There are celebrity news stories and then there are CELEBRITY NEWS STORIES. Many people can’t get enough gossip on movie stars, pop stars, athletes, and of course the British Royal Family. Celebrity culture even spawned an entire genre of celebrities who are famous for being famous, like the now faded Paris Hilton and the indefatigable Kardashians(or Kartrashians), in a way America’s counterpart to the Royal Family.
And, politicians like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and especially Donald Trump owed their success to celebrity appeal(and even notoriety, not necessarily a bad thing in our time).
And many opinion-makers over the years attained bigger-than-life, folksy or glitzy, celebrity personalities. Think of Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken(who went from comedy to politics), Ann Coulter, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and others. And the most popular ‘influencers’, the product of the internet, rely more on personality than insight.
While many people, especially females and homosexual men, must have their daily fix of celebrity gossip, others(perhaps the great majority) don’t care what Taylor Swift or Vin Diesel is up to these days(and have no interest in the much diminished Royal Family). Most celebrity gossip has to be sought after in tabloids(and their counterparts or extensions on the internet), but once in a while a story blows up big time and enters the 24 hr news cycle, sparing no one of its usually sordid details.
Surely, one of the biggest was over the accusations of child molestation against Michael Jackson(which had a sequel of sorts). Another big one, equally funny and pathetic, was the Woody Allen vs Mia Farrow saga involving Soon-Yi and Dylan Farrow(which resurfaced in the #MeToo era).
Generally, the biggest stories involve crime, which can be deemed as news-worthy. Think of the O.J. Simpson trial. And the Harvey Weinstein case that went from allegations of sexual improprieties to even rape. The Weinstein controversy gained in traction thanks to the (largely manufactured) #MeToo movement, probably engineered by Jewish elites against ‘sexist’ Trump and ‘white males’(as indeed the likes of Bob Packwood were targeted in years past, though by the very people who circled the wagons around Bill Clinton), only to blow back on the Portnoic Jews. Jews urged on the women in media and entertainment to expose all those ‘rapey’ White Males, only to realize to their horror that the fingers were pointed at them. (Likewise, even though the mad hounds of BLM were unleashed on MAGA-world, they mostly mauled the ‘blue’ urban areas, making it a living hell for many ‘liberals’ and Jews.)
Having zero interest in celebrity-dom, only the biggest scandals appear on my radar. I hardly know most pop stars or bands since the early 90s. Most movie actors and actresses of the past 20 yrs are a blur.
I haven’t seen a single PIRATES OF CARIBBEAN movie and avoided most spandex action-hero movies(though a few, like ANT-MAN, were good). I haven’t seen an Oscar show since Clint Eastwood won for UNFORGIVEN and even then only a snippet.
So, when a celebrity news story enters the 24/7 news cycle, I usually have no idea who’s who and what’s what. There was the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard fiasco not long ago. I knew Depp but not Heard, though I recognized her face as she was in John Carpenter’s box office flop THE WARD, which I rather liked.
The buzz surrounding the Justin Baldoni vs Blake Lively feud is now much bigger than the Depp-Heard clown show ever was. Also, it’s more interesting in having pushed certain hot topic buttons and ensnared other big names in showbiz. If the Depp-Heard show was essentially a he-said-she-said case of mud-slinging(and bed-pooping), an ugly side of private lives of celebrities exposed, the Baldoni-Lively case involves a rather complicated power play and intersects with various issues and themes that define current culture and politics.
By coincidence a few weeks back, I checked out a film called IT ENDS WITH US from the library thinking it might be interesting. The opening scene presented a most appalling character, a woman who arrives at her father’s funeral and then blithely walks out during the ceremony. Just appalling, but then the world is full of appalling people, and art should reflect reality, right? Besides, perhaps her behavior could be understood within the larger context of her family experience. So, I kept watching with an open mind. Second scene had her perched over the railing of a high-rise rooftop, soon to be joined by some doctor with whom she engages in the most insipid conversation imaginable. It was utterly shallow but presented as true-to-life and complicated. That was enough. No way I was going to waste two hours watching these two, a man-child and a woman-child. If art wants to dwell on mankind’s imperfections & failures and examine why, that’s one thing, but when vapid idiots are presented as characters worthy of our time and attention, forget it.
