I think Uncut Gems broke The Weeknd

do not hurry up tomorrow

I’ve been thinking a lot about Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye over the past few years—and by “a lot” I just mean more than I previously did, which was “not at all.” I’ve never liked The Weeknd, but with some curiosity I’ve passively monitored the Canadian pop star’s career progression since his acting debut in Uncut Gems, which was probably the most I’ve ever cared about him in my life. The Safdie brothers’ thriller is set in 2012, and so Tesfaye plays himself from 2012, a singer on the cusp of becoming a major star with the release of his three mixtapes: House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes in Silence (the track “Wicked Games” had a chokehold on MySpace pages at my high school).

But in Uncut Gems, he’s just some Canadian singer who looks “stupid” to Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner. It’s probably a less than 10-minute cameo overall, but Tesfaye goes on to engage in fisticuffs with Howard in a memorable nightclub scene about midway through the film. Here, Tesfaye performs a live rendition of his song “The Morning” and then does coke with Howard’s much younger girlfriend, Julia (played by Julia Fox). In a blind rage, Howard assumes they’ve been hooking up; to be fair, The Weeknd does try.

Uncut Gems was something of a cultural phenomenon—at least to me, and at least to my corner of social media, where the film positively exploded. It’s hard to estimate the extent to which the general public cared about the film, since I am admittedly so exclusively keyed into my pop culture-obsessed, cinephile niche. But within that niche—and I think partly bolstered by COVID lockdowns— Uncut Gems was, in no better term to describe it, the moment. But ultimately it was a box office success, and at the time it became A24’s highest-grossing film to date before it was dethroned by Everything Everywhere all at Once. It even inspired fucking Inside Out 2.

Then, three months after the wide release of Uncut Gems, and just a few days into lockdowns, The Weeknd released his album After Hours. The cover depicted an image of Tesfaye grinning sardonically at the camera, his head tilted up to display a bloodied, broken nose. I remember thinking to myself, “Huh, that’s very reminiscent of Uncut Gems. Interesting.” In the film’s final stretch, Howard is beaten by his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s goons, leading to a broken nose stuffed with tissue and a climactic scene with Julia, where Howard admits to her that he is “so sad” and “so fucked up.” The look of Sandler with the bloody nose became iconic, and Tesfaye seemed to be tipping his hat with the art direction of his latest album cover. It was no surprise, then, to hear similarities in the album’s tracks to the score of Gems, and to ultimately discover that Daniel Lopatin AKA Oneohtrix Point Never, the composer who created Gems’ brilliant, blood-pumping score, had co-produced the album. With Gems’ fan popularity and critical recognition as a masterpiece, and The Weeknd’s peripheral involvement it, it seemed like the singer was, understandably, trying to imbue some of its success into his own.

But why? Well, if the last few years have indicated anything, it’s that The Weekend has been trying very hard to be cool again. For it seems that he is no longer, if he once was. Was he ever? Howard Ratner’s brief quip that The Weeknd “looks stupid” seems terribly true and terribly prescient. But let’s back it up a little: When Tesfaye first started out, he was anonymously releasing R&B music on YouTube before he met producer Jeremy Rose at a party in 2010. Rose would go on to help Tesfaye create three tracks, including “The Morning,” before the two parted ways. Still anonymous, still on YouTube, the songs caught the attention of Drake, The New York Times, and ultimately the world. I am getting all of this information straight off of Wikipedia, for what's it’s worth.