Jeremy Renner

How Jeremy Renner went from action star on the rise to a guy with a busted app and an Amazon camping store. There was a moment, back in the early 2010s, when Jeremy Renner really did it for me. The strong forearms, the relative shortness (5 feet 9 inches) — so taciturn, the perfect addition to my pantheon of Busted-Face Hollywood Men. Renner rose to prominence in the midst of a catastrophic worldwide recession, a model of the sort of working-class (white) masculinity seemingly under siege on all fronts. Like George Clooney before him, he’d spent decades toiling on the fringes of Hollywood, taking roles in commercials, television pilots, and indie films. By the time he arrived at stardom — cemented by back-to-back Oscar nominations for The Hurt Locker and The Town (2010) — he seemed mature, fully formed, confident in his skill and his role. That tension came to a head earlier this month, when the Jeremy Renner Official app was shut down after being beset by trolls (again ). There was some of the normal, run-of-the-mill trolling (death threats, misogynistic shit). But the real implosion was incited by the sort of trolls, like Deadspin’s Stefan Heck, who tried to see what would happen if, in answer to Renner’s question about plans for the weekend, he answered “looking at porno .” The sort of troll that posed as “Jeremy Renner’s Evil Twin” to suggest that he had put his “balls all over ” Renner’s onion rings — or pretended to be an official account for Casey Anthony, and then, in turn, pretended to be Jeremy Renner defending Casey Anthony’s right to have an account. On Sept. 4, Renner publicly announced , “Due to clever individuals who were able to manipulate ways to impersonate me and others within the app I have asked ESCAPEX, the company the [ sic ] runs this app to shut it down immediately.” It was a shitshow that, rather than sparking much hand-wringing over the toxic state of online discourse, primarily prompted most of the internet to wonder: Why does Jeremy Renner have his own app? No one would ask that question about a fan website, or a forum or Facebook group. But a personal app communicates a weird mix of hubris and desperation: It’s a more crass and complicated version of Instagram, explicitly monetizing the “personal” content and interactions that the rest of social media provides for free (Escapex apps like Renner’s provide a tightly policed positive-commentary conduit between a celebrity and their superfans, wherein users can purchase the ability to “boost” their comments to prominence). The Kardashians had personal apps that supplied content to fans for a monthly fee, before shutting them down this year, but those made perfect sense: The incredibly successful Kardashian brand is built on a willingness to monetize, well, everything . Renner’s app drama found him in an odd, liminal space of being at once too “legitimately” famous for this sort of explicit monetization (an Oscar nominee!) but also somehow not famous enough for people to understand why the app would exist in the first place. He made it hard not to ask the question: Who does Jeremy Renner think he is? If that’s still a little unclear, the way most of us have come to see him has solidified into something best encapsulated by writer Nick Ciarelli : “like if a normal guy who works at Dick’s Sporting Goods was granted many wishes by god.” Renner has openly modeled that normal-guy image for the last decade: in interviews, in endorsement deals, in profiles, on junkets, in role choices. The existence of the app just cast all of it — the Jeremy Renner Store stocked with camping gear on Amazon; the vanity singing project ; the Jeep ads; the abundance of leather car coats; the use of hashtags like nature, SharedExperiences, SundayFunday, and LoveTheseDudes — in a different light. The sheer existence — and vertiginous decline — of the Jeremy Renner Official app is weird and inexplicably hilarious. But like the rest of Renner’s current image, it’s also a sym