Nothing about the film registered(except as an annoyance and headache), and I would have forgotten about it but for the explosive scandal with Lively the actress hurling accusations at the actor-director Baldoni who, depressed and panic-stricken, decided to hurl them back. Reportedly, the film, based on a popular novel, has a serious message — it’s about DOMESTIC ABUSE — , and its actor-director Baldoni, a kind of male feminist, threw his heart and soul into the project. It seems Lively did as well, leading to a tussle over the rights over the novel. If Baldoni was likely fueled by the vanity of moral rectitude — “Look ma, I’m a male feminist exposing violence against women” — , Lively’s actions seem purely career-driven, i.e. she saw the film as her entry into serious acting and coveted complete ownership of the project by any means necessary.
It’s probably not a good idea to have such a thoroughly unsympathetic character at the center of a message about domestic abuse. More often than not, viewers may come away with the feeling that the stupid bitch got what she deserved, not that the abuser is necessarily any better — based on the rooftop scene, the guy seems like a jerk. (There’s a saying, “physiognomy is real”, to which we might add, “personagnomy is real” as the mere personality of Lively, on-screen and off, is a tell-tale sign of what a conniving wench she is.)
The issue of domestic-abuse is far more complicated than feminist types would have us believe. Given that the male is stronger than the female, the man can obviously do more harm; therefore, the man must be more mindful of his violent urges. That much, most people can agree with. But the man being stronger doesn’t make him innately worse than the woman. It’s like a wolf can kill a coyote that can kill a fox, but that doesn’t make the coyote any less of a predator and killer. If a man and a woman are equally vile & nasty and get violent, the man will likely hurt the woman more, but she too was responsible. Indeed, if a good-hearted man is provoked into violence by a vicious woman, the former will beat the latter, but can you blame him who didn’t want things to spiral out of control?
Perhaps, IT END US WITH US isn’t so simpleminded and places blame on the woman as well, but the first two scenes left me with zero sympathy for the cretinous woman(or for that matter the cretinous man). If a meteor hit those two and blew them to smithereens, who’d care?
With Blake Lively in the news, I checked to see if I’d seen her in any other movie, and there was one other, which I’d also aborted after two or three scenes. It’s called A SIMPLE FAVOR with Anna Kendrick as co-star. Kendrick is like a doll, what you see is what you get, with little in the way of interiority, and should stick to character-acting(like in the TWILIGHT movies). I’ve never been able to finish any movie with her as lead, not because she’s off-putting(like Lively) but there’s no there-there to her screen persona.
At any rate, the mere introduction of Blake Lively in A SIMPLE FAVOR was reason enough to switch off the TV. I had no idea she had become a thing in Hollywood with frequent appearances on TV shows, with ties to famous stars(like Taylor Swift), and in marriage to some guy named Ryan Reynolds(who looks as dweeby as Richard Roeper who took over Gene Siskel’s slot on Roger Ebert’s TV show).
The whole world now knows about Lively because of the spat that spiraled out of control and spawned massive lawsuits back and forth. The general narrative goes like this: Blake Lively was this perfect sweetheart, beloved by her ever increasing fandom, a woman of grace and beauty in a picture-perfect marriage to Ryan Reynolds, a star in his own right with romantic comedies and DEADPOOL movies. They were seen as the perfect duo, the up-and-coming power couple of Hollywood, and the industry & public had nothing but affection and admiration for her(and her hubber). She was apparently the model of all things cool and wonderful about popular entertainment.
