The world is full of things that don’t interest me. The rules of American football. Whether there are aliens. Anything to do with Kardashians. I don’t need to know about them, and I never will.
It’s a wonderful relief. I was an awkward child, so curious I was continually in trouble for dismantling the kettle and cutting earthworms in bits and being afraid of the stars, then a young woman perpetually in a lather of anxiety about not knowing enough, ever. It’s so calming, now, to realise that there’s just loads of stuff I simply don’t need to add to the brain bank. My cupboards are a mess but I have a Marie Kondo approach to the mind.
I have social media to thank for this realisation. As the incoming payload mounts hour by hour, it’s a luxury to tick off the wads of trivia I never need to care about. The stormy teacups brimming over, which you know will be broken crockery by tomorrow. Warring Wags making their lawyers rich; Johnny Depp’s divorce? I’d rather hear about other people’s nematodes on Gardeners’ Question Time.
So I thought this week’s little brouhaha over the makers of the movie Don’t Worry Darling, and their behaviour at the Venice Film festival — otherwise known as SpitGate, as Harry Styles (wearing one of the silliest shirts ever designed) apparently spat on his co-star at the film’s premiere — would be one I could safely wipe. Since everyone else would also have forgotten it in about 48 hours.
But it proved to have strange staying power. And I found myself getting interested, not in the daft he-said-she-said story itself, barely average-grade tittle-tattle, but in people’s almost obsessional interest in it.
True, those involved have been drip-feeding the story for some while. Leading actor leaves, or was he sacked? Director hops into bed with celeb replacement. Female lead falls out with director. Everyone snarls at everyone else. There is a car crash of a press conference. And of course “sources deny” that any spitting took place.
So far, so forgettable. And dispiriting, given the clear undertow of misogyny/schadenfreude towards a female-led film. Yet there’s something about this dull little drama that has hooks. It goes beyond the obvious lure of glimpsing behind-the-scenes ego-tangles. Perhaps it’s more about control — in this case, lack of it. The profiles of those we elevate to celebrity status are usually so carefully ordered, we love it when the wheels come off the perfection machine.
Decades ago, the Hollywood star-makers were famous for control, creating godlike beings with gleaming teeth and silky-smooth home lives. There were plenty of cracks in the lacquer, of course, but often the fairytale narratives held — the task was vastly easier without the internet and social media.
We laugh at the Hollywood dream-factory of the 1950s, and at a public so gullible it believed Marilyn was blonde and Rock Hudson was a ladies’ man and the rest of the la la land fantasy. But aren’t we equally controlled, equally credulous? We live in an even more contrived world. A giant public relations industry works around the clock to shape our beliefs and views and wants; influencers and TikTokers who don’t do anything at all have huge sway. Able to infiltrate our lives at so many points, and by so many subtle means, the power of this thought-control is even greater. What makes it so strong is precisely that it isn’t top-down, it’s self-generating. We can all have our say, through social media, so there’s an illusion of freedom and power, of our potential to tell it like we see it, to shape the story. So it’s us who are in control, right?
Wrong, surely, as well as dangerous. It’s our lack of power we should look at. The fuss about Don’t Worry Darling is a kind of crowd hysteria, harmless enough in this case, perhaps, but indicative of an effect that can be deeply noxious. The whipping-up of a social mood by sheer force of numbers: we’re more likely to be controlled by that than being the independent drivers we imagine ourselves to be. Sometimes it’s easy to spot — in the likes of “internet personality” Andrew Tate, for instance, for whom preaching violent misogyny is a career choice. But mostly it is much more insidious. It’s telling us what to do, to think, to buy. What to care about.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against gossip. I think stories about other people are a basic human need, as well as a pleasure. Reports of the goings-on in the next-door cave probably helped our ancestors survive; Greek myths (their glamorous unruly gods the equivalents of our celebs) were preliterate teaching tools and instruments of social order; stories were formalised into literature and theatre and much that I love. But I thought every story, however trivial, had a meaning if not quite a moral. This one, though, doesn’t seem to have either. It’s just froth on the daydream.
Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor
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September 10, 2022 at 04:00AM
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A Hollywood story that's all froth and no moral - Financial Times
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