Pop-culture crushes I have known
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News
A series of articles in the National Post last week made me wonder about the nature of the “pop-culture crush.”
The Post’s series was actually about overrated celebrities. Inspired by dialogue in Woody Allen’s 25-year-old movie, Manhattan, which branded certain luminaries unworthy, the newspaper asked readers to write in and nominate candidates for the “Academy of the Overrated.”
Columnist Robert Fulford dumped on visual artists Jeff Wall and Salvador Dali, writers Richard B. Wright and Hugh MacLennan and even the Nobel Prize, which he said wasn’t judged in a savvy enough manner to merit the reverence its name provokes. Post readers nominated everyone from KISS (“the most overrated band in the history of rock’n’roll”) and CanLit (“looking tired altogether”) to Celine Dion (“I wish she would just go away. Quietly.”) and Tommy Douglas (“he destroyed the tax base in Saskatchewan”).
This was quite an amusing exercise, especially for those of us who like to disparage everyone more famous than ourselves out of sheer spite. It was also the flip side of what we experience much more often: the pop-culture crush.
The individual pop-cult crush is what results when the media itself decides to embrace a fresh darling. Take a look at Paris Hilton, the latest “it” girl to become a household name purely (or impurely, in her case) by dint of media-fabricated fame. Hilton’s agent ought to be getting some gargantuan royalties. The publicity she has received simply for being a well-heeled skank seems to have propelled her autobiography to top 10 ranking on the New York Times bestseller list.
But before you fire off an angry e-mail to me, telling me that I shouldn’t besmirch the name of the wildly talented bleach-blonde heiress, let me just tell you that I sympathize with your dysfunction. I know what it is to get a pop-cult crush – to decide that somebody the media has anointed as worthy of the cover of Us really does merit all those celebrity gift bags.
I confess — I myself started out by bowing before the graven image of Martha Stewart. More recently I have made false idols of TV cook and cookbook author Nigella Lawson, alternative-country songsmith Lucinda Williams, and Prime Suspect star Helen Mirren. I have gotten unconscionable warm fuzzies for Richard Gere (I know, it’s the hair, I’m sorry). Not to mention the studly James Purefoy from the movie Vanity Fair, if only because he can carry off britches.
I have strong feelings for U.K. author and beauty Zadie Smith (who wrote White Teeth), intrepid Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolan (who covers Africa), United Nations Special Envoy to HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis (’nuff said), and everyone associated with the Scottish movie Dear Frankie, late of the Vancouver International Film Festival.
I do not have such strong feelings for my local city councillors. I should, because they have an actual effect on my life, but I don’t because their glowing faces never appear on the covers of the magazines beside the supermarket checkout. (We can only dream that former mayor Don Bell will change all that.)
Admiring other people to such a degree that you Google them relentlessly (or write them letters, or own scrapbooks full of pictures of them) is pathetic. I know it, you know it, yet many of us do it. It is especially uncool when you realize that in most cases you don’t admire these people for their deeds or their smarts, but for their looks.
When will you recognize that your infatuation has gone too far? When you find yourself publicly praising Madonna’s “acting,” especially in Swept Away. When you hear yourself claiming to appreciate Richard Gere’s “dedication to Tibet,” maintaining that that is why you have 17 photos of him from his American Gigolo period Krazy-glued to your fridge. When you start dressing like Britney Spears even though you are a 5’2” 50-year-old male, you are acres beyond far gone.
Which brings me to Gwyneth Paltrow, and how earlier this week I hoped to approximate her buttocks.
Paltrow seems utterly charming. Her performance in the movies Emma and Sylvia were note-perfect. She has dated, but cleverly avoided marrying, several iffy Hollywood hunks and settled on a less hunky but ostensibly wholesome musician. She is well-educated, intelligent, speaks several languages, and has no trouble with English accents.
Of course, those aren’t the real reasons that I pay any attention to her. It’s because she is lovely to look at and lives a glamorous life where, I imagine, designers consider her a muse and Harry Winston presses baubles on her just in case she’ll be going out later. Until recently, when she became a bore by maundering on about her baby and the wonders of motherhood, she tended to infuse any page or screen with radiance. So it was no wonder that when I saw a recent interview with her on the web, I read it.
There I discovered an essential fact, which other Paltrow enthusiasts will appreciate – she credits a certain pair of underpants with allowing her, post-pregnancy, to regain her girlish figure in time to shoot her latest movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. She noted that Hollywood wardrobe people all use this item of lingerie, called Spanx, to trim down their leading ladies for the camera.
Could there be a more tantalizing tidbit for the sycophantic mind? I don’t think so. In the flash of an icon, I was on the Internet surfing for Spanx and ordering up the rear end of Gwyneth Paltrow, a la mode.
“Maybe that’s all it will take to transform my lumbering self into a slim and polished princess on the order of her Paltrow-ness,” I mused.
I was sure that my husband Stanley would be most appreciative of a major transformation on my part. If I started with Gwyneth Paltrow’s buttocks, could her cheekbones be far behind?
This is the thing about the pop-cult crush – it encourages your imbecility to fully blossom. Spanx, it turns out, are comfortable enough. Maybe they also seriously compress flab – I cannot tell. However, squeezing them on did make me deeply bitter about the fact that Gwyneth doesn’t have to worry that when she removes her lingerie she will cause a tsunami in Japan. “Harrumph!” I thought vengefully. “She can’t be that bright after all, having named her kid ‘Apple.’ Maybe I’ll nominate her for the Academy of the Overrated.”
Either way, I’m moving on.
My new pop-cult crush is on Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen Confidential, chef at Manhattan’s Les Halles and host of the Food Network’s A Cook’s Tour. He’s long and lean and cool, gratuitously profane and smart as a whisk. And his new tome, Les Halles’ Cookbook, is among the most entertaining I’ve ever read.
Yes, that’s it – that’s why I like him. For the same reason you became infatuated with David Beckham: talent.
Writing > Humour
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