BUT, lo and behold, as the result of these recent revelations, we all might have been duped and are finally seeing the Real Blake at last, by golly! Unsurprisingly, snoops have been combing through her past interviews and appearances on TV for tell-tale signs that everyone had somehow missed.
Except that the world that had been so besotted with Lively must have been blind and stupid. Even a cursory look at her should have made it as plain as day that she’s a total joke built on delusions, of hers, those around her, and her fans. First, just look at her. At best, she’s a 6, maybe 6.5 if we want to be generous. How was this woman ever considered to be beautiful?
Beautiful people can be wretched too, surely the case with Amber Heard who certainly has the looks. Heard is as ugly inside as she’s beautiful outside, like when she went full-Hindu(or Hindoo-doo) on Johnny Depp’s bed. That was some bad shit.
Blake Lively is somewhere between Tatum O’Neal and Ellen Barkin. To be sure, there’s the odd kind of beauty accented by what in most cases would be deemed as flaws or blemishes. Catherine Deneuve is conventionally more beautiful than Jeanne Moreau, but the latter is more special. Lively simply isn’t beautiful, conventional or otherwise. At most, she’s slightly appealing.
Not that an actress has to be beautiful as, after all, fiction explores all sorts of characters, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. But beauty has to be represented by beauty. No amount of makeup and style can make non-beauty into beauty. But, it’s even worse with Lively. She lacks even the basic modicum of style.
In A SIMPLE FAVOR, she’s introduced as a Hitchcockian mystery lady in slow motion and lush music, but once her character comes into focus, it’s shoddy and shapeless. It’s not Lady X but Peppermint Patty. Also, beauty isn’t just about content but countenance, bearing and presentation. A beautiful painting rattling around in the back of a pickup truck just doesn’t cut it. Blake Lively not only lacks the looks but wouldn’t know how to carry it if she did.
There are actresses lacking in beauty who compensate with winning personalities or comedic talent. Plenty of men and women make themselves more attractive with wit, charm, intelligence, or some other quality. But even such saving grace is missing in Blake Lively. In the scenes gleaned from A SIMPLE FAVOR and IT ENDS WITH US and snippets available on Youtube, she comes across as a total zero.
And, she has one of the most repulsive personalities in entertainment, which should have been apparent from day one. Then, why were so many people fooled? Or did they sense the truth but lead her on nevertheless(which would be rather demented and cruel)? But then, why?
Toni Collette comes across so well because she plays to her strengths in full knowledge of her limitations. She’s no beauty but has genuine appeal, which she molds accordingly given the situation. Thus, she’s usually more attractive as a character and personality than she actually is as a physical person.
Toni Collette in THE SIXTH SENSE
The whole fiasco is like a sudden reversal, adoration u-turned into animosity, a frenzied tar-and-feathering ritual. It’s like the scene in THE WIZARD OF OZ where the minions of the Wicked Witch, instantly upon her death, break en masse into a song-and-dance of celebration.
While the die-hard fans of Blake Lively are surely disappointed in a “Say it ain’t so, Blake” manner, it’s as if most people immersed in celebrity culture always suspected her to be a fake and were waiting for the OK signal to pounce on her and tear her to shreds. It appears Lively was as blindsided as Ceaușescu in his sudden fall from grace. “I thought everyone loved me.” Nope.
But then, why did Lively become so big in the first place? Could it be that women, who have an outsized influence in the casting department, harbor a bias against truly beautiful women in favor of less attractive ones?
It could also be that the industry believes that truly beautiful stars are less relatable to most girls out there. Their beauty is too blinding and intimidating. In contrast, the ugly duckling type generates the demotic and ‘inclusive’ hope that ANYONE can be a star. One look at Catherine Deneuve or Greta Garbo, and most women are apt to feel, “Gosh, I’m ugly and hopeless.” But, Blake Lively as beauty standard isn’t so daunting as at least 40% of womenfolk look better than her. Of course, it surely helped that Lively’s mother was herself a talent scout and her father an actor, providing their child with a leg-up in the industry.
