On the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, director Norman Jewison became increasingly frustrated with his star actor Steve McQueen. Jewison kept imploring him to play the role with more visible charisma, more swagger. McQueen refused. He underplayed everything. He let silences hang. He did less when the script called for more.
Jewison’s frustration reportedly reached a boiling point just before he watched the dailies. It was then that he could see that McQueen, by refusing to perform coolness, had become the most magnetic thing on screen. It wasn’t a technique or performance. He seemed constitutionally uninterested in trying to impress anyone, and that particular quality, that specific absence, turned out to be the thing nobody could look away from.
We recognize this dynamic instantly when we see it. The person at the party trying too hard to seem indifferent, the band making a show of not caring about record sales, the startup founder who won’t stop telling you how little they care about what VCs think. An obvious attempt to seem cool and detached is its own kind of neediness, and everyone can feel it. As Luke Burgis, the author of The One and the Ninety-Nine observed in a recent conversation, “There’s a danger in a kid in high school who’s trying way too hard to be cool. It just doesn’t work like that.”
We get this intuitively. But the question is why? What is it about the conscious attempt at creative independence that undermines itself? What is the psychology of cool? And if you can’t try your way into it, where does the real thing actually come from?
The Psychology of Cool
Coolness, despite feeling like a vague cultural term, turns out to be a surprisingly specific, well-studied psychological phenomenon. Caleb Warren at the University of Arizona has spent years investigating what it actually consists of, and his research identifies a remarkably consistent factor: perceived autonomy. People and things are seen as cool when they diverge from norms in ways that feel self-directed and appropriate. You don’t come off as cool by flouting every convention in sight. There’s important nuance there. You’re perceived as cool by deviating from the ones that feel unnecessary, and crucially, in ways that seem to come naturally.
And here’s the finding that matters most for our purposes. Warren and his team found that people earn less status when they visibly try to be cool compared to when coolness appears effortless. The act of trying betrays the very dependence on others’ approval that coolness is supposed to signal the absence of. Put simply: you cannot try your way into being cool.
Cool Meets The Psychology of Mimetic Desire
René Girard, the Stanford philosopher behind mimetic theory, offers a framework for understanding why. Girard’s central insight is that human desire is fundamentally social. When our basic needs are met, we look to our social group to determine what we want. Desire begets desire. Most desire, in Girard’s view, is borrowed.
This is the engine of audience capture. Pop artists, fast fashion brands, market-driven companies: they all swim in this web of borrowed desire, tracking what people want and adjusting accordingly. The rare figures who appear to desire independently of the social current become enormously attractive precisely because they seem to operate on a private frequency.
But Burgis, whose first book, Wanting, builds extensively on Girard’s, identifies a trap. Consciously setting out to be anti-mimetic is still a form of orientation toward the crowd. You’re doing the opposite of what you think they want, which is still a reaction, still downstream of the audience’s preferences. The conscious resistance to the crowd presupposes a fixation on the crowd. You can’t push against something without first bracing yourself against it.
Audience Capture and The Psychology of Cool
The figures who actually escape this trap share something in common, and it has little to do with strategy. They’re absorbed in their medium to a degree that crowds out the question of the audience entirely.
Burgis, in his book, explores this through Ornette Coleman. Coleman didn’t set out to invent free jazz. He was working in a department store when, during his lunch break, he wandered into a gallery and saw a painting of a wealthy woman with “the most solitary expression in the world.” He went home and wrote “Lonely Woman,” a song that would eventually break the genre open. The originality was a byproduct of absorption, not a goal. His contemporary Miles Davis expressed a similar sentiment: “It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.”
These are people so consumed by their material that the question of the audience simply doesn’t arise. In a recent conversation, Burgis described this as a kind of productive forgetfulness: the best creative work happens when “you kind of just forget” the audience exists.
Not Trying to be Cool
It’s worth noting, of course, that being independent of one’s audience guarantees nothing. You can ignore the audience completely and still produce work nobody values. Coleman experienced this himself, spending almost a decade in poverty. There are no assurances here, only uncertainty.
What gives these figures their gravitational pull isn’t simply the absence of concern for others. It’s the presence of something far more powerful: a fascination with the material that runs so deep it crowds out the need for approval entirely. They aren’t trying to be cool, or anti-mimetic, or to be perceived in any particular way. And that, paradoxically, is what gives certain people that gravitational pull.
Norman Jewison didn’t understand what McQueen was doing until he watched the footage. On set, it looked like a refusal. On screen, it looked like magnetism. McQueen was uninterested in performing at all. He had his own idea of how the role should be played, and he was more absorbed in that vision than in what the director, the studio, or the audience expected of him.
