It’s Getting Worse: Club Chalamet, Connor Storrie, and Parasocial Fandom

Okay, fine, let’s do this.

This week, Simone Cromer, best known on social media as Club Chalamet, alleges that she was “jumped” by someone while they were both standing outside of a hotel in Paris waiting to catch a glimpse of Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie. Cromer, who has been a controversial figure online for her unsettling fan obsessions and swings into conspiracy, says that this person, a fellow Storrie stan and self-described obsessive, threatened her. The other person claims that they were just trying to protect Storrie from a stalker. That they, too, were waiting for hours in a heatwave to see an actor for a few seconds added a particular sense of irony to the occasion.

To call this incident messy and stupid would be doing a disservice to the fine messy idiots of our society. This is an embarrassment that once again reminds us that we need to stop being weirdos about celebrities and that amplifying the opinions of stalkers is creepy. But how did we get here?

Cromer first went viral when it was revealed that Chalamet was dating Kylie Jenner. Her bizarre and exceedingly long audio rant about the pair was the stuff of tinfoil hats and red string on corkboards. She claimed to have insider knowledge that the relationship was fake and that the pair did not have sex, and one of her pieces of proof was that Chalamet, a lover of Italian food, had never taken Jenner to Olive Garden. Because the internet cannot take anything seriously, Cromer was elevated to the status of irony-poisoned stan queen, with many people cheering on her misogynistic rants and grabbing of Chalamet in public. She attended one Q&A where she grabbed his used water bottle. At a more recent film festival event, she barged towards his table and touched him without permission.

The Wall Street Journal published a bizarre profile of Cromer late last year (read my thoughts), which elevated her profile further as her Chalamet fandom began to wane. Between him not winning the Oscar for Marty Supreme and his public dedication to his partner, Kylie Jenner, it became abundantly clear that Timmy would go the way of the dodo. A brief attachment to Sam Reid was replaced by Connor Storrie, as Heated Rivalry became the biggest show in the world. This was a familiar cycle to those of us who had known of Cromer before her viral fame. She used to frequent a film forum I’m a member of, where she was a proud Michael Fassbender obsessive who dumped him as a “flop” when he started dating his now-wife, Alicia Vikander.

Moving Storrie, who is over three decades her junior and was a complete unknown this time last year, she doubled down on the weird rhetoric. Her posts are often uncomfortably objectifying, parrot conspiratorial shipping rhetoric over his closeness with co-star Francois Arnaud, and she has a serious hatred for his other co-star, Hudson Williams. I'd argue her posting has gotten way creepier since switching targets. She always studiously insisted her obsession with Chalamet wasn't sexual, but Storrie? Wow, she is extremely comfortable spinning fantasies about his love life.

She’s not the only person who’s treated Storrie with this kind of flagrant disrespect and entitlement. For some reason, the Heated Rivalry fandom is divided between Storrie and Williams camps, with racism and queerphobia rampant across the board. It got so bad that the show’s cast and crew had to call it out. And yet Cromer and her cronies persist in this tedious pattern of making everything in fandom a competition. It’s all about numbers, victories, and backing the right horse.

Cromer has made for an easy target of mockery, given that she’s a woman in her late 50s who seems to exclusively gawk over much younger men and cannot help but throw their spouses and girlfriends under the bus in the process. The ageism and racism she’s faced is undeniable, as is her own history of misogyny, victim-blaming, and sharing of hard-right rhetoric. She’s a woman who speaks with such authority in her obsessions, and her eagerness to position herself as the leader of her fandoms, spewing conspiracies and putting targets on her adversaries’ backs, makes her hard to embrace. But there are countless Club Chalamets across the fandom spectrum, and many of them are way scarier than her. It’s just that she’s been anointed as special by the press, and they’ve made a clickbait-ready spectacle in turning her obsession into content.

All of these people are stupid and selfish and should leave Connor Storrie alone. This man has been wildly famous for about seven months now. He went from a nobody to an A-Lister in less than a year, and now he has to contend with being followed everywhere, having his love life speculated about, and being pitted against his friends and co-stars in ways that frequently descend into racism and queerphobia. It’s a miracle that he and Hudson Williams are coping as well as they are. This is not a normal experience of fame, and it’s not normal the way that Cromer talks about Storrie.

Okay, it’s not normal, but it is familiar. The way Cromer talks about Storrie is often uncomfortable, but also not unique in its objectification. Attacking Hudson Williams, an Asian man, by claiming he’s jealous of his white colleague for having “won the lottery in appearance (fair, blond, blue-green eyes)” is staggeringly racist and a dishearteningly common line of attack in many a fandom space. Pitting two friends and colleagues against one another so you can perpetuate the image of yourself as the fandom sage is an old and rotten tactic. What feels different now is that Cromer’s every word becomes news, and the trainwreck of her stupidity is blown up to oversized proportions.

The depressing thing is that I think all of this will only benefit Cromer, a bigoted creep whose history of harassment and stupidity should have made her persona non grata from the moment she went viral. The press has been curiously eager to make her into not only a star in her own right but the figurehead of modern fandom gone awry. While she is genuinely nuts and often deeply cruel in her conspiratorial ramblings, she is not, alas, a unique figure in this system. Creepy stalker fans plundering the depths of the parasocial has been a thing for centuries. Lisztomania had women scrambling on the ground to pick up the used cigarette butts of a composer. Beatlemania changed a generation. People have gone to jail for stalking, abusing, and killing their idols. But now, Cromer gets newspaper profiles and stans, cheering her on and pushing to see how far she’ll go.

And all of this will end in a bloody documentary, and Ryan Murphy’s probably got his claws into a spec script somewhere. She’ll get more weirdly fawning coverage, and everyone will ignore her support of Kevin Spacey and retweeting of Tommy Robinson. Whenever there’s a need for yet another cycle of fandom bashing or faux-concerned gawking over the ways that celebrities are maligned, they’ll point to Cromer and make her the main character. They’ll use that as an excuse to further exacerbate the dehumanising of people like Chalamet, Storrie, and whoever their next of-the-moment target is.

Because that’s the real agenda here: people like being able to berate and harass and objectify celebrities, and the press wants that nasty cycle to continue. They may tut and shake their heads when things go too far, but they were the ones pushing it to that level. It’s why people like Chappell Roan are so overtly punished when they dare to establish boundaries. They’re spoiling the fun of people like Cromer and company. It’s no coincidence that they also love an excuse for misogyny. Just look at how they pseudo-ironically cheered on Cromer when she was being transparently sexist towards Kylie Jenner. The bigotry doesn’t count if it’s directed at someone you don’t like, is how the logic so often goes.

Cromer shouldn’t have been physically manhandled, especially not by an equally unhinged fan who thinks their parasocial attachment is more manageable because they’re aware of it. The cavalcade of jackassery on display is exhausting. It’s also true that behaviour like Cromer’s should be called out and pushed back against. Fandom spaces should be forceful in combatting bigotry and obsession, both towards their interests and their fan community. Sometimes, it is that serious. We have far too many examples of when this gets violent and scary. And I don’t think I’m being paranoid in worrying about how far these stalker creeps will go. Even if they don’t plan to lock Connor Storrie in their basement, isn’t it a good thing to want fans not to treat human beings like punching bags? Surely, it's just better for us as a species not to make stars of bullies and creeps.