Now, if Blake Lively had any sense, she would have wondered why so much attention was showered on her. Was she really so deserving? Apparently, the thought never crossed her mind stuck-up with delusions of grandeur. Her putting-on-airs as hot stuff only made her more ridiculous, but then there were plenty of people who egged her on for reasons ranging from heartfelt to well-meaning to downright cynical.
Indeed, it’s the pretense than the thing itself that renders someone or something ridiculous, even ludicrous. For example, a high school star athlete is perfectly fine in his milieu but would be pathetic playing with the pros. A skilled amateur may be impressive among his peers but would be a damn fool to climb inside the ring with a champ or top contender. Someone with an IQ of 120 is pretty smart but no genius; it’d be downright ridiculous for him to put on airs as the next Newton or Einstein.
In Hollywood movies, the problem is less the beauty deficit than the put-on that non-beauty(and even ugliness) is beauty. (This is partly ideologically driven, as the fashion industry and beauty pageants, in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’, have been featuring bald women, fat women, squat women, disabled women, and fake women, aka trannies.) Take Carey Mulligan and Hailee Steinfeld who aren’t without talent and have done well in certain roles, especially Mulligan in AN EDUCATION and Steinfeld in TRUE GRIT. But, they’ve been utterly miscast in roles calling for beauty or the kind of attraction to drive a man crazy. With Mulligan(who rather resembles Fatty Arbuckle) as Daisy in THE GREAT GATSBY, one wonders if what Gatsby really needed all along was a new pair of eye-glasses. He went to all that trouble for Little Miss Arbuckle? And what was up with Steinfeld(who mildly resembles John Rhys-Davis) as Juliet? One wonders if Romeo is a star-crossed or cross-eyed lover. It’s impossible to watch this adaptation of ROMEO & JULET without grimacing like Fred G. Sanford whenever his eyes fall on Aunt Esther.
Carey Mulligan and Fatty Arbuckle
Hailee Steinfeld and John Rhys-Davies
If Blake Lively understood her limitations, she might have honed her skills accordingly as a B-actress with some moderate appeal. Apparently, she drank the Kool-Aid that she’s the next superstar, the dawning goddess of Hollywood. And given her ‘serious’ aspirations with IT ENDS WITH US, maybe the next Katharine Hepburn or Meryl Streep as well.
Indeed, it turns out she insisted on REWRITING the script as well, with Justin Baldoni finally relenting under pressure. So, she’s not just a hot babe and serious actress but a creative light too, ROTFL. If ever there was an illustration that a woman’s vanity knows no bounds, she takes the cake. Non-beauty pretending to be beautiful, non-talent pretending to be talented, and unserious pretending to be serious. Three strikes and you’re out.
Ironically, Justin Baldoni, her primary victim, had gone out of his way to indulge her, validating once again the adage “No good deed goes unpunished.” Reputedly a sensitive and ‘empathetic’ male feminist type(LOL), he went the extra mile to accommodate Lively’s demands at every turn and offered himself as a doormat. While nice women may appreciate nice guys, bitches see them as wussies to trample on. The lesson is never to waste nice on un-nice.
Based on various accounts, it seems the more Baldoni complied to Lively’s demands, the more she took advantage of his lack of spine, the more she humiliated him(and even his family at the movie’s premiere, restricting them to the basement area of the theater). This is why male feminists have always been a joke. The problem isn’t their sympathy for women but their assumption that women are not only the fairer sex but fairer-minded individuals.
In truth, there are as many bitches as there are sons-of-bitches, and these bitches wreak havoc and are downright psychopathic in their lack of concern for the harm they’ve done. Also, bitches often act in concert with sons-of-bitches. Plenty of Jewish bitches in Hollywood knew what son of a bitch Harvey Weinstein was up to(with the shikses) but didn’t care.
