I have a friend who sends me profiles of women he found on Tinder every day. It started because I wanted to know about divorcees on Tinder for a book I’m writing, and it’s become a constant in our conversations: the way humanity describes itself on dating apps speaks me like the abyss.
For two days I have felt that there is a serious gap in my education in this century: in fact, I do not have a friend who sends me profiles of men among the desperate that she finds in the Tinder window. I’ve been reading the newspapers for two days and I’m wondering: how did Matteo Messina Denaro describe himself? How did he fake his self-portraits and personality, like all of us, to be more attractive to his social contacts?
In the Great Undifferentiated we live in, it doesn’t make that big of an impact when the chemo neighbor says a hot-shot fugitive she’s been chatting up with her friends; nor that a surgeon takes a selfie with it and then sends it around so many times when arresting the patient that it ends up in the newspapers.
One of the most difficult things for the reflective middle class to grasp is the ethical limbo in which the concept of celebrity exists. If you’re famous, you’re famous: whether you’re famous because you’ve offended someone, or because you’ve won a Nobel Prize, because you can write songs, or because you know how to dissolve children in acid, you’re always famous and famous is currency.
“I sat next to the refugee” is as good as “I sat next to the famous actor”, or maybe even more: the selfie with what should have remained hidden is rarer and therefore more valuable than the selfie with the influencer who everyone, who stops her, grants a photo. Then, of course, Vongola75 does not have the precious snapshot with the most wanted fugitive there was, but at most one with a footballer, he will throw himself and lecture Brocco81, who instead shot himself with the criminal – but it is a game of departure .
Repubblica writes a few very tender lines: “The clinic leadership has also made their lawyer available to defend the young surgeon, who feels defamed by the comments on the photo and is asking for legal protection”. That means you take a picture with the fugitive and then are surprised and offended when passers-by berate you on social media and, for once, feel ethically superior to someone. Perhaps lessons in minimum comprehension of the mass media should be included in compulsory education programs that have never been more plentiful than they are now.
Sublime is also the adjective of the interview partner, an unspecified clinic employee who says: «I remember that one day he came to the clinic with a very original shirt. Watermelons were painted on the cotton. I told him and he replied that it was worth 700 euros. I was in shock.” The stun is the perfect complement to newspapers saying that “designer clothes” were found in the house where Messina Denaro was hiding. It seems like the end of “Quo Vado” as Zalone smacks his parents Plays pranks by presenting them with a black girl and then asks his fiancee to show his grandparents the baby that is really his, the white one: “Get the original one, the branded one ».
Expensive shirts are a good detail for the Tinder profile: there, too, he will have presented himself as a fashion-loving man, as the guy who works in the clinic was called, or – still a sixty-year-old southerner – he will have feared that a similar detail makes him look a little rich? (Geographical, age and gender discrimination in one sentence: then say I don’t have the gift of synthesis).
Perhaps more than the profile of Messina Denaro – who probably chose a photo that emphasized his resemblance to Eros Ramazzotti; who perhaps had as a suggestive phrase «Another one like you: but even if I invent her doesn’t exist», which has a certain effect on us old women – we should be able to imagine the profiles of the women with whom he chatted. The witness, who reports that the fugitive texted all her friends, claims he was active on news platforms up until the morning of his arrest: will the ladies now consider themselves ghosts? Yes, well, the 41bis, but that owes me some explanations, before that it was a whole promised land, a different world, and then it’s an asshole like the others, they’re all exactly the same.
(In the Great Undifferentiated, in which, for the bestseller Harry Windsor, it is equally serious that his mother died and he had to follow the coffin in worldwide vision, and that his sister-in-law would not lend his wife lip gloss; in that for the polemics of Instagram the Iranian women who are dying and the taxi drivers whose POS isn’t working have the same seriousness; in this Big Undifferentiated here, for the divorcee on Tinder it’s just as serious that the guy she chose didn’t make it to the appointment appeared because he has an ex-wife he didn’t tell her about, or because he was a crime boss whose cover was blown).
What kind of woman did Messina Denaro date? The ones that have Mother Teresa and Karol Wojtyla as representative photos? Who calls themselves «Backpacker Traveler»? The ones who use their “no” to passive-aggressive as a selection criterion? (Has anyone on the run since 1993 ever heard the term “passive-aggressive,” which I believe was first popularly used in Woody Allen’s 1992 film Husbands and Wives? Is it plausible that the last thing he does before is a criminal? going into hiding or going to the movies to see a cerebral comedy about adultery?).
Of course, I spent a few hours researching who made the watermelon print men’s shirts: Gucci? prada Google is useless as always and the first to show you are from H&M. Which, however, opens up a scenario that is maybe even more beautiful, maybe even more like a Dino Risi movie. What if Matteo Messina Denaro had sold a €14.99 H&M as a €700 shirt? What if the mighty boss guilty of horrific crimes was primarily Italian, primarily a mythomaniac?