Many lies get told on TikTok; also, many truths. One such truth came last weekend when a user with the handle @madallthatime explained that all the people looking for distinct Halloween costume ideas on social media were just being served the same videos by the algorithm—thus negating their uniqueness. Instead, this internet sage explained, they should be looking somewhere else: the #HearMeOut trend.
TikToks of the trend, also known as #HearMeOutCake, encompass a simple premise: A group of friends, or enemies, or coworkers, sets a cake on a table and then takes turns placing sticks in it. Upon each stick rests the image of a person—or fictional character, human or otherwise—on which the friend/enemy/coworker has an embarrassing crush. Sometimes it’s Mr. Burns, sometimes it’s Fidel Castro. Always, it’s uncomfortable. That’s the point.
What @madallthatime was suggesting, though, was that all the faces on those cakes represented a font of untapped Halloween costume potential—a series of obscure characters perfect for All Hallows’ Eve partying.
Every October the internet-savvy among us look for smart, creative outfits and decorations, and every year many of the best stem from bizarre memes. This is why that person who made a “Pink Boney Club” of skeletons in their yard in honor of Chappell Roan (er, Chappell Bone) has already been all over social feeds this fall. (Just me?) But meme-as-costume, as an idea, doesn’t trend the way it used to. If anything, it’s millennial cringe. When The Atlantic publishes “The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween,” it’s time to pack up your Target Lewis look and go home.
Which is where @madallthatime’s plan comes in. As algorithms, particularly TikTok’s, get more adept at serving viral-ready content, a homogeneity takes over. If everyone is going to be some version of Roan—or, perhaps, some green-clad Brat—then maybe the best costume is an obscure character from the C-plot of an animated series. Right now, the #HearMeOut trend is offering loads of them.
Four score and seven internets ago—OK, maybe more like a decade or so—celebrating what became known as HallowMeme was a cultural moment. People dressed up as “double rainbow” or Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women.” Unlike the “total slut” lore of Halloween costumes given by Mean Girls, HallowMeme outfits were mostly demure. Sometimes they were political. It was the Obama years, before the power of 4chan revealed itself as a true political force.
In 2024, less than two weeks before the next US presidential election, memes have different meanings. When “brat” took off in the days following Vice President Kamala Harris’ announcement that she was running for president, it felt as though the left-leaning internet was trying to reclaim some of that 2012 internet energy, the spirit of the time when Obama got reelected over Romney.
Meme costumes in the intervening years have just become another mode of Halloween fashion, but if there was a time when one or two might really take off and go viral on America’s sidewalks, this could be it. Maybe there will be Donald Trumps in McDonald’s uniform; maybe every Chappell Bone will be wearing a Harris–Walz camo hat. Maybe they’ll dig that Sexy Undecided Voter outfit out of the closet.
Perhaps the meme costumes won’t be political at all. A report from the Los Angeles Times about the rise of internet-inspired costumes noted that Moo Deng and Raygun were looking to be quite popular this year. Oddly, though, the newspaper sourced this to the Google “Frightgeist” trend tracker, which has Beetlejuice characters in two of the top 10 spots. Familiar faces from Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine also rank high. Maybe 2024 will be remembered as the year meme attire peaked and faded.
The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.
The truly savvy, then, might be wise to take a page from @madallthatime and find a way to make Princess Fiona from Shrek their Halloween look. They might accidentally find the love of their life. Or they could be very meta and just dress up like a cake covered in a rogues’ gallery of their most embarrassing desires.
Loose Threads:
Blade bummer. Alcon Entertainment, the production house behind Blade Runner 2049, apparently wasn’t too happy with Tesla’s robotaxi rollout. The company filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Monday against Elon Musk, Tesla, and Warner Bros. Discovery (which hosted the launch), claiming Tesla used images similar to those in 2049 even after Alcon had denied a request to do so. The images Musk used during Tesla’s livestreamed robotaxi unveiling on October 10 weren’t directly from the movie, the suit claims, but they “used an apparently AI-generated faked image to do it all anyway.”
Blade bummer, part 2. Marvel has reportedly removed its long-in-the-works Blade movie off of its release calendar.
You know what we don’t have enough of? Odes to Stardew Valley wives.
Gladiator II becomes the next movie to get a special popcorn bucket. This one seems a little less, uh, explicit than the buckets made to promote Dune: Part Two and Deadpool & Wolverine.
