Each clip-on addition is a talisman of got-my-shit-together-ness —these fragments I have shored against my ruins—with the fully dressed cup acting as a stand-in for an aesthetically organized life.
When I imagine a Stanley cup I imagine it on screen. I’ve certainly seen one in real life—whole walls of them at Target, in fact, and probably women walking the same Target aisles with Stanleys in hand. But what I mostly see when I close my eyes and think of a Stanley is a succession of TikTok moments. The clitter clatter of nails tapping the hollow metal cylinder, the sparkle of a limited release glitter Stanley rotated for the camera, a collection of Stanleys arranged on a suburban benchtop like models on stage at a Miss America pageant. This is not by accident: the TikTokification of the Stanley cup has been vital to its contemporary popularity. Even as TikTok’s future hangs in the balance, its broad influence on our cultural imagination and visual landscape is undeniable, apparent everywhere from the bleed of TikTok dance trends into real life to Instagram’s recent transition to a vertical grid. A profile of Terence Reilly, the executive who stewarded Stanley’s recent rise to ubiquity, revealed that “most of his television time has been replaced by watching TikToks,” keeping him in the loop on the new trends and techniques du jour. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.
More recently, the Stanley cup has also provided a basis for increasingly baroque forms of ornamentation, also captured on video. An enormous range of Stanley accoutrements, some sanctioned and some unofficial, offer ways to increase the cup’s functionality (straw caps, snack trays, clip-on chapstick holsters) or its aesthetics (stickers, lid ornaments, handle charms). TikTok creators take full advantage of these ancillary items, loading their cups down with bits and bobs, clips clipping and zippers zipping in an ASMR frenzy. The videos proliferate, even as Stanley’s star begins to wane and other water bottles ascend: getting my Stanley ready to take on a hike; underwater Stanley for my Moana 2 themed bath; get Ready With Me (GRWM) but it’s a Stanley getting dressed, covered in mini-bags and pill cases and Totoro straw stoppers.
If the conventional GRWM video requires a capitulation to what Laura Mulvey famously described as to-be-looked-at-ness—the idea that women on screen are “simultaneously looked at and displayed”—the Stanley cup GRWM displaces that role onto the object. The Stanley acts as a proxy for the body, enabling creators (usually women) to participate in the pleasures of the GRWM genre without the vulnerability of offering up their own body for the viewer’s gaze. Like the classic GRWM, the Stanley video also expresses something about its creator’s class status (or at least their class anxieties). The cups themselves are expensive, and collecting enough accessories for an effective GRWM requires a financial and time investment. Each clip-on addition is a talisman of got-my-shit-together-ness —these fragments I have shored against my ruins—with the fully dressed cup acting as a stand-in for an aesthetically organized life. While Stanley’s roots as a purveyor of knockabout camping vessels are retained to an extent in next-gen Stanley culture (and creators do appreciate their cups’ utility value), the cup’s to-be-looked-at-ness is the real story: the Stanley is a doll, a dressable mini-me that is also an accessory for and symbol of the real me.
I have a theory that the Stanley cup became TikTok famous in part because its dimensions are almost identical to that of the phone screen (the phone is also a doll, by the way). The most popular Stanley cup is the Stanley Quencher, a 40 oz tumbler made of recycled and BPA-free stainless steel. It is 10.78 inches high, and 5.82 inches wide including its robust handle. So, an aspect ratio of 1:1.85. The TikTok video image is 1:1.78, fractionally squatter than the Stanley but functionally the same. The cup fits into the space of the frame perfectly.
In its mirroring of the video frame, the Stanley became an ideal subject for the age of vertical video, not that we call it that anymore. During the first few years of the smartphone camera’s ascendance, we maintained something of a belief that we were all still shooting video in the traditional sense. You’d hear people yell at their friends to “film horizontally!!!”, as though their footage of a kids’ birthday party or nice sunset might end up on the big screen, or at least might be viewed by someone else holding their phone horizontally. But the feeling that iPhone video was cinema quickly wore off. The up-down orientation won out, aided and abetted by the arrival of front-facing cameras that made our faces into another perfectly-fitting subject to capture with our phone-doll-mirror-camera-screen. Portrait mode.
If you have a feed full of Stanleys, you might notice that the cup’s role often fluctuates throughout the course of a single video, toggling viewers’ attention back and forth between the Stanley as an active body (a tool for hydration) and a display body (a doll to dress, an object of beauty and desire). Stanley as figure, Stanley as ground. What’s more, it often does this without the cup ever leaving the frame. Within the small restless rectangle of the TikTok video, to cut away is to risk losing the viewer, who can swipe to the next video with barely a thought. Instead, narrative is created on the body of the Stanley cup through the accumulation of Stanley accessories, and via various in-frame effects (sped-up motion, filters to add sparkle, jump-cut transitions that enable new accessories to appear without the phone-body leaving the screen). The Stanley cup is there until we look away.
In his 1954 essay “Cinemascope: The End of Montage,” film theorist and Cahiers du Cinéma co-founder Andre Bazin suggested that the rise of the super-widescreen film format CinemaScope “has come along to definitively destroy montage as the key element in cinematic discourse.” Big if true. Montage is one of the building blocks of narrative cinema, almost too fundamental to imagine cinema history without. As initially theorized by Soviet filmmakers in the early 20th Century, montage is the cinematic technique of cutting between two sequential shots in order to produce meaning from the juxtaposition (we see a shot of a man’s pensive face then a shot of a child in a coffin, we understand the man is upset because the child is dead). Montage makes meaning through the edit.
