celebrity gossip, academic style

(vis-a-vis Taylor Swift’s Red)

Has blue eyes (“State of Grace”)

You never saw him coming (“State of Grace”)

Is your achilles heel (“State of Grace”)

Took your virginity (or some approximation thereof) (“State of Grace”/”Red”/”Treacherous”/”Trouble”/”I Almost Do”)

If you have feelings for him, they will take the shape of metaphors involving colors (“Red”)

Is good with his hands (“Treacherous”)

Is trouble (“Trouble”)

Clarification: is trouble when he walks in (“Trouble”)

Has a new girlfriend (“Trouble”)

Wears belts with notches (“Trouble”)

Has a plane? To fly you places you’ve never been? (“Trouble”)

Still has your scarf in his desk drawer. That smells like you. (“All Too Well”)

Played t-ball (“All Too Well”)

Has a sister (HOLLA, MAGGIE G!) and a mother who tells stories about him (“All Too Well”)

Also glasses and a twin bed and a refrigerator with a light. (“All Too Well”)

Dates 22-year-olds. (“22″)

Has a chair by the window, looking out at the city (“I Almost Do”)

May or may not wonder about you (“I Almost Do”)

Has a telephone that you almost call almost every night (“I Almost Do”)

Is very active in dreams as concerns the touching of faces (“I Almost Do”)

Likes to break up and get back together like a 14-year-old boy (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”)

Is one of those awesome guys who needs space after a month apart (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”)

Music tastes: Indie Records > T.Swift (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”)

Just to be clear, is never ever ever ever getting back together with you (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”)

Adorable fight resolution tactic: put on a football helmut while fighting (“Stay Stay Stay”)

Carries groceries; finds 22-year-old amusement endearing (“Stay Stay Stay”)

Repeated, sad-faced refusal to put you on the top of his list (“The Last Time”)

Responds positively to jokes on the door (“Holy Ground”)

Fits poems like a perfect rhyme (“Holy Ground”)

His face = in every crowd (“Holy Ground”)

Has love as big as New York City (“Holy Ground”)

Dancing is not worthwhile without him (“Holy Ground”)

Has long handwritten note in pocket. Right now. (“Sad Beautiful Tragic”)

Incites sadness, beauty, tragedy (“Sad Beautiful Tragic”)

Has green eyes? (“Everything Has Changed”)

Has freckles? (“Everything Has Changed”)

Has a simple name? (Everything Has Changed”)

Eyes look like coming home? (“Everything Has Changed”)

Doesn’t like it when you wear highheels (“Begin Again”)

Doesn’t get that song (“Begin Again”)

Unchivalrous, untimely (“Begin Again”)

No really: doesn’t think you’re funny (“Begin Again”)

Probably is listening to this album on repeat just as much as I am (“Annie’s Deep Thoughts, 3 pm, Day After Thanksgiving 2012″)

 

 

What do you know about Denzel Washington? Outside of his film roles — varied and classic — what do you know? Did you know that he’s been married to his (first, only) wife since 1983? That he has four children? That his father was a preacher, that his parents divorced when he was 14, that he went to private high school and nearly flunked out of Fordham before he discovered acting? Did you know that he’s been possessed by the Holy Spirit, that he considers going into pastorhood, that he prays every day?

Unless you’ve read the six articles — from GQ, Entertainment Weekly, Grantland, and The New York Times — that I just read, chances are you did not. He’s the biggest star you know the littlest about.

But you do know who Denzel Washington is. You know what he represents: a blend of charisma and honor, save when he “goes bad” and plays the amoral, the stubborn, the angry. He’s a master of historical ventriloquism, the first choice for any bio-pic of a black man. Yet he’s also dexterous, racially speaking, in the same way that Will Smith is: if a role is written for a white man, he can play it. Which isn’t to say that his image isn’t inflected with racial awareness — see, for example, his three collaborations with Spike Lee, including Malcolm X, along with his role as “The Hurricane” and various other racially specific roles. His image is not a-racial, but he can play a-racial — and that’s part of what has made him a star. (Apocryphal legend has him adament about decreasing, or altogether cutting, storylines and/or scenes in which he appears, romantically speaking, with white women: white men don’t want to see me go home with their women, he’s said to have argued. Whether or not this is true, the principle holds true: all the way back in The Pelican Brief, when his character played it chaste with Julia Roberts (despite the romance depicted in the filmic adaptation) through last week’s Flight, when he fools around with a beautiful, very white love interest….but never more than a kiss, and very fleetingly onscreen).

Point is: Denzel is, economically speaking, one of the most powerful and resonant stars working today. He is, however, as I like to parse it in my stardom classes, a star purely in terms of picture personality and capital. People like the type of role he plays, and they like it well enough that they actually go and see his movies. He is not a cultural star, per se — his image is limited to his roles, and what they seem to represent. What they represent is something powerful: his picture personality is that of an eloquent, persuasively charismatic man capable of manipulating and transcending the environment in which he finds himself. On the street, in the boxing ring, in the courtroom, amidst gangsters, in the air — he