The Influencer Has Entered the Plot

From punchline to plot device: tracking the rise of the influencer character in film and television

---

There’s a particular moment in Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a culture. An influencer character, phone perpetually in hand, documenting everything for her followers, becomes an unlikely source of crucial evidence. Her constant livestreaming—once framed as narcissistic and frivolous—turns out to be exactly what’s needed to crack the case wide open.

It’s a fascinating evolution. The influencer has graduated from lazy punchline to legitimate character archetype, and Hollywood is finally catching up to a reality the rest of us have been living in for over a decade.

From Mockery to Main Character

Remember when influencers first started appearing in movies and TV shows? They were caricatures—vapid, self-absorbed, obsessed with likes and engagement to the point of absurdity. They existed to be mocked, to represent everything shallow about modern culture. The influencer was the butt of the joke, a walking, talking symbol of society’s decline into digital narcissism.

Shows like “Black Mirror” gave us cautionary tales where social media stars met gruesome ends, usually as karmic punishment for their vanity. Early portrayals treated influencer culture as a temporary phenomenon, something we’d look back on with embarrassment once we all came to our senses.

But somewhere around 2020, something shifted. Writers started to realize that influencers weren’t going anywhere. More importantly, they represented something genuinely interesting: a new kind of power, a new form of documentation, and a fundamentally different relationship with privacy and public life.

The Influencer as Witness

This is where “Glass Onion” gets clever. The influencer character isn’t just comic relief or a symbol of cultural decay. She’s a plot device in the truest sense—her compulsion to document everything becomes narratively essential. In a murder mystery where everyone has secrets and motivations to lie, the person who livestreams their entire existence becomes the most reliable narrator.

It’s a brilliant inversion of the traditional “unreliable narrator” trope. The person we’d normally dismiss as superficial becomes the keeper of objective truth. Her camera doesn’t lie, even when everyone else does.

“The influencer’s constant need to document isn’t a character flaw anymore—it’s a superpower disguised as narcissism.”

We’re seeing this pattern emerge across multiple genres. In thrillers, the influencer captures the crucial evidence. In comedies, they provide real-time commentary on unfolding events. In dramas, their curated online persona contrasts sharply with their private struggles, creating built-in dramatic tension.

The Influencer Across Genres

The versatility of the influencer character is remarkable. They’ve shown up everywhere, adapted to fit whatever story needs telling.

In horror films, the influencer’s need to broadcast their location becomes a vulnerability. Their followers can track them, their livestreams give away their hiding spots, and their refusal to put down the phone becomes genuinely terrifying. The genre understands that constant connectivity is its own kind of exposure.

In satire, influencers serve as mirrors to our own behavior. Shows like “The White Lotus” use influencer characters to examine class, privilege, and the performance of experience. They’re not just making fun of influencers—they’re using influencers to make fun of all of us.

Even prestige dramas have gotten in on the action. “Succession” featured influencer-adjacent characters navigating the collision between old and new media. “Euphoria” explores how social media performance intersects with identity formation for an entire generation.

Why Now? Why This Character?

The proliferation of influencer characters in media isn’t accidental. It reflects something fundamental about how we live now. We’re all performing versions of ourselves online, curating our experiences for an audience, documenting moments not just for memory but for content.

The influencer character crystallizes these anxieties and realities into a single, recognizable figure. They’re us, taken to a logical extreme. They’re doing what we all do—seeking validation, building personal brands, trying to monetize their personality—just more transparently and at a larger scale.

For writers, the influencer offers rich dramatic possibilities. They exist at the intersection of public and private, authentic and performed, powerful and vulnerable. They have audiences that can be mobilized for good or ill. They create permanent records of temporary moments. They’re always “on,” which means they’re always revealing something, even when they think they’re maintaining their image.

The Meta-Narrative Problem

There’s an interesting paradox emerging: as influencer characters become more common in media, actual influencers are increasingly cast in these roles. Reality stars transition into scripted content playing characters not far removed from their real personas. The line between “influencer playing an influencer” and “actor playing a character” grows increasingly blurry.

This creates a fascinating meta-narrative. When an actual influencer plays an influencer character who documents a fictional crime that helps solve a fictional case, what are we really watching? It’s performance all the way down, and Hollywood is finally sophisticated enough to play with these layers.

From Novelty to Necessity

What “Glass Onion” and shows like it demonstrate is that the influencer has evolved from novelty character to narrative necessity. They’re no longer shorthand for “look how shallow we’ve become.” Instead, they’re fully realized characters whose unique relationship with documentation, audience, and image-crafting creates genuine dramatic possibilities.

The influencer character has become shorthand for a whole set of modern tensions: the death of privacy, the commodification of personality, the burden of constant performance, and the strange power that comes from having an audience. These aren’t shallow concerns—they’re central questions about how we live in the 21st century.

“The influencer isn’t just a character type anymore. They’re a lens through which we can examine our entire relationship with technology, image, and truth.”

Films and shows that get this right aren’t using influencers as easy targets. They’re recognizing that influencers represent something genuinely new in human experience: a life lived simultaneously in public and private, where the boundary between the two has become permeable to the point of meaninglessness.

What Comes Next?

As influencer culture matures and fragments into countless niches and platforms, we’ll likely see influencer characters become even more specific and nuanced. The generic “Instagram influencer” will give way to the conspiracy theory YouTuber, the ASMR creator, the fitness coach, the BookTok sensation—each with their own narrative possibilities.

We might also see a backlash, a new wave of characters defined by their refusal to participate in influencer culture, creating drama through their absence from the digital panopticon everyone else inhabits.

But for now, we’re in the sweet spot where the influencer character has shed their training wheels. They’re no longer lazy stereotypes or cautionary tales. They’re complex characters who happen to livestream, document, and perform their lives for audiences—which makes them, paradoxically, some of the most realistic characters in modern media.