John Keats is KENough
an Angel Talks essay on losers, poets, and the public imagination.
Here’s the situation. This is an essay about John Keats, Ken dolls, Plato, and what is means to be a loser. Maybe there’ll be some other peculiarities of whatever nature involved too, who knows? Forgive me for running so excruciatingly ahead of the charge here, I have no wish to catch you off guard, truly. This is not a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing type of essay. This is as much an essay as it is a rant, as much bones as it is blood, and yes, this is the wolf, not the sheep. I’ll gladly bare my teeth to prove it to you. So, you can choose to take in this piece as earnestly as you deem fit. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I. Ken dolls and golden retrievers
Ryan Gosling, in press for the 2023 “Barbie” movie (dir. Greta Gerwig), recently enjoyed a semi-viral moment when a clip of him discussing taking on the role of Ken took off on the internet. Gosling, blond and chipper, eagerly nailed down the essence of what it meant, for him, to take on a role of Ken as a literal male accessory; “Ken’s got no money, he’s got no job, he’s got no car, he’s got no house. He’s going through some stuff”. He smiles, he waits for us, the audience, to get it. It takes a long while. Extended promo for the Barbie movie has not at all been light-handed about both the feminist aspect of the film, nor the existential part, nor the fact that Barbie and Ken are, well, dolls. In another burst of virality for the film, promotional character posters took on a second skin as the hot Twitter meme format of the month when Barbie and Ken’s respective posters featured the phrase “She’s everything / He’s just Ken”, fractured into two. For a week or two, every imaginable internet ship was divided through this format; the high-achiever, and the other one. The loser. Presently, in a post-Barbie world, moments from the film featuring the phrase “I am KENough” and a musical-esque dance number and song aptly titled “I’m just Ken” are proving that like the cultural impact of the movie itself, the loser is here to stay.
The cultural comeuppance of the loser is not the craziest thing to ever happen to society. Like with everything in Vogue, the pendulum swings and we happily swing along with it. Our cultural imagination is pre-occupied with losers right now. Likewise, the early 2000’s had their very own adorkable phase to rival our current cultural zeitgeist embrace of the ‘golden retriever boy’. The nice guy, sans misogyny. The loser, repackaged ever so slightly. He’s just quirky and awkward enough, but still attractive, and above all, respectful and appreciative.
II. ‘Cause I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby!
I’m using the term “cultural imagination” here to refer to the idea of a “social reality”; a reality separate from biological, or individual reality. That is, it’s the idea of a separate sphere constructed through social interactions. It is the zeitgeist, it is the timeframe, it is the social norms, and yes, our cultural perspective. Perhaps the term that is most appropriate is sociological imagination. Either way, what I mean is this; our imagination and our fascination is shaped within the culture, the society we exist in. Civilisation as a whole can act as a prism for enforcing certain social norms and myths, furthering stereotypes. Thus, with the ways we interact with media and issues regulated as it is by our cultural frameworks, we have a tendency to develop a collective obsession with certain archetypes. And right now, the “loser” is having its cultural moment.
“Loser” may strike you as a harsh term. Really, there’s not just one way to define what it means to be a loser; it is more about a vibe than anything, more about the absence of a vibe. It doesn’t matter what Ken is, it matters what he isn’t. Barbie is everything, Ken is… just Ken. Loser-dom exists within the liminal spaces of the world; not exactly inside of personhood and not exactly outside of it. Think along the lines of Rodrick Heffley from the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movie, Pudge from “Looking for Alaska", Adam Sandler, Ken, Cameron James from “10 things I hate about you”, Pete Davidson, or Jack Black in “the Holiday”. A complete lack of prospects does not a loser make. More often it’s about an easygoing, slightly goofy, yet wholesome energy. A teenage dirtbag, baby!
III. A loser is a wish your heart makes
So, let’s follow this line of thinking all the way back to Romantic poet John Keats, and his love interest Fanny Brawne. Yes, I wish to go there. After all, this essay was born from a ranting text I sent a friend declaring Keats to be quote “Ken-coded”.
