Heidi Klum Won Halloween Forever and Sometimes Life's Unrelenting Emptiness Threatens to Swallow Me Whole

Let’s face it: everybody loves to dress up for Halloween. But celebs have a little more help than the rest of us when it comes to being as spookily scarifying as humanly possible every October 31st. Still, Glamazon icon Heidi Klum’s frightfully funny get-up this last Halloween made us want to bow down and prostrate ourselves before Queen Heidi’s awesomeness.

Klum went from beauty to beast with a look paying homage to Michael Jackson’s furry transformation in the John Landis-directed “Thriller” music video with a little help from from her talented friends in make-up and costuming. But no costume, no matter how brilliantly realized, can truly conceal the unrelenting horror of everyday life in Trump’s America. 

Klum’s outrageous Halloween brought a smile to the faces of her millions of fans on Instagram and Twitter, serving briefly to distract an increasingly fearful, paranoid and hate-crazed populace from the free-floating anxiety and acrimony that now characterizes every facet of American society. 

Sometimes the world seems so grim and ugly and hopeless that it can be difficult to even get out of bed in the morning. You want to cry because everything seem so hopeless, but you're worried that if you start crying, you might never stop. Yet that didn’t keep Klum or her Glam Squad from putting together a Halloween costume for the ages. Alas, the much-liked and traded-around Instagram photos of Klum looking exactly like Michael Jackson in the legendary video won’t do anything to halt the rise of white supremacy in our country, or to counter-act the spike in hate crimes since Trump’s election.

But these fun and fuzzy fan-favorite photos did give people beaten down by our nation's horrifying descent into madness a brief moment of escape from the never-ending string of seemingly preventable gun massacres that are a pervasive, seemingly permanent component of American life. 

Americans are massacred so frequently, in churches, in schools, and on college campuses, that we’ve become increasingly deadened to these tragedies. They’re the white noise of contemporary life, but we’ve somehow thankfully retained our ability to experience child-like joy over something as silly and inconsequential as a veteran model pulling off an ambitious Halloween costume that reconnects the public to their childhood, before everything went to shit, when it was still possible to feel hope and optimism about the future and not just an overwhelming, all-consuming sense of dread.

It seems safe to assume that Michael Jackson himself would be “thrilled” by Klum’s loving tribute to one of his most iconic looks. We’ve reached a nadir in American life where the living envy the dead. In that respect, maybe the iconic performer and showman is lucky that he did not have to personally experience our nation's descent.

It’s as if the election of Trump opened a Hell Gate. It's as if American voters—in their stupidity and ignorance and child-like need for someone to push them around and tell them what to do and how to feel and what to think—unleashed a Pandora’s Box and we’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since. 

American life increasingly resembles a waking nightmare we will never awake from but that doesn’t mean we can’t all enjoy a brief break from obsessing about the awful state of civilization by admiring a particularly well put-together Halloween costume. 

So congrats, Heidi Klum! You not only win this and every other Halloween with your “howlingly” clever costume, you also briefly made us forget about the inexorable downward spiral we’re in and how incontrovertibly fucked we all are, now and forever. 

The only questions that remain are “What is Klum gonna do for Halloween next year?” and “Are we all hopelessly doomed?” 

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