Jeremy Strong, the most locked-in actor of our time, portrays Mark Zuckerberg in the coming film The Social Reckoning.Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail
Welcome to Parlance of our Times, a new biweekly pop-culture etymology column that unpacks a word or phrase that is suddenly everywhere. This week: ‘Lock in’
Lock in
1. v., To enter a state of complete focus.
2. n., A performative social-media challenge.
It’s way past time to lock in. This year’s Great Lock In, a TikTok challenge in which participants eliminate distractions such as TikTok in order to accomplish lofty goals, began on Sept. 1. And even if you’re not participating, this is the season to get back to school, back to work and back to a state of white-knuckled focus on what matters most.
In its current meaning, “locked in” can be traced to the world of sports, both digital and physical. First-person shooter video games require locking in on a specific target, just like real military hardware. And in a 2013 documentary, basketball legend Kobe Bryant described how he achieved peak performance: “You become oblivious to everything that is going on … You’re just locked in.”
In memes since, there have been the “born to dilly dally, forced to lock in” juxtapositions and the joke that you need to “lock in” to get your phone’s facial recognition software to work – not quite an NBA championship, but a win nonetheless.
Earlier usage was decidedly less glib. When French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby was paralyzed by a stroke and described the experience in a memoir written exclusively by blinking his left eye, he introduced the world to the horrors of locked-in syndrome. To choose total focus is a challenge; to have it forced upon you is torture. It’s the rude corollary to Blaise Pascal’s observation that, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Which brings to mind the traditional British lock-in, in which the pub closes with the patrons inside, sparing them from staggering home for a few more hours.
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In the performing arts, being locked in sounds a lot like method acting. The much-maligned technique was pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavski, who once locked himself in a basement to understand the motivations of a miserly knight. (Though he later wrote, “To become a tragedian it was not enough to lock myself in a cellar with rats.”) More than a century later, Heath Ledger locked himself in a hotel room for six weeks to play The Joker in The Dark Knight, an unsettling performance for which he was posthumously given an Oscar.
Last month, Anya Taylor-Joy argued against monomaniacal focus: “If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of, so we can’t completely lose our minds.” The women of The King James Bible Play, Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s Stratford Festival hit, are in agreement, joking about the absurdity of method acting before concluding that “method acting is for assholes.”
The most locked-in actor of our time is certainly Jeremy Strong, method man of the Succession set. In this month’s GQ, he promotes his performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning while speaking in the Polish accent from his next project, a remake of The Boys from Brazil; he figures he hasn’t spoken in his own voice in 10 months. As he explains, “The literal only thing that matters to me is what’s going to end up on screen.”
Somewhere between getting off social media and speaking Polish to the cellar rats lies the ideal level of concentration. Finding that optimal state is the key to being locked in.