Please stop method-acting your press tour

I moved house and now I hate everyone

For those people who read last week’s newsletter/documented descent into madness, you’ll be pleased to know that the hateful task of moving out of my rental has been completed. Even better, I didn’t resort to any act of ceremonial immolation involving me, or my possessions.

I can’t say, however, that I am unscathed.

For the past few days I’ve been eating like a bin-scavenging rodent, have been surrounded by dozens of unpacked bags and – most pressingly – have lost the capacity to feel any positive emotions whatsoever.

This wasn’t even the low point.

I’m sure the experience of happiness will return to me at some point. In the meantime, though, I am a haggard, resentful crone living in a nest of clothing-filled garbage bags. I have fully turned into the kind of creature villagers once used as a cautionary tale to stop children wandering at night.

Rightfully so. Anyone would do well to be careful around me right now.

On a good day I have a compromised ability to appropriately allocate how much emotional energy to spend on things that do not affect me, but which I find to be annoying. After moving, that faulty gauge has exploded into a million tiny bits of metal and I am a geyser of unchecked crankiness.

Currently in my crosshairs? Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. In fact, I am deeply resentful of any celebrity who has taken part in the most annoying PR campaign strategy of recent years – making your actors embody whatever shitty Hollywood crapfest they’ve been paid an ungodly amount of money to star in.

The first time I noticed this phenomenon was the wildly successful and deeply irksome marketing palaver for the Barbie movie. Don’t get me wrong, the film itself was fine. Certainly not profound or affecting. But palatable in the same manner a well-ish-made salad sandwich from a corner shop can sometimes be.

The marketing of Barbie was an egregious example of Hollywood attempting to remove the line separating movies and reality. Ryan Gosling responded to questions in character as Ken, Margot Robbie did the entire press tour dressed like Barbie. The media slavishly reported on stories about director Greta Gerwig hosting sleepovers with the cast, as though this multimillion-dollar business was just some girlish romp. It was relentless.

Irritatingly, it also worked.

Barbie, a movie with no more depth than a recently-drained cyst, was hailed as a generational masterpiece. But the greatest tragedy of its success was that it inspired many similar media campaigns.

Wicked, another profoundly okay movie, went by the same playbook. This time, the narrative we were all forced to accept was that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were really, actually, super best friends for life. Just like – you guessed it – the movie! These two grown women were paraded around the world, clinging to one another like velcro, in an objectively insane spectacle.

Which brings me to the next example of this phenomenon: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the current Wuthering Heights marketing campaign.

This time, both actors are having to pretend they’re SUPER DOOPER obsessed with each other. Like, an unhealthy amount. Seriously, guys. Margot said she felt anxious when Jacob wasn’t on set, and that she obsessively stared at photos of him or whatever fucking stupid story that they’re seeding out.

You know another couple who were unhealthily obsessed with one another? HEATHCLIFF AND CATHY FROM WUTHERING HEIGHTS! WOW! What a crazy example of life imitating art!

Hollywood marketing departments serve this unimaginative hot garbage, straight into the trough, hoping we’ll gobble it up like hungry piggies.

But come on. Margot Robbie is a woman in her mid-thirties with a child and a husband. Are we supposed to believe she is owning up to an emotional affair with her co-star because she loves yapping to entertainment reporters so much?

It’s absurd. She knows it, the media knows it, I believe the audience knows it, too.

There is another artform which asks us to suspend disbelief between the actors, the performance, and real life — WWE. They even have a word for it: kayfabe.

I could slave away at an explanation of this term, but New York Times columnist Nick Rogers dissects it so eloquently, I’ll borrow his words:

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.

This is fine when all parties agree to the fiction’s construct. But I am not a willing spectator.

What they’re doing is dumb, embarrassing, and I would like them to stop trying to immerse me in their silly little pantomime. Particularly now when, just left of stage, Rome is burning.

Hollywood has never looked more irrelevant and farcical.

Or so says I – a humble crone shouting from my garbage bag house.