Island in the Sun

On the death of Michelle Trachtenberg and millennial movies for boys and men.

Michelle Trachtenberg in EuroTrip. Credit: DreamWorks.

There’s no podcast this week because I am on the road and can’t record anything. But a new episode will be out next week. I’ve got a few different guests lined up across the spectrum of politics and culture, and I am really looking forward to talking with them. Stay tuned.

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I think most millennial boys, at some point in their youth, had a crush on manic pixie dream girl Brittany Murphy or Michelle Trachtenberg, perhaps best known to the lads of my generation as Jenny in EuroTrip (2004). Now both actresses are gone too soon, with Trachtenberg found dead by her mother in her New York City apartment earlier this week. She had been in physical decline for some time and underwent a liver transplant that apparently failed. She was 39.

The news of her death bothered me. Well, it mostly did after I saw a post from a Twitter account called “Died Suddenly” that suggested that she had “died suddenly” due to the coronavirus vaccine. The evidence? A nearly four-year-old Instagram post in which Trachtenberg mentioned the jab. So she “died suddenly” of complications related to her liver years later after a long and public deterioration. I never took the shot myself because I felt uneasy about it and hated how aggressively it was pushed on people. But I have a deep disdain for this type, who looks for every instance of death to exclaim, with morbid delight, “died suddenly,” regardless of the actual cause of death. It is ghoulish and callous. It’s also unique to the viral internet.

I realized that I associate Trachtenberg with the Before Times, when things were a little less insane, and the internet had not yet been directly integrated with my brain via smartphone and thus there was still a barrier between virtual and real. It is my understanding that this is not really an acceptable thing to write about as a millennial because it is overdone at this point. Who wants to hear about looking back on the simpler days of hazy teenage summers when the world was vast and open like the sea and every moment of intimacy felt charged with an electricity that snatched your breath and raced your heart and made your mind swim and we had not all been completely poisoned yet? Even being online then seemed more intimate. It often occurred at one of those enormous desks that resembled a Shinto shrine of wood and metal where we would commune with the spirits that reside in the World Wide Web, our digital great chain of being. Before dating apps, there was Myspace (I guess it is kind of back now) with Tom, your smiling default friend, and AOL Instant Messenger.