THE GIRL WITH A SHORT KING
The difference in a photo they took obviously was big
“Tall and tan and young and lovely”—record scratch.
I was scrolling along with my morning coffee when all of a sudden Vogue magazine fed me this viral bit. Dear God, I thought, I’ve been infected with an earworm. That’s what you call a song like “The Girl From Ipanema” that keeps repeating in my mind, so it’s definitely, probably related to the post.
From the comments, I gathered what’s really been bugging me: not so much the girl in an earworm as the guy bitten by a radioactive spider. He’s looking a lot shorter than I remembered.
Searching through the Instagram photo-sharing service reveals that the image of the tall leading lady with the short leading man is in vogue (= not just in the eponymous fashion mag). Zendaya stands five feet ten in her socks. Tom’s five feet sevenish, give or take an inch (depending on the source). Curiously, all the Spider-Man scenes with them in pictures had been made to look the same height. There are two possible explanations for this.
One is that during production there was a dramatic increase in the actual height of Tom—or at least in the studio ground. This explanation seems possible, but unlikely.
The more likely explanation is that Hollywood is quickly supplanting reality as the aesthetic in pictures.
As recently as 2021, a movie studio not only felt the need to make Tom look taller, but it showed contrary to popular belief as well, not all publicity is good box office.
They say there’s no business like show business. Except they left out stage business and the other funny business going on here.
What’s more, the content in an authentic countermovement hasn’t made social media immune to silver screen quotation; people slide into my DMs all the time wanting height or pleasing stature.
Good thing we use the same design elements for pictorial compositions, both of motion pictures and still photographs alike. Time to act. Tho, instead of stagecraft by a picture writing into the photo, focus on the fly—like at BERO’s launch. Coming live from the red carpet and pursued by paparazzi there, where you had recourse to your company holiday party for a celebratory photo op. ‘Twas all thanks to this little volume of the newsletter you hold in your hands.
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