Lost in showbizCelebrityThe Hollywood star’s attempt to become an online player has had to be brought to a halt after trolls broke his app
I have spent more of my life than I would like to admit imagining who a Jeremy Renner fan would be. In my mind, they have dogs and a gleaming pickup truck, but they don’t live on farmland; instead, they live in a grey-fronted new-build on an uphill cul-de-sac in a generic American town. They have a number of sweated-in caps that they wear every day, even to formal events. At least one pump-action shotgun and possibly a long-range weapon, too.
I dream that Renner fans literally all air guitar along to Don’t Stop Believin’, even when the song is not actually playing. The males still somehow have early-00s goatees and jeans that pool over their boots like curtains. When they walk into a gas station – which Renner fans do up to seven times a day, always making a creaking, groaning noise when they pay at the register in damp, crumpled wads of cash – they walk sideways and stiff-legged, like Liam Gallagher after bruising his tailbone, so that other people cannot easily navigate past. My imaginary female Renner fans, meanwhile, self-describe as “mom” in their Instagram bios, have one eye that cannot look directly at a camera lens and are always making some sort of vile American casserole that is mainly pork lumps and garlic powder.
Night after night, these Renner fans sit in a cuddle puddle with their dozens of large rescue dogs. As the lights dim against the night, truck engine tinkling cool outside, they watch The Hurt Locker, then all the Marvel films, that Bourne one Renner did, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Renner fans are fundamentally happier and more at peace than you and me, yes, but will history remember them when they are dead? It will not.
What history will remember, though, is Renner’s attempt at becoming an app billionaire, which came crashing down this week. In case you have somehow not downloaded the Jeremy Renner app – called, simply, “Jeremy Renner” – it was a bit like Instagram, but only for pictures of Jeremy Renner, posted by Jeremy Renner, with Jeremy Renneresque captions such as: “Have a rockin weekend everyone!!!” You could communicate with other Jeremy Renner fans, and every time someone commented back to you on the app you got a push notification that, due to an incredibly thoughtless quirk of design, made it seem as if Jeremy Renner himself was whispering it directly into your phone. So you could type, say, I don’t know: “I literally don’t know how my movie career happened. I am entirely charmless and a completely forgettable actor. My go-to facial expression is ‘midway through a polite conversation with an unfamiliar neighbour, I realise my dog has rolled in a dog turd’. They should have left me in the makeup truck where they found me” and it would appear as if Jeremy Renner was saying that, about himself. So you can see how this instantly and spectacularly fell apart.
As Stefan Heck wrote on Deadspin, “I Broke the Official Jeremy Renner App by Posting the Word ‘Porno’ On It”. After a screenshot of someone responding to the word “porno” with “Nasty!! Not Cool” went viral, the Jeremy Renner app was inundated by Renner impersonators all saying how much they loved porno and pornography-aligned things. And lo: Renner had to shutter the app he primarily used as a way of wishing people a rockin weekend.
“The app has jumped the shark. Literally,” Renner said in a statement, literally. “Due to clever individuals that were able to manipulate ways to impersonate me and others within the app I have asked ESCAPEX, the company that runs this app, to shut it down immediately.”
Ah yes, those galactic-brained hackers who were able to manipulate the iron-clad security of the Jeremy Renner app by … simply signing up with Renner’s name and photograph. How on earth could we have seen this happening?
The thing is … this is not even the first time the Jeremy Renner app has been shut down because of trolling. In 2017, around the time of the app’s initial launch, the Renner community (Rennerheads? Renoids? Jerryboys? God knows) was tearing itself apart in the comments section under Jeremy Renner’s updates. This was due to a multipronged controversy involving a Hurricane Harvey giveaway experience (fans were mad that a Renner-promised visit to the set of the Avengers film turned out to just be a visit to his house), comment moderation described as totalitarian, a wonky app update and accusations of bullying. I simply cannot believe that Renner somehow attracts this much online drama. But see you in 2021 for the inevitable Biannual Jeremy Renner App Catastrophe.
Not in front of Cardi, please, children
I am both sad and delighted to announce that Cardi B is locked in a rap feud with four 10-year-old boys. In a way, we should have seen this coming, shouldn’t we: Cardi B, a lightning bolt of drama, glamour and soft-spoken charisma, who took possibly the last original path to superstardom going – from viral motivational Instagram speaker (“A hoe never gets cold”) to alumni of the reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York, to multiplatinum artist to one of the biggest stars in the world – was always, truly, destined to have this headline written about her: “Cardi B tells 10-year-olds who wrote diss track to go ‘drink f***ing milk.”
To catch you up: on Monday night, Cardi broadcast one of her regular tell-all Instagram Lives, in which she uttered the immortal lines: “Not gonna let no little fucking white boys come at me all motherfucking day long. Motherfucking shut the fuck up and stay in your motherfucking place. Go drink your motherfucking milk, bitch.” The clip was interpreted as being a dig at ZN8tion, a group of four fraternal quadruplets who had recorded a diss track aimed at Cardi in which they chant, “They fixed your teeth / but they couldn’t fix your face” and that they “Don’t know what’s faker / your life or your butt”, before one of them dances toward the camera with a cushion down their tiny child’s trousers to simulate a curvy arse. I simply don’t know how four children – Hollywood, Slim Z, Bonez McKoy and Mr Great, before you ask – got access to a studio, a camera, a cushion, a beat to diss over the top of and 143,000 Instagram followers, but it’s 2019 and we just have to accept these things as facts now. That’s just the world we live in. I mean it’s better than a Jeremy Renner app, isn’t it?
Anyway, turns out it was all a misunderstanding. Cardi was actually lamenting footage from Travis Scott’s Netflix documentary, Look Mom, I Can Fly, in which he seems visibly annoyed to lose the best rap album Grammy to Cardi’s Invasion of Privacy. So she defended herself and her work on Instagram, relating how she recorded it throughout a difficult pregnancy, and these eerily matching 10-year-olds had absolutely nothing to do with it. This has, therefore, become a self-fulfilling rap beef: ZN8tion have somehow blipped above the radar by swinging for Cardi and fundamentally missing, and now she’s mad that everyone thinks she’s mad at four identical children. So in a way: yes, Cardi B is now annoyed at ZN8tion because everyone thought she was annoyed at ZN8tion, but she isn’t, she’s annoyed at … I don’t know. “The industry.”
I think the main takeaway from this, though, is: this cannot be the last I hear from Hollywood, Slim Z, Mr Great and my precious Bonez McKoy, please. It’s a dark and miserable year, a grey and torrid time to be alive, and what I need – what my soul craves! – is four matching 10-year-olds in wraparound sunglasses rapping on an anti-bullying platform, but bullying Cardi B as they do it. Please, more beef from the ZN8tion quads. Go for Kanye next, or Taylor Swift. Call Ed Sheeran out for a rap battle. This is what the future of culture needs: four aggy 10-year-olds, cushions firmly down their trousers, calling Drake a “fart boy”.
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