you'll want to be high for this
21st-century stardom at the limits of narrative in hurry up tomorrow, abel tesfaye's goodbye(?) to the weeknd // all 43 the weeknd music videos, ranked (does seo still work?)
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got a deep dive into The Weeknd’s 14-year career and it’s punctuation point, the feature film Hurry Up Tomorrow. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week means Friday.
In 2011, we were on the brink of a new phase in popular art. Pop stars had achieved access to a suite of PR tools so complete that music had become inseparable from the life of the artist who made it. Most stars took this in a conventional direction, but a handful experimented with turning their new artistic tools against their art, immersing their fans in experiences of self-loathing that implicated not only the star-making apparatus but the concept of stardom itself. Kanye West led the charge in late 2010 with the public therapy circus surrounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. A teenage model named Sky Ferreira released a track about her obsession with Michael1 Madsen and started mouthing off to hipster blogs about how much she hated the music industry. Also-ran singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant filmed an awkward Photobooth video, spliced it with cloying images of Americana, and cut it to a song about watching her boyfriend play Call of Duty. And an anonymous Canadian with an angelic voice slipped onto the scene with a series of depraved accounts of drug abuse and sexual exploitation set to gorgeous 4AD synths, released under the name The Weeknd.
We know where this ended up. Sky Ferreira's crowning achievement since releasing one of the best albums of the 2010s has been scratching a rash in Twin Peaks: The Return. Lana Del Rey committed to her bit so hard that she married a Louisiana alligator wrestler. Kanye West pushed things the farthest, transforming his entire life into a work of PR that at one point could have conceivably enveloped the United States government; instead, he declared death con 3 on Jewish people and made a song about having sex with his cousin.
In 2025, only The Weeknd remains a stable, stadium-filling, pop star. He revealed his identity in late 2011, exposing himself as a pudgy-faced 21 year old with a goofy haircut named Abel Tesfaye. That face committed to the Satan’s angel construct, launching itself on a 14-year frenzy of music videos, album releases, and publicity stunts, all centered on the supposed sociopathy of the man behind the voice.
The Weeknd’s songs cast him as an unrepentant - or at best, manipulatively repentant and momentarily self-pitying - villain, bragging about sex, drugs, and cruelty in alternatingly cold and buoyant tones. He staves off criticism by lobbing accusations directly against himself, ignoring the results of the bad behavior in favor of the simple exposition of its badness. Like every star who has committed serious attention to the idea of celebrity in a post-Bowie/Madonna world, he has gone through a series of Eras, which he calls "projects". They usually end with him pretending to kill himself. I've lost track of how many times he's shot or otherwise disposed of himself in a music video, exchanging one all-black ensemble and doomy synth vibe for a slightly different all-black ensemble and doomy synth vibe.
In 2020, The Weeknd began his latest, and maybe final, reinvention cycle, a three-album sequence that mirrors his initial mixtape trilogy. In the videos and live promos for After Hours he appeared with a smashed-up face, leading to speculation about whether or not the injuries were real. The hoopla culminated in a VMAs appearance with a completely bandaged head. The album’s final video revealed the horror underneath: a rictus-grin facial reconstruction with obvious surgery scars, a celebratory mask literally sewn over Tesfaye’s tragic face. The new look didn’t last: Tesfaye remade himself again in 2022 in the Blade-themed video cycle for Dawn FM, a meditation on aging that features him stomping out an elderly version of himself before ultimately allowing his arms, legs, and head to be torn off, revealing an inner child beneath the haggard adult façade.
All of this led up to the final act, the months-long, multi-media spectacle of Hurry Up Tomorrow. Tesfaye is an astonishingly prolific self-promoter, but the media blitz for Hurry Up Tomorrow has been excessive even by his standards: four distinct phases of trailers (one that includes a stop-motion video of a robot baby), four separate track lists, four sets of album artwork (one by Harmony Karin), a tie-in with the artist Anitta that involved a pregnancy announcement for a demon baby, five music videos, a claymation short, a New York pop-up shop, a massive stadium tour, and, of course, a feature-length film. The video for "Open Hearts" was filmed in some new Apple format and ends with a hyper-real, high-frame-rate rendering of Tesfaye encountering another version of himself, this time a ghostly digital recreation in performance mode. We've seen this before, but this time it ends with a THE WEEKND title card that transforms into . . . THE END.
