Posting Cringe: AnnaLynne McCord's Weirdly Horny Poem for Vladimir Putin is a Morbidly Fascinating Trainwreck
Everyone responds to news of war differently. Model and actress AnnaLynne McCord responded to Russia invading Ukraine by channeling Gal Gadot in the early days of the pandemic and Mark Duplass when he infamously admonished Leftists to follow his big-hearted, fundamentally honest and well-intentioned buddy Ben Shapiro and posting cringe.
The 2010 Teen Choice Award nominee saw that the whole world was on edge because a brutal, power-mad dictator had invaded a neighbor and thought to herself, “How can I make this international crisis about me?”
So McCord threw on an invisible beret and decided that the only way to fight hate was through poetry and love and poetry about love. McCord wrote and performed a poem on Twitter in which she personally addressed the former KGB agent not as a dead-eye, sociopathic strongman who has definitely killed people with his bare hands but rather as a grown-up version of a sad little boy adrift in a cold, cruel and callous world.
McCord didn’t just unwisely choose to appeal to Putin’s inner child; she went back even further and appealed to li’l baby Vladdy in his little red diaper crying out for a mother’s love.
Here’s the thing: I don’t think Putin was ever a baby or a child. I’m pretty sure he came out of the womb a glowering 37 year old KGB operative whose training began while he was still in utero. If Putin had an inner child, and that is a very big if, I’m pretty sure he had him assassinated somewhere along the way.
From everything that I have seen and read, Putin does not appear to possess human emotions, which makes McCord’s attempt to reach him on a level of pure, raw emotion all the more fascinatingly misguided.
he seems nice.
The actress’ widely mocked and weirdly horny ploy for world peace begins formally with McCord looking directly into the camera and uttering the words, “Dear President Vladimir Putin,”
The thirty-four year old American with the thick blonde mane then takes us straight to Crazy Town when she apologizes inexplicably for not giving birth to the 69 year old despot.
“I’m so sorry that I was not your mother” are McCord’s exact words, before explaining, “If I was your mother you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light.”
One of the many bizarre aspects of McCord’s tone-deaf Poetry Slam is that she tries to win Putin’s heart by indirectly insulting his mother. McCord’s whole bizarre spiel heavily implies that the reason that Putin is a cold-blooded killer and warmonger is because his mommy didn’t give him enough hugs, that she didn’t tickle his little belly and tell him that he was mommy’s special little man.
McCord is flat-out saying that Putin’s mother didn’t hold him “in the arms of joyous light”, nor did she fill his early life with laughter and joy and volunteer to die for him in a variety of different contexts.
I know in the United States arrogant men tend not to respond well to people insulting their mothers. I suspect it’s the same in Russia, particularly if those implicit insults are accompanied by an offer to be a loving, kind and endlessly understanding surrogate mother, one whose love is so Christ-like and perfect that it can single-handedly transform a man from a murderous monster to a happy little cuddle bug who just wants to spread love.
Like Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank”, which I wrote about in my new book The Joy of Trash along with Gal Gadot and Super-Friends’ cover of “Imagine” and Mark Duplass’ endorsement of Ben Shapiro, McCord’s Putin poem is filled with pregnant pauses and ACTING.
McCord’s bid for accidental camp immortality is only two minutes and twenty seconds long yet it feels like it lasts two hours and twenty interminable minutes. Every moment lasts a veritable eternity. It feels as if time has stopped.
The muddled ideas expressed are baffling and embarrassing, as is the writing. What, for the love of god does “Never would this story’s plight, the world unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise of nations sitting peaceful under a night sky” mean?
I’ve similarly looked at the words “Perhaps the torture of unwrit youth would not within your heart imbue ascription to such fealty against that world that you thought was so cruel” and “When holds she doesn’t harm at bay and leaves her boy for the promise of a man” over and over again and cannot, for the life of me figure out what they’re supposed to mean.
McCord posits herself as the ultimate maternal figure, someone with so much love in her heart that she’s able and willing to be the perfect mother to a power-mad strongman thirty-five years her senior. Yet there’s an unmistakable sexual element to her video as well.
McCord doesn’t just offer to be the loving, supportive, life-changing mother Putin has never known, due to the unrelenting crappiness of his biological mother; she implicitly offers to be a MWB, or Mother With Benefits. She’s positing herself as Putin’s fantasy mother but the weirdly narcotized intensity of McCord’s performance lends her poem an unmistakable hint of incest.
Watching McCord’s tweet mocked around the world was a surreal, unexpectedly emotional experience for me because it seemingly reflected my own childhood trauma more than its ostensible subject.
I was abandoned by my mother when I was two years old. That abandonment scarred me for life. Having a loving, supportive mother would have made a world of difference in my emotional development.
In that respect I would happily take McCord up on her offer to be the kind, loving, supportive mother I never knew but always longed for. Then again, it would be VERY weird to have a surrogate mother who is all of the following:
Younger than me
A complete stranger
Someone I find sexually desirable
Name a more iconic duo!
Though McCord’s plea has been viewed TWENTY FIVE MILLION TIMES I can’t imagine that Putin took time out of his busy schedule terrifying the world with his hawkish ways to watch McCord’s video of the damned and consider her words and ideas.
I’d love to think that McCord’s words reduced Putin to tears, that he finally felt seen and understood on a human as well as a political level for the very first time in his life and chose to end his invasion of Ukraine as a result but that’s not going to happen in this world or any multiverse, for that matter.
Like Gal Gadot and Super-Friends’ simpatico cover of “Imagine”, McCord’s Tweet ended up accidentally serving a useful purpose. McCord’s maudlin, mawkish and sometimes downright incoherent words distracted us momentarily from the horrors of war.
We as a culture enjoyed a long, cathartic, healing laugh at McCord’s expense and while McCord seems like a lovely person who means well, I can’t say the mockery she has received has not been richly deserved.
McCord made us all laugh and while that was most assuredly NOT her intention I’ll take levity wherever I can get it these days.
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