If you’re the sort of person who pays attention to the sharper edge of popular culture rather than spending all your time listening to true crime podcasts, then you will already have heard of Pete Davidson. No? Well, let us drag you out of your brainless cultural lethargy…
Here’s the skinny on Davidson, a man who, by our reckoning, is an icon in the making. (Maybe.) His father died on 9/11 when he was seven years old; he’s a regular (and increasingly beloved) star on the US comedy show Saturday Night Live; he, by his own admission, “cannot function” without marijuana due to suffering from Crohn’s disease since the age of 17; he got really famous by dating Ariana Grande and then got even more famous by snogging Kate Beckinsale courtside at a hockey game. Oh, and he also inspired big dick energy. All that and he’s only 25 years old.
Davidson, you see, has become increasingly prolific over the past ten months or so, partly as he’s been attracting some industry heat for the acting roles he’s landed (see Mötley Crüe so-bad-it’s-kinda-good Netflix biopic The Dirt) and partly because of his somewhat mercurial energy. His aesthetic is hipster barista who works nights at Rough Trade Records mixed with Francis Bacon’s haunting portrait of a screaming pope. His “look” is so cliché bad boy – the ink, the mismatching hoodies, the wide post-coital grin – that he comes across like every other almost famous rebel gonnabe.
The thing is, this Pete is different. This Pete is no Doherty, nor even a Townshend. Call it a millennial’s angst, but Davidson – despite the rumoured conquests and wild partying – seems to lack the penchant for self-absorbed recklessness that a bona fide, genuine bad boy needs. He also has humility and, strangely, lacks the maniacal ego required of someone who treats the entirety of earth like Hugh Hefner treated female guests at the Playboy mansion in the Seventies. If Russell Brand showed the world how not to be a bad boy everyone secretly liked, then Davidson is showing us how likeable rebellion can actually be.
Don’t take our word for it. Take the word of a military man – ex-Navy Seal Dan Crenshaw. Earlier this year, despite Davidson comparing Crenshaw to a “hit man in a porno” on SNL (the Seal lost his eye in combat and thus wears an eye patch), his subsequent televised apology was not only accepted by the ex-military man but also showed that a public admission of guilt allows his audience to feel warm empathy towards his occasional trip-ups. Davidson came across as genuine rather than mealy mouthed. A bad boy with big dick empathy… Imagine Louis CK without, well, Louis CK.
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