May 2023 (i)

roaches at the Met Gala



At the Met Gala, a cockroach crawls toward a photographer in a tuxedo. He’s hungry! someone yells, off-camera. Get a photo! Get a photo! Kevin, get a photo! Kevin, get a photo! You think the photographer is going to bring his foot down on the insect, but he doesn’t. Why put an end to a viral moment in the making? The photographer—Kevin Mazur—moves his feet, like he wants to dance but doesn’t know how. He snaps some photos. The roach scrambles across the carpet, which looks dirty up close. Behind Kevin, attendees look on, a couple of them recording the scene on their phones.

The banal moment proliferated into articles and clickbait. “Met Ball 2023: Cockroach Invades Event” (BBC); “The Surprise Star of the 2023 Met Gala Red Carpet Is a Cockroach: Watch the Viral Moment” (People); “A Cockroach Made A Surprise Appearance At The 2023 Met Gala” (Today); and so on. Piers Morgan even wrote an ornery op-ed for the New York Post: “Spare me these sickeningly hypocritical Met Gala celebrity cockroaches.”

I guess the cockroach was noteworthy because vermin aren’t supposed to exist in the world of the rich and famous, though of course cockroaches exist everywhere except Antarctica, and have for 100 million years. Like the fly on Mike Pence’s head, unremarkable occurrences become fodder for a self-generating circuit of latenight-host cracks and AI-written headlines. Amid constant absurdity, the ordinary seems anomalous. Reality interrupts like bloopers our televisual world.

It goes without saying that when everything is a spectacle, nothing is. Against the buzz of the Met Gala, the roach was just as thrilling as, say, Jared Leto stumbling around in a cat costume. Everything is exciting or everything dull. During the recent summer Olympics in Tokyo, a cameraman filming a field hockey match turned his lens to record a cockroach scurrying next to him. The broadcast didn’t cut away. Another viral clip. Mira, says one of the announcers in the Spanish telecast, Ah… tenemos… la cucaracha. Bored with looking, we watch whatever scurries at the seams.

At the Met Gala, people scream stupid jokes at the roach: What are you wearing?! Go that way! It’s a weird video. People squealing with delight at a sign of encroaching decline. Roaches can live without their heads for weeks.

ben tapeworm


ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.To get new entries in your email inbox, please email bentapeworm@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.