#oreo

There is something about the way in which the words SELENA GOMEZ are emblazoned on this package, larger and more important than OREO.

It's a little bit of a joke to say that these cookies have the flavor of Selena Gomez, but I do think that's how they're positioned, as otherwise, what is it? Selena Gomez is known as an actress and singer. You don't buy these cookies because you think that she makes great cookies which is then somehow distilled by the food scientists at Oreo, or that she has good taste as a culinary expert, no, the important thing is that they are a totem of the cultural artifact of Selena Gomez, a way to have a piece of her in cookie form. There is something of the Eucharist in it, a mystical communion with a transcendent figure.

There is, in small print, a concession to the idea that these have a specific taste that can be divorced from Selena Gomez herself. They're cinnamon and chocolate. But not just cinnamon and chocolate: Selena's cinnamon and chocolate.

Somewhere, there is a real Selena Gomez, but we are now so many steps removed from her that her name is a simple signifier, pointing not to the real physical woman, but to the concept of the woman. In the same way, the flavor of the cookies is one of the least important things about them, positioned in small print at the bottom of the labeling. The text sits there embarrassed, ashamed to admit that it is not simply the flavor of the abstract concept of Selena Gomez.

I read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and kind of hated it, mostly because it said with many words what could have been said with few. But one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that we have entered an era of hyperreality, one in which traditional distinctions between reality and representation have collapsed entirely, a world where we have symbols which refer only to themselves. The symbol of Selena Gomez still does point to a person and her body of work, but when looking at this package of cookies we can see how the symbol spills out beyond the bounds of reality. We are left to grapple with the fact that some things are implied to have Selena Gomez nature. This is the promise of the cookies.

And this raises the question: does the real, actual, living person Selena Gomez possess Selena Gomez nature? A part, certainly: this is the wellspring of the symbol, as managed and curated as she's been since her early days as a child actor. But we must expect that there are parts of Selena Gomez that don't have Selena Gomez nature, and in some sense we could call this authenticity, but in another sense, inauthenticity.

And even those elements of Selena Gomez that are known and presented to the public in this carefully curated way might not have Selena Gomez nature. The modern memetic cluster that defines Selena Gomez, the Selena Gomez referred to on the package of Oreos, has little to do with her childhood performances, and in some sense they are alien to the symbol now.

The most striking part of this packaging, for me, is that Selena Gomez appears to us only in letters, only in a monogram on the face of a cookie, a pair of headphones with Selena Gomez nature, a specifically chosen metallic red color that must also have Selena Gomez nature. But there's no image of Selena herself, the flesh and blood person, all that is merely implied, but also unimportant. You are meant to recognize the name, or possibly the aura.