Get Your Lie Right
Sometimes I consider this toxic celebrity culture we hath wrought and am so saddened. Now, do not get me wrong. I love celebrity gossip. I am a part of the problem and I’m pretty unrepentant. I read the online gossip sites and consider Entertainment Weekly and People a bit biblical. Pretty people! Doing fancy things! In fancy clothes! I am totally down with it.
But.
I also worry. I’ve been writing an essay about privacy and coming out which has gotten me thinking about the boundaries celebrities are never allowed to maintain which led me to thinking, today, about Kristen Stewart.
As an aside, celebrity profiles in glossy magazines. They all seem exactly the same. Celebrity has busy schedule. Celebrity eats lunch. Celebrity smiles and says something coyly modest. Celebrity goes to something work-related. Reporter is adoring, adoring, adoring, or cynically adoring adoring adoring while pretending not to be. Celebrities are like bloggers. We only see what they want us to see. They are not revealing a damn thing. They are performing and that’s totally fine but let’s call it what it is—performance profile.
The only thing that really drives me crazy about Stewart is how she always acts so put upon by her success as if she had no hand in it. No one forces actors to act. She had some say in getting involved in her career. But fine. She’s really young and really young people tend to be irritating. I am basing this on personal experience. I was the worst at her age but I was fortunate not to be in any kind of spotlight.
She also… doesn’t seem to have a lot of range but she was great in that Lifetime movie Speak.
Anyway.
Today, Stewart issued an apology for having an affair and cheating on her boyfriend Robert Pattinson who I do not care for at all, nor find attractive. That’s neither here nor there either but I have an opinion on him and you should know that. When I watch the Twilight movies, I glare at him a lot. In the second movie (I think), where he’s in Italy about to expose himself, and he rips open his silky shirt to bare his extraordinarily pale chest that will glitter in the Italian sunlight, I felt such a visceral dislike, I had to grip the armrest and center myself. That movie Remember Me? Ugh. He is the worst in that movie which was only saved by my secret husband Pierce Brosnan who… I would like to pierce me.
That was a terrible play on words. And vulgar. But Pierce is hot and his wife is thick and I love that he has a thick wife.
It galls me that K Stew had to apologize though, or that someone advised her to apologize. It’s so unnecessary. She’s an actress, not a politician. She doesn’t owe anyone but the people in her real life an explanation for her actions. She fucked up, sure, but everyone fucks up. People cheat. People cheat because relationships are hard and people are human and because sometimes you meet someone who makes you want to step outside of yourself and into them even though you know you shouldn’t.
She displayed such bad judgment. I just want to shake her and say, GIRL! WHAT? GIRL! But I want to do that not to tell her not to cheat but to protect her from this extraordinary, unnecessary, far too public humiliation that is going to be kept alive from now until the final Twilight movie is released in November and beyond. That’s a lot of penance for her mistake.
If everyone in this world who cheated issued public apologies, we would literally not have enough time left in our lives to read those apologies. Can you just imagine?
When I was younger I used to say cheating was a deal breaker in a relationship. I was very much interested in dealing in absolutes. You betray me. I leave you. Then someone cheated on me and I decided to stay in the relationship. I don’t know why because it was a terrible relationship but I realized that when I was talking about cheating as a deal breaker, I was dealing in theoreticals. I was talking out of my ass.
The older I get, the more I realize I hate bad cheating. If you’re going to cheat, don’t get caught. It’s not that hard. This ex who cheated on me left the evidence in my car. That’s disrespectful on so many levels and it was that casual sloppiness that pissed me off way more than the infidelity. I wrote about it, and it got anthologized twice so I felt way better about it after that. My ex called me on the phone once, many years ago, after finding the story in an anthology in Barnes and Noble, and said, “That’s not exactly how it happened,” and I said, “The having sex with someone else in Olive Garden was true.” There wasn’t much more to be said after that.
I have too many exes but that’s a different story.
Olive Garden. It’s been like thirteen years and that still sticks in my craw. So aggravating. I literally cannot eat in an Olive Garden now. I just get real salty about that restaurant and it’s so upsetting because their salad dressing is great.
I’m no saint. I’ve done some dirty back in the day. You would never ever know, though save that I am telling you. If I am with you, I respect you enough to be discreet. Also, now I’m just too lazy to cheat. If I’m with you, that’s all I have the energy to invest in. Who has the time to be involved with more than one person? And ugh, all that keeping track of things. No thanks. Just thinking about it makes me want to nap. Good news, future boyfriend! I’ma be faithful.
Have some class about your lying is what I am saying. Respect your partner enough to not throw your bullshit in their face.
Kristin Stewart is young so she forgot she’s one of the most famous women in the world. She forgot that there is an army of people who spend their days and nights following her around to get pictures of her picking her nose and having coffee and kissing her boyfriend and, as we now know, kissing the director of her last movie. She got sloppy. I am pretty sure she won’t do that again but my goodness, what an unfairly high price she has to pay to learn that lesson. I feel truly bad for her which is also weird because she is a complete stranger but my therapist says its okay.