But of course, it wasn’t the end. We still had the coup de grâce: Tesfaye, frequently described on Wikipedia as a "noted cinephile," achieves his apotheosis by starring in a feature-length film as himself. Shot on 35mm and directed by a real director (Trey Edward Shults), The Weeknd story finally comes to us in full, not as fragmented video clips but as a 105-minute immersive dive into the pains of being pure evil.
**SPOILERS AHEAD. Get out now if you want to see this movie. But maybe read the next sentence before deciding to go see this movie.**
I don't need to tell you what you probably already know about Hurry Up Tomorrow: you don't earn a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes without doing something special. I was at least looking forward to finding out what it would be like to experience a two-hour music video on the big screen. The answer is a headache. The first act is filled with so many strobe lights, 360 pans, and sonic shifts that I started to wonder if I ought to heed the epilepsy warning. I sometimes appreciate an unpleasant sensory experience, a simulation of what it must feel like to be a whacked-out, over-connected pop star with no room to breath. But you can't be both immersively nauseating and immersively mind-numbing and come out a successful motion picture. At some point a musical has a duty to be entertaining.
There are no surprises in Hurry Up Tomorrow; if you've watched a couple Weeknd videos, you know what you're getting into. It opens with blurry Cocteau Twins lights washing over a voicemail break-up from Riley Keough. "I thought you were a good person," she says. "But I know you aren't, because a good person would never do something like that to someone else." She tells him his mom would be disappointed. She tells him he'll end up alone. She tells him exactly what a girl in a Weeknd movie would say in a voicemail message, which is essentially what the Weeknd regularly says about himself.
We slog through the motions: performance, party, girls, fire, sad face, death. Barry Keoghan pumps up a bummed-out Tesfaye before a show; after some drugs and invigorating toxicity, Tesfaye gets out there and kills it. Meanwhile, Jenna Ortega burns down a house for some reason. Later, Tesfaye goes to the club, then to a party, then blacks out and wakes up to noodle away on a keyboard while a shadowy woman sleeps in his bed. There's a subplot: Tesfaye has focal dystonia and can’t sing.2 Also, he's sad about that voicemail. Eventually he locks eyes with Jenna Ortega in a moment of vulnerability. They run away together. They play air hockey (he’s from Canada). He plays her a new song: it's about his father leaving him, or something. Then we get to the third-act twist: Jenna Ortega is crazy! For a second it’s a horror movie. Then it’s an action movie. It finally ends up a Weeknd music video, complete with very obvious visual metaphor and deeply serious diagetic musical performance. Cut to black, title smash.
The whole film is a set up for that final metaphor. Tesfaye is tied to a hotel bed by Jenna Ortega, who will only release him if he confesses to her why he’s so sad. Taunting him in a notably millennial tank-with-exposed-bra-over-midrise-stonewashed-skinny-jeans outfit,3 Jenna Ortega puts on two Weeknd singles ("Blinding Lights," "Gasoline") and analyzes them with all the depth of a Spotify summary. Despite their poppy tenor, Ortega notes a “disturbing death drive,” a self-inflicted numbness, and coy allusions to some sort of inner hurt. When Tesfaye doesn't confess where that hurt comes from, she douses him in gasoline and flicks a Zippo. The confession finally comes out in the form of the title song - coincidentally, the final song on the album and therefore the last song to ever be released by The Weeknd (maybe). The truth will shock you: Abel Tesfaye is secretly vulnerable. The whole "I like to abuse drugs and hurt people but sing about it in a minor key with an angelic alto" thing is actually a result of trauma. Abel knows that he's disappointed everyone, even his mother. But he's making his confession, and he’s going to be honest from now on. He only needed a teenage4 fan to tie him up, analyze his songs for him, and light him on fire to get him to admit it.
You don't need to know what “parapraxis” means to psychoanalyze this. You can dwell on the fetishism and the nasty age-sex-power dynamics, but the core of this scene is a man who desperately wants to be taken seriously. Only a young girl can break through the façade and cut to the pain of what's going on behind the mask. We’ve known this story since Nausicaa dug Odysseus out of the mud in the Phaecian woods, and to a certain type of person it will never get old. What Tesfaye adds to the mix is the plea that moviegoing adults who appreciate 35mm and psycho-sexual analysis will treat him as seriously as teenagers do in their Instagram comments.
