Sunday, January 16, 2022

For Camila Mendes, Fame Is the Best Revenge

Is the ocean bigger than Camila Mendes? Certainly—but also, in some respects, no. In real life, Mendes is 5'2" while the Atlantic Ocean takes up nearly 41 million miles. Watch the Riverdale star wade through waves in Miami—even while wearing some gasp-worthy beachwear from Chanel—and it's easy to lose her between the blue-green swells that smash the horizon. She's just one girl, after all, and the ocean is eternal.

That's in the physical realm, anyway. What happens when you view Mendes through your phone is a little different. For starters, the 27-year-old is captivating onscreen, with a wide open face she knows how to use. (After four years of training at NYU's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, it seems her eyebrows alone have mastered the Stanislavski method of "react first, think later.") Put a camera on her in the Atlantic, as photographer Tyler Joe did at the shoreline of the Faena Hotel, and suddenly you think, What ocean?

Then there's the data. In the vast corner of the internet known as TikTok, #CamilaMendes content has been viewed roughly 2 billion times. The #AtlanticOcean? About 175 million. We could twist this fact into a parable about environmentalism and Hollywood, or a lament about the attention span of the American teen. Or we could simply accept that in some realms of reality, Mendes is essentially a force of nature.

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