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I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
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Count me out on crying "sexism!" when it comes to Newsweek's characterization of Julia Roberts as "Hollywood ancient." And that's exactly what the author said—Hollywood ancient—and you know what? He's absolutely right. By the response here, you'd think he'd written a headline that read:"Julia Roberts is OLD!!!" But that's not what he wrote. He stated the truth when he proclaimed that at 41, Roberts is old for a leading lady—by Hollywood standards. I guess you can call it sexist, but in Hollywood, it's a reality. And I'd beg to differ with those who see a poke at her taking years off to raise her kids is sexist, too. We heard more about Mickey Rourke's so-called comeback than his acting chops after he got nominated for an Academy Award. Living in Hollywood, you kind of come to understand the movie industry has its own version of dog years, and you learn that men and women have it equally rough when it comes to getting ahead in the business. It's not like guys get a free pass. Me? I've never liked Roberts. I've always found her gummy grin more fake than endearing, and the tales I've heard from those reporters who've interviewed her suggest she's more viper in the grass than girl next door. Here's to her comeback flop.
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Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.
While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.
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