2 Steps To Coolness

The Pokemon World Championships ended in Hawaii yesterday. Naturally, Japanese players won a majority of the events. The prime event however - the video game senior division - crowned an American for the first time ever.

(Champion Ray Rizzo on the far right.)

After one Pokemon battle, this thin and pale but otherwise nondescript white guy is a celebrity. People are admiring him in Pokemon communities wordwide, but he fits absolutely no part of the "cool" image we're used to seeing in modern media. Here's an example of the image I'm talking about:

(If you've spent any time on the Internet recently, you've probably seen banner ads for this new abomination.)

Given these two pieces of recent media news, I think it's time I discuss what it really means to be "cool." Let's look at that Resident Evil poster a little more and make a list of the image's "cool" qualities:

• Canted text. Attempts to defy convention by resisting horizontal alignment.
• Rain. The figure is undaunted by bad environmental conditions which shows determination.
• Guns. A staple icon of cool people. Why? Holding a gun asserts authority by threat and sets a person apart from common people since most people are not weapon-trained nor threatening. The ability to hold two guns at the same time sets her above other people who hold guns.
• Glare of determination. Also a staple of cool people. It shows intense focus on a task which in turn shows confidence in completing said task.
• Black garb. Black is both associated with death and with business and formality (again, threat mixed with determination). It's symbolically convenient that this figures business is death.

Jovovich looks "cool" in the poster because she is focused on a task (killing zombies) which she appears superhumanly capable of completing. This is your standard action movie poster. It packs in as many icons associative of coolness as it can to make as many people as possible think that Jovovich looks like she's got a job to do and that she's good at it. These simple associative tricks ultimately make this poster shallow and ridiculously hyperbolic to anyone looking as hard at it as we are. In the case of this poster, the image tries so hard to put on a facade of coolness that it has the unbearable stench of superficiallity. Unfortunately, the media is saturated with this facade. Particularly in anime:

(Characters like this further condition us to think that this strong, serious, contemplative, trench-coat-wearing, problems-with-your-father demeanor is "cool," but I dare you to try it in real life. I guarantee people will just think you're a jerk.)

As we see with Ray Rizzo, you don't have to look cool to be cool. In fact, genuinely cool people rarely fit the mold of coolness. Despite opposite visages, what Jovovich and Rizzo have in common here is that they both provoke admiration from their audience by displaying authority, dedication, and intent. Being cool is about being admired and admiration comes from doing things in intentful ways. Period. You don't even have to do something inherently "cool" to be cool yourself (as demonstrated by Rizzo's Pokemon mastery) - commitment is a very rare and coveted skill and people will admire you just for your passion. And if you're good at what you do (often a side effect of dedication) your coolness will be undeniable.

So your choices for achieving coolness basically boil down to two options:

1. The Jovovich Path: Contrive an image and conform to it until you become that image. 
2. The Rizzo Path: Do something with enough passion that you become cool under the image you already have. 

Option 2 is by far the easiest, most pleasant, and most genuine. And from what we've seen here, it breaks down to a simple two-step program:

1. Commit
2. Accomplish 

Yep. That's it. Now take this lesson out into the world do something! Anything! You too can be a Pokemon Master!