by Gianna Hayes
I’m sure you’ve seen it on Pinterest, or through TikToks or Instagram reels: How to be the mysterious cool person, reading poetry in that one armchair of the library, headphones in, always blasting Lana Del Rey, unknowable and unreachable. What is the appeal?
Appearances are of course a huge facet of our culture and social life – I’m sure you’ve heard of performative activism, the male gaze versus the female gaze and other liberal arts college sociological topics. As Shakespeare says, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” As someone who has strived for this aesthetic in the past, I can attest to its uselessness, whilst simultaneously understanding the appeal. Personally, when I’ve felt the pull of “being mysterious,” it is always to appear for others as a projection of someone I’ve always wanted to be, someone I feel like I can never truly be. I imagine someone looking at me in the library, or in my single booth at Lowry, and wanting to be interesting enough for them. This can be different for each person, but it seems that many people idolize this “mysterious” aesthetic.
The mysterious cool girl doesn’t laugh loudly with friends over dinner, she isn’t imposing her presence, she goes through life like a ghost, and we the audience are haunted by her as she flits through the world of the living, a character in her own movie and the rest of us background fillers. As a result of being a mere shade, she is both observed and observing; she is unbothered, moisturized, staying in her lane. She is independent, which is perhaps what I’ve so valued about this caricature. For those introverts and ambiverts out there, it can be nice to idealize a life where you don’t have to interact, constantly relying on others for social fulfillment. These mysterious girls appear to us as the pinnacle of an effortlessly interesting life, and their backstory may be tragic, but at least their beret is sitting at the perfect angle. The mysterious girl is cool on her own terms, she goes to bookstores and thrift shops on her own, she does the crossword while waiting for her matcha in the trendy café (for Wooster, just imagine Boo Bears). Sometimes I just want to read a book while I eat my dinner, and that doesn’t mean I’m performing, right? Right??? Fundamentally, no. But of course, the media and male gaze complicate things.
The aestheticization of the cool, mysterious individual is what we are really analyzing here today, because that’s who we see in movies and tv shows and hear talked about in songs – consider the song “104 Degrees” by Slaughter Beach, Dog or Ramona Flowers from “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and similar manic pixie dream girls. Now, manic pixie dream girls, while a category of their own, are not far off from the mysterious cool girl aesthetic. Both strip women, or individuals when applicable, of their own narrative and place it instead in the mind of the observer. The audience watches and projects their ideas into this mysterious person, and we romanticize strangers who we only find interesting due to their The 1975 t-shirt or their crocheted headphone covers. A person sporting a mesh shirt and reading Sylvia Plath can be all that one’s imagination needs to create an entertaining narrative.
So why would one strive for this air of intrigue? Perhaps it is because we can be scared to come up with our own narrative. If we place that on other people to interpret, it leaves less up to us. We relinquish our narrative because it’s easier to just exist as a fly on the wall, reading our poetry in the library, undisturbed. Yet this mindset always comes back to haunt us, and we live our lives appearing and performing for other people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy time alone where we are perceivable, but instead, when you think of the mysterious cool girl, know that she is a person all on her own, with her own faults and graces, and we don’t know the person behind the sweater vest or beneath the beret.