Plenty of sons-of-bitches cleared the path for lowdown bitches like Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland. It makes more sense to see the world in terms of good people vs bad people than men vs women(upon the feminist conceit that women usually comprise nicer people). Well, Baldoni learned the hard way as, in his own way, he was no less deluded than Blake Lively. But then, there’s no long-term guarantee that he will learn from his mistakes as pussy-boys will be pussy-boys.
This scandal caught the attention of the Right(that is at a political disadvantage in most institutions and industries) as yet another case of the ‘elites’ invoking victimhood as a power-move. Indeed, victim politics is almost always less about actual victims being heard than about its uses by the powerful to crush their rivals and foes. (For example, forget about the women and children in Gaza, but concoct victim-narratives in Ukraine despite Kiev’s shelling of Russian civilians in Donbass to justify NATO expansion eastward to threaten Moscow.) Lively spun her tensions with Baldoni not merely as a professional issue but a sexual one, i.e. she had been belittled, humiliated, and abused as a sensitive woman by an insensitive man. In other words, the kind of abuse depicted in IT ENDS WITH US was happening on the set as well, by golly.
Those on the Right are all-too-familiar with the powerful invoking victimhood to silence their critics and get what they want, beginning with Jews on the top who endlessly pull the alarm bell on ‘antisemitism’ and ‘new hitlers’ to further their global supremacist agenda. Zion destroys and conquers, but the Western Narrative(from sell-out MAGA as well) is “we must protect the Jews from ‘antisemitism’.”
And among blacks, it’s usually the upper and well-connected ones who flash the race card for their schemes and hustles, perfected long ago by the likes of Jesse Jackson. And the kind of women who usually bitch about ‘misogyny’ are elitist or elite-trained women who rationalize every setback or disappointment as yet another case of ‘anti-woman’ hatred.
But then, white Christians have been doing this forever as well, advancing and conquering but also crying victim. Send in missionaries into areas ripe for the taking. Let them be beaten or killed by the natives, thus providing a pretext for conquest. It isn’t imperialism, guys, but to save Christian folks from the savage heathens. Most of modern victimology is really a cancerous outgrowth of what the White Christian world had done for ages.
In the pre-internet age, Blake Lively might have gotten away with her stunt, especially as the mainstream media were snugly on her side, indeed one of the emboldening factors to her action. But in the age of the internet, Justin Baldoni, cornered and exasperated, decided the dump the files — the various forms of communication between Lively and himself — that painted a starkly different picture from the one presented by Lively’s team and the compliant media, of which the New York Times was a key player.
With every Jane and Joe having access to the raw material and being able to make up his or her own mind about what really transpired(and then with celebrity ‘influencers’ like Candace Owens jumping on the bandwagon), the momentum began to shift decisively in favor of Baldoni. Owens supposedly played a crucial role by pouncing on the story with zesty exuberance. Lucky for her, the speculations turned into revelations, whereupon other internet sleuths joined the frenzy like sharks drawn to blood. It was sort of like the ending of M. Night Shyalaman’s GLASS where the powers-that-be cannot keep the secret contained as it goes viral around the world.
As with the GameStop short squeeze revelry whereby virtual nobodies upended the rules of big time insider-traders, hoi polloi gleefully watched the crash-and-burn spectacle of Blake Lively and her enablers. Things got so bad that even her friends and allies began to distance themselves from her.
Following Donald Trump’s comeback victory, Elon Musk declared that ‘you’(or we) are now the media, free to communicate and share information regardless of the narrative-management by legacy institutions, and the Lively-Baldoni circus was a satisfying demonstration of the cultural shift.
