With I Said I Love You First officially unleashed onto the world (no matter how “cringe” some non-millennials and millennials alike might find it), Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco also saw fit to release the Jake Schreier-directed video for “Younger and Hotter Than Me” on the same day. As technically the fourth single from the album (following “Scared of Loving You,” “Call Me When You Break Up” and “Sunset Blvd”), “Younger and Hotter Than Me” is a marked tonal shift from the others, which bear a much “sunnier” perspective on l’amour (whether romantic or, in the case of “CMWYBU,” platonic). But with “Younger and Hotter Than Me,” the rose-colored glasses are off, and Gomez is at her most candid.
While some, of course, will be rightly prone to take issue with a thirty-two-year-old going on and on about how she’s day-old bread now (which Miley Cyrus, at thirty, also explored on 2023’s “Used to Be Young”), the tragic reality is that society in general (and L.A. in particular) continues to make women feel that way. And rather than getting better since the time that Madonna broke down age boundaries by “daring” to keep working as a pop star in her forties and beyond, it’s arguably gotten worse thanks to social media. Which has made Gen Z perhaps the most ageist generation to date. And in seeing herself through Gen Z’s eyes, Gomez like many other millennials, has been made to feel like trash.
Hence, a video that highlights a certain “stuckness” (/unwillingness to move forward) and “depression coma,” with Gomez waking up on what the viewer soon realizes is nothing more than a film set. Something Gomez can relate to considering how much of her career has been spent living on such sets (particularly Wizards of Waverly Place). The fake room she’s in is outfitted with furniture that’s all covered in tarp-sized beige sheets, lending it that dusty, forgotten kind of “mausoleum flair.” Perhaps a nod to how her twenties have died and now it’s just a sled ride downhill into irrelevancy.
With the song’s opening notes bearing a similar sound to the piano accompaniment of Taylor Swift “New Year’s Day,” the other Swift correlation here is “All Too Well.” Specifically, when Swift sings, “And I was never good at tellin’ jokes, but the punch line goes/‘I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age.’” For Gomez, that translates to the lyric, “We’re not getting any younger/But your girlfriends seem to.” And as Gomez walks through the backlot of the studio where she’s apparently playing the on-set lurker, she enters the bathroom with her toiletry bag and encounters a “younger and hotter” girl staring at herself sadly and self-consciously in the mirror, presumably upset over a man or something that a man said to her.
As Gomez stoically brushes her teeth, she looks over at the tiara-wearing redhead and gives something vaguely resembling a smile. On the one hand, she seems to want to reassure the girl that it’s going to get better, but, on the other, she knows the girl is wasting her time with all this self-consciousness and not fully taking advantage of the powers of her hotness while she can. Because it doesn’t get better, and one doesn’t realize how good they have it in their twenties until that decade is gone. But Gomez knows there’s no point trying to explain that to this redhead. A girl, unfortunately, must learn the hard way.
Returning to the set with her toiletry bag, Gomez stops at the craft service table to unapologetically eat a donut (no sense watching your weight when you’re “old,” right?), glancing over at the scene currently being filmed: a group of teenagers performing TikTok-esque dance moves against the setting of a high school backdrop. More salt in the wound to make her feel like a “granny.” Later, Gomez is back in her sheet-covered furniture area, writing in her journal (now also an “old lady” act since no youth writes tangibly) and pacing back and forth as she laments, “Looking for something to tell you/Looking for reasons to speak.”
Evidently, she must have found one, for, in the next scene, she appears walking along the backlot with Blanco, even holding hands. The two have lunch together and Gomez reflexively wipes a piece of food away from his mouth, an intimate act that, in truth, most younger girls would probably be too dainty/repulsed by to bother with. When the lunch is over, Gomez watches Blanco leave the Sunset Studios premises (as the shot of the Sunset Las Palmas Studios parking garage in the background makes clear). The two look wistfully at one another, Blanco faintly mouthing “I love you,” only Gomez doesn’t appear to notice. Not that it would matter. Their relationship could never work again—not now that Blanco (or his “character”) has experienced the majesty of younger and hotter snatch.
Alone once more on the darkened lot of the studio, Gomez continues to roam about, reflecting (one imagines) yet again on her lost and squandered youth. Reaching the sheet-covered “room” again, Gomez (still dressed in her clothes) lays her head on her pillow, pulls the covers over her and waits for another day to arrive, taking with it another portion of what’s left of her youth.
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