The absurd is the new sincerity: inside the magnificent trolling of Sofia Coppola's daughter on TikTok

There is no waste in the viral video that starred Romy Coppola at the end of last month.

In the 49-second TikTok, Sofia's daughter, and therefore Francis's 16-year-old granddaughter, tells that she is punished for trying to hire, with her father's credit card, a helicopter with which to fly from New York to Maryland (350 kilometers) to have dinner with a friend.

But the video has nothing to do with it.

Romy tries to liven up the punishment in the kitchen by making pasta with vodka.

But the video has nothing to do with it.

Before starting to cook, Romy comments that she had to Google what was garlic and what was an onion;

she attempts to use her father Thomas Mars' Grammy as a tool and voices Ari, a man who is supposed to be her babysitter's boyfriend.

What does Ari think about the helicopter fiasco?

"Prefer

because it is a feminine fiasco”.

Romy: “Well, it's women's month, so…”.

End. Sofia Coppola has dedicated her filmography to portraying the inner life of lucky women in golden cages.

Her daughter has taken, assimilated and parodied the witness in less than a minute.

It's a Coppola masterpiece fallen from heaven.

None of this is true.

The video exploits the poetics of the absurd, the only truly original genre of TikTok and, hastening, of our times: it is possibly the most valuable creative mine of this youth.

Or maybe I'm exaggerating with the latter.

distance

typical of that era, the growing display and exploitation of emotions so much on social networks tends to disorient us a bit.

The much more accessible TikTok syndicate offers an invaluable refuge to feel connected with the times.

There is nothing more democratic than chaos.

But if I think of TikTok creators, how many I really know by name (Nicholas Flannery, Tyler Gaca and...) or –what makes me feel worse– how many I have unfollowed and forgotten because I got tired of their aesthetic, sometimes which, by social media rules, were never allowed to change much anyway, I just ended up thinking of Chinese lobsters (this will make sense later, I swear).

The networks are a shredder that rewards novelty and condemns repetition: those who feed it with great content appear and disappear by the minute.

This video wouldn't stand out especially if it didn't have the last name Coppola signing something so contemporary, so well done.

It reminds me of when Francesca Scorsese, Martin's daughter, stood out as the

more dadaist of old Hollywood.

Sasha Spielberg joined the famous irreverence game shortly after, especially with a

with her friend Alana Haim, and closed the imaginary trilogy (why is it that the sons of successful directors don't do network comedy, but rather the most leaden cinema and television today?).

It's a priceless feeling of familiarity.

It is irrational to use the surnames of an old clique of filmmakers who have already said what they had to say as a navigation chart for the new times.

But it's also irrational to pretend there isn't a certain charm to the idea.

The alternative is a continuum in perpetual boiling of new and old names, the digital manifestation of the end of the great institutions in which we have been immersed for about 15 years.

That's why I think of Chinese lobsters.

In 1958, at the time of the Great Leap Forward, Beijing decided to eradicate its four biggest pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats... and sparrows.

It was thought that the latter ate the crops and only when they were practically extinct did it become clear that the sparrow is actually the main predator of the locust.

The country was covered with them.

In the streets, in the beds, on the roofs and in the orchards.

Millions of people died of starvation.

It was such a humanitarian tragedy that China ended up buying 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to fix the mess.

The rage to destroy the old is very good.

It's better when you give a little thought to what will take its place.

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