CinemaScope, the would-be killer of montage, came crashing into movie theaters in 1953. It stretched the cinematic frame from the square-ish “Academy ratio” of 1.37:1 to the sweeping horizontal of 2.55:1 (two and a half times wide as it was high). With it came the epics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957)—big movies with sweeping landscapes and lots of things spread across them. For Bazin, CinemaScope’s extreme wideness suggested that directors were no longer “condemned to carve up reality” into shot reverse shot, close up, reaction shot. The broad horizontal space meant that speaker and listener, subject and object, could all fit there on the screen: meaning could be made within the frame. “We had mistakenly taken montage to be the essence of cinema” writes Bazin, “but in effect its importance is related to the restricted size of the classic image format.”
But, of course, CinemaScope did not kill montage. Its popularity was relatively short-lived, and by the mid-60s it was crowded out by Panavision’s VistaVision and other competitors. Aspect ratios fluctuated throughout the rest of the century, but the cut—the magic splice that puts two disparate images in relationship—remained the fundamental tool of cinema. Still, Bazin’s observation retains a central truth: the affordances of the frame and the aspect ratio affect help define what forms of art are possible within its constraints, and what kinds of image can be made and distributed.
Perversely, the true killer of montage may not be the widest-of-wide frames but the narrowest of narrow. Today’s predominant videospace is the phone screen, which, as we know, shrunk the broad cinematic rectangle to the size of a hand and flipped it vertically. This is no room for a landscape, no room for a grand narrative to parade from left to right across a room-sized image. At this size and aspect ratio, there is barely room for continuity editing. An eyeline match or an establishing shot make little visual sense when shrunk to the size of a pack of cards, and an over-the-shoulder shot leaves no room for anything in the background. Vertical video’s constrained frame has impacted our understanding of remaining wider-screen spaces as well. Over the past year, viewers and commentators have theorized that shows like Netflix’s Avatar the Last Airbender and Disney+’s Loki aggressively constrain the on-screen action within the center third of the frame, in order to make it more crop-able for vertical video. “I’ve never seen something staged so aggressively for TikTok” said writer Ryan Broderick. Whether or not it is the imperatives of TikTok and other social video apps driving creators to disregard two thirds of the screen space (there are plenty of pre-vertical filmmakers famed for their centered framing), the 1:1.78 rectangle is a powerful container.
The one thing that does fit in the frame with comfort and ease is the body: the human body getting dressed, the Stanley cup, the doll, the face. And so, instead of continuity editing, we see creators keeping the body (of the creator, of the Stanley) in the frame for the duration of the video, and letting everything else move around it. To swipe through a dozen #StanleyCup clips is to see a screen filled with Quencher after Quencher, stitched together by a series of jump cuts both within and between videos. Swipe, a Stanley from the POV of its owner, being packed with ice CUT TO cup filling with water from the faucet CUT TO cup moving through space held by a disembodied hand SWIPE TO another cup, getting ready for game day, each football-themed accessory appearing with ASMR clacks and zzzzps via invisible jump cuts SWIPE TO unbox my Stanley with me, a single-shot unwrapping of the tumbler from its cardboard carapace and tissue liner, reminiscent of the fetishistic way a tech blogger would unbox his Macbook Pro on YouTube a decade ago (landscape mode for the laptop body). Close app. Montage is dead, and the cup stays in the picture.
Where continuity editing creates a continuous sense of narrative time and space through the magic of cinema, StanleyTok (and TikTok itself) offers neither a coherent sense of space or a clear passage of time. Instead, meaning occurs by accretion. Things happen, and Stanley accessories pile on, one disconnected fragment after another, with different fragments and a different order for every viewer. All this jumping around is enough to alarm the staunchest mid-century media theorist (or, for that matter, an advertiser looking to influence viewer desire and purchasing habits). However, StanleyTok offers us something else in exchange for the loss of temporal and spatial certainty: a commercial object. The ever-present and always-centered cup-body becomes a stabilizing figure to offset the trauma of the jumpcut as we move through the dissociative world of the app.
Within the screen world of TikTok, the Stanley cup and other viral products are essentially transitional objects. D.W. Winnicott introduced the concept of the transitional object in 1951, to explain the young child’s frequent attachment to a specific teddy, soft toy, blanket or “hard toy” (click clack goes the lid of the Stanley). The transitional object provides psychological comfort during a destabilizing time, such as the developmental stage in which the child is first recognizing their separation from the mother/caregiver. The Stanley serves this same specific function on screen—a sense of calming physical continuity in the frame as everything shifts and jumps around it. Of course, the offscreen Stanley cup functions even less metaphorically as a transitional object, comforting its frazzled owner in a world that may feel disjointed and overly complex, lacking the main character energy of a grand modernist narrative. Heading to work: Stanley in hand. Driving to pick up the kids: Stanley in the cup holder. Health crisis: GRWM and my Stanley to go get a biopsy.
Our relationship to the world now includes our relation to the screen and everything that goes on there, and the uncomfortable attentional fluctuation between phone-space and living-space adds yet another level of psychic jumpcut. Stanley is there in both spaces, screen and living room, bridging the gaps in diegesis and supporting a new kind of hybrid lifeworld. Terence Reilly and other marketers of transitional commodities are keenly aware of this bridging role, offering us a tremendously shoppable object that can jump offscreen and into our hands with a few clicks or a Target run. The transitional object is a pacifier both on screen and in hand, easing the psychic strain of constructing a relationship to reality. But the task of building that relationship is never fully completed—we will never be made whole, and the need for a Stanley will never be satisfied.
Kelly Pendergrast is a writer and researcher from New Zealand, living in Oakland, California. She writes about technology, aesthetics, material culture, and the environment.