If ever there was a historical equivalent of the “She’s everything / He’s just Ken” dynamic, Keats and Fanny fit it best. You can all stop searching, I’ve found it first. Finders keepers. Of course, I could make this a surface-level thing, because Fanny loved fashion, and dazzling a room of people, and Keats never really did much besides his legendary writing and dying young (Only one of those is an actual accomplishment, the other just… happened to him). Though I’m sure the writing took much involvement, keeping it to that would be an awfully dull way to go about such a strange mission statement as mine. Because yes, Keats is a great writer, one of the most impactful Romantic poets to come out of the movement, but he’s also a massive loser. His writing is romantic, yes, but his letters also often skew whiny, possessive, jealous, self-absorbed and melodramatic. Of course, this is what half of the appeal of the Romantics is as a movement of writers: both the dark and light parts of passion get their time on the stage. It’s the intersection of love and violence again (it always is). And while we’re discussing the Romantics as losers, let’s not forget to give Percy Bysshe Shelley his flowers. I mean, a man obsessed with bodies of water, and boats, yet absolutely unflinching in his refusal of learning how to swim, until he eventually drowned. That right there is the very essence loser-dom.
The loser, then, is endearing because we envy their ability to just be a loser. To be weird and awkward and jealous and possessive and whiny, to fully stand in that without much care or doubt. Someone like fellow romantic writer Byron is also loser, yes, but he’s not a loser in the same sort of font as Keats is. He’s a different type of loser altogether. Keats is an italicised font loser because he is at least somewhat aware of his dork-y traits, and how they might be undesirable, yet also aware that he couldn’t stop them from showing if he tried. He often laments his less desirable traits in the same letters he uses to express them. Whereas Byron does not have the necessary literary tone of voice to make us feel like he has any desire or impulse to stop being a regular-font, non-bold, non-italicised loser. In resigning to being, at times, undesirable, yet maintaining a certain apologetic nature, there is a source of respect for our imaginations to latch onto. The loser may not be perfect, but he is self-aware.



IV. The myth of the tortured loser
Plato believed poets were granted divine inspiration, but Keats wrote of “negative capability”; the idea that writers can, and must hold themselves back when pursuing a greater ideal of Beauty, even when that pursuit ends up being detrimental to their own lives, and acts against their logic and reason. It is a call for independence at the cost of the author’s desires. To be free, to remain mutable, Keats argued that poets sometimes had to detach from their subjects. He grasped very well that people don’t enjoy writing that sets out to tell them what to feel: ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us. […] Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.’, as Keats wrote in a letter in 1818.
Loser-dom too should be great and unobtrusive. The loser either stands for nothing or they stand for everything. The kind we often find so captivating is more the latter than the former. Only the latter awakens some mercurial respect in us. Keats’ last loser stand is to stand for nothing, to choose negative capability, but in that, he is in fact standing for something, thus the ouroboros of loser-dom strikes again. He is but a humble slave to his writing, and that is what he believes to be right. The loser, like the poet, realises their identity is ever mutable, ever-transforming. They might stand for something now, but there is no guarantee what the next five minutes, days, weeks, or months will bring. Yet still they stand, they float, helplessly, but also painfully self-aware to some degree. Always balancing just right between content and self-pitying, always appreciative but not static, always functioning as a vocal work in progress of sorts. This is integral to the appeal. Like with writers or poets, or artists in general, the mythos of it all can both add or detract to the way we perceive the loser. And it can turn our imagination, our fascination, into disgust at the blink of an eye.
Writers, artists, myths- they’re easier to digest when they’re in their own shackles. The loser is endearing when they acknowledge that, as far as our perception is concerned, it is themselves that keeps them ‘trapped’ in loser-dom. Artists and other types of losers are not mythical martyrs, they present like they keep the keys firmly within their own thoughts at all times, but choose to remain where they are. They could always conform, tone it down. Write less aggressive, more flowery letters to their loved ones. Learn how to swim, get a job, get a house, get a car. Choose to care less, or care more. But no, they have reached a level of acceptance that to us mere mortals can only ever be a dream, something we squint our eyes at to see. A green light on the docks. It’s just that, whether consciously or unconsciously, the loser knows that we’re captivated by them, that we envy them. We have told ourselves that we have to be everything, and they have told themselves that it’s okay, that they can just be Ken. And they won’t lie awake at night about it either. That’s precisely why they have our heart.
x Angel
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
This Barbie is obsessed with the intersection of love and violence! If you enjoyed my ramblings today, I would love to invite you to join the White Lily Society. Come join a group of people that say things like “John Keats is a loser” in a text once, and then write a 1700 word essay about it. Come, join, become a martyr of deliciousness.