? It should be laborious now, residing within the quiet and the contempt that continues to be.
However that’s the factor about figures like Timberlake, isn’t it? We grow old; they stay the same age.