However the NYT might have been involved in this affair, only a fool would regard it as an impartial or fair-minded investigator, especially as the media departments have downplayed the possibility and even the desirability of objectivity. As Reality has come to be regarded as an endless power-game of competing narratives, the only imperative is to latch onto the ‘correct’ or approved agenda and do anything under the sun, even rewarding lying and cheating(as with the Russia Collusion Hoax that even led to Pulitzer prizes), to make it prevail against the opposition(that isn’t merely ‘wrong’ or ‘misguided’ but ‘anti-democratic’, ‘treasonous’ usually in concert with New Hitler Putin, or just downright evil, thus implying any compromise with it would be another ‘Munich’). The new normal in mainstream journalism has been the rejection of free speech by so-called ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ who believe power must always trump principle, were the latter to enable the enemy that isn’t merely wrong but irredeemably evil and ‘unacceptable’. It explains why the Democrats and so-called global ‘progressives’ have no qualms about pulling every dirty trick in the book to destroy the opposition, high and low, left(Jeremy Corbyn) and right(Viktor Orban). When your worldview pits your side against LITERALLY HITLER(or secular incarnation of Satan), any means necessary is deemed justified.
As the NYT crew favors certain narratives over others, such as #MeToo versus the sexual predators, it was bound to be partial to a woman’s complaint, just like the media have been far more likely to fall for black victimhood narratives, even one as laughable as the Justin Smollett’s near-lynching by the Chicago MAGA mob.
Granted, it’s always a game of who/whom as the sexual victims of Bill Clinton was usually shunted aside as ‘bimbo eruptions’ of a ‘sexual McCarthyite witch-hunt’ against Slick Willy’s XYZ. Lively got favorable attention due to what she is and whom she knew.
And, following the Oct 7 attack, the NYT pulled every string to favor the Israeli perspective, even concocting false or exaggerated narratives about mass rape by Hamas attackers. The bias is as tribal(usually Jewish) as it is ideological or partisan. Who sincerely believes E. Jean Carroll’s rape story about Trump? Yet, the media ran with it, the legal system got on it, and the partisan anti-Trumpers(most people in New York) feigned credulity. Or how about those obviously bogus charges against Brett Kavanaugh by the hideous Christine Blasey Ford, yet another student of the school of ‘anything goes for the cause’?
But there’s also the factor of personal connections among the celebrities, industry insiders, and star journalists, a questionable status for those in the news profession. Take the case of Ronan Farrow. In one way, he could be seen as a hero-reporter, tough crusader for justice, who brought down the swinish Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul who’d gotten his way with women for too long. But, it also seems to have been a career move, i.e. what better way than by harpooning a Moby Dick of Hollywood? Farrow’s timing seemed almost orchestrated and coordinated with the powers-that-be given that, if not for the Trump presidency, Jews in the media might have thought twice about turning sexual predation such a big issue. It’s also worth wondering if his connection to Mia Farrow(and people she knows) owed to his meteoric rise.
The problem with star reporters(or journalists) is they are celebrities in their own right. As they don’t cover something as mundane as street crime or petty corruption, their success owes to access to insiders and movers-and-shakers, and over time, wittingly or not, they can become de facto agents or tools for one faction of bigshots against others. If they prize their accessibility(to remain relevant) to the elites in the industry over the truth, they will invariably turn into bulldogs of the powerful. In other words, they become like so many partisan political hack journalists who overlook corruption among Democrats and only focus on the Evil Republicans, or vice versa.
At this point, the public hasn’t yet connected the dots as to why the NYT favored the Lively narrative, but it most probably wasn’t the result of impartial curiosity. As with NYT’s skewed political coverage, its handling of culture & entertainment is surely loaded with considerations other than objective facts and blind justice.
In years to come, this affair may serve as a case study, not for its juicy gossip content but its implications of the profound changes in the information landscape. As with Donald Trump’s comeback from his humiliation ritual in 2020, it’s a story of how the established systems of communication and control were undermined and then completely undone by the power of the internet that gives voice to outsiders and provides a venue for the aggrieved, Baldoni in this case, to share his/her side of the story to sway the public.