What sticks with me most about Hurry Up Tomorrow is how very conventional it is. It’s an ordinary three-act film, a 20th-century narrative conclusion to what began as a 21st-century, de-centralized artistic experiment. It compresses The Weeknd into an Aristotelian beginning/middle/end structure and reduces Tesfaye to a character with a 100-minute arc. When the "Hurry Up Tomorrow" song drops, it comes with a clear narrative purpose. It’s a classic tearjerker climax moment, designed to jerk tears directly out of one’s face. In other words, it's manipulative. That manipulation isn’t a function of the song itself, but to place the song in the film, at an emotional pressure point, is to embed it within the limits of plot and therefore reduce it to the pushes and pulls of narrative art.
There’s nothing wrong with that - there’s nothing wrong with musicals - but it’s helpful to think about this narrative appropriation of music as we try to understand this conclusion in the context of the Weeknd’s career. The day after Hurry Up Tomorrow debuted in theaters, "Hurry Up Tomorrow" was released as a single with an accompanying music video. It might be the first genuine stylistic variation in The Weeknd’s oeuvre. For the first time we encounter the sensitive hip-hop-video trope of a tracking shot through a childhood home, complete with inter-generational family photos and framed cross-stitches. Tesfaye sits at the piano and sings his song, a whole lot of emotions streaking across his face. Maybe it's just the Stockholm Syndrome of watching 43 music videos, two shorts, and a feature film in four days, but I found the performance just a little bit moving. It probably sucks to play out a fake version of yourself that is pretty obviously the result of some trauma avoidance. It probably does feel nice to use your God-given talents to make something honest for once.
And - this is manipulation. This is narrative. This has only ever been narrative. The entire Weeknd project has been the perpetuation of a career arc that always followed the beats of narrative cinema. It should have been obvious we were heading here from the start: a story that starts with a statement as overtly fucked up as “High For This” could only end with as broken a confession as “Hurry Up Tomorrow.” Abel Tesfaye has always very obviously been playing a character, and Hurry Up Tomorrow is a revelation of the boundaries of the multi-media stage on which that character performs. Not in a post-structural, pointing-out-the-artifice sort of way: Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t calling attention to the stage lights. Rather, it unintentionally reveals the self-serious rigidity that has always defined Tesfaye’s career, an impulse toward narrative that has undercut the effectiveness of his project from the day he first revealed his face.
I don't want to burden Hurry Up Tomorrow with the weight of exposing the death of the 21st-century celebrity art project.5 Instead, I think it demonstrates how extraordinarily difficult it is to free a constructed persona from the conventions of narrative. The Weeknd's project has never been anything but an actor playing a character in a scripted play. What felt exciting to me in 2011 was the new capacity for popular artists to reveal themselves through and against their own art. But in The Weeknd’s case, it’s clear that the revelation of the face never introduced us to the person behind it. Hurry Up Tomorrow wants to tell us, in ending the role and revealing the wounded man beneath the persona, that we’re finally seeing the substance of the real Abel Tesfaye. But cinema is magic, not transubstantiation. And by trying to manifest the revelation through a movie, Hurry Up Tomorrow only drives home the point that none of this presence has ever been real.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with a review of the new Mission: Impossible movie, which will be an interesting experiment because, other than the Brian DePalma original, I have never seen a Mission: Impossible movie.
An earlier version of this essay said Sky Ferreira had a crush on Mark Madsen. Mark Madsen is a former player for the Minnesota Timberwolves who is happily married with three children.
Shoutout to my uncle Pete, a leading researcher of musician’s dystonia. I don’t think they consulted him for this movie.
I’d love to see a fashion analysis of The Weeknd’s universe. I haven’t seen a young person dressed like Jenna Ortega’s character since it was age-appropriate for me to listen to this music. Tesfaye and I are about the same age, and I wonder if we’re both frozen stylistically in 2012. There’s one video where Tesfaye tries out big pants; he looks so unbelievably stupid that even he seems to have noticed it, because he’s been back to pre-Trump skinny jeans ever since.
Jenna Ortega is 22 and her character is never explicitly identified as a teenager, but the mean age of Hollywood teenagers is about 25 and Ortega currently plays a 16-year-old in the hit television program Wednesday, so it’s pretty hard to read her as anything but a child in this film.
2025 could be a big punctuation-mark year for the post-narrative class of 2011. The Weeknd’s project is now over - or at least as over as Michael Jordan’s career was when he retired from the Bulls. Sky Ferreira claims Masochism is finally coming in 2025 - she’s said that pretty much every other year for the past decade, but maybe this time it’s true. Lana’s Classic will be announced any day now, and it seems like it could be substantially different than her previous nine albums. I don’t want to think about what’s coming next for Kanye because it makes me sad. But Hurry Up Tomorrow might not be the only 2025 watershed in the history of celebrity-as-artwork.