From Twitter, via Jeff Snider of Variety:
“100% RUMOR, no confirmation: Overheard at lunch in Beverly Hills - JUNO TEMPLE may be playing HARLEY QUINN in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. #RUMOR”
Was the lunch between Social Studies and Gym? Did your corespondent not have the time to hand Ms. Temple a two-check-box note reading “Are U Playing Harley Quinn? YES [] NO []?”
I often wonder what I’d do if I got a brain injury that meant I couldn’t write intelligently about films at the time of their release. Now I know I could simply fall back on making up horseshit about films well in advance of that time.
Seriously, do you want your movie culture to be a replica of the start of “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie? Did you hear about Juno and Chris?
So, Alyssa Bereznak wrote a first-person piece for Gizmodo.com about her OK Cupid profile connecting her with a guy who was a world-champion Magic: The Gathering Player. (It is the editorial policy of Shut Up, Mr. Burton that we do not link to the pieces in question, as that simply fuels the beast. The hateful beast. Our only other editorial policy is the Kantian Imperative.) Ms. Bereznak is, of course, free to write about her dating life as she sees fit, which is to say that as the generation of dignity-free, look-at-me narcissists the ‘net has given us, she will and can do so.
But instead she chooses to name the gentleman — not obliquely, or forcing the gawking (ha-ha) jackasses who would read such a piece to do a little Google search based on a few facts, but flat out. I didn’t read into the article to see how things went — I was busy vomiting — but let us be frank. Gawker and its ilk love to erase the wall between the public and the private — like all gossip, and like all fascists — and I suspect that Ms. Bereznak has things she would not like made public that she would not wave off were some compunctionless jackass to write about them. This does not make her a hypocrite, however; it makes her human — or far more human than her piece suggests. (Her self-effacing note at the start of the piece — “Earlier this month, I came home drunk and made an OKCupid profile” — clearly written as a pre-loaded Absolvo Me, does not excuse her. As Nietzsche says, “he who despises himself still respects himself as someone who despises,” and the person who pretends to despise themselve so they can love themselves is even worse.) Ms.Bereznak ’s listing of posts suggests she’s been working for Gawker since June 2011. Her previous highest-commented story had 205 comments (the hard-hitting ‘What Makes New York Bagels The Greatest?’); as of this writing, her card-dealing and low-dealing dating piece has 703.
Congratulations to Ms.Bereznak, and to Mr. Nick Denton, the transparency-is-king, give-the-people-what-they-click lord of a barren wasteland of gossip, shame and puff pieces. As Charles Heston says in Planet of the Apes — and as I think any reasonable person would say to Ms. Bereznak, Mr. Denton and anyone who writes for Gawker media’s smug, glib sideshow of the apathetic dammed — “You got what you wanted, tiger … how does it taste?”
It is one thing to live in a glass house and throw stones; it is another to live in a glass house and throw people.
James.
… So You Don’t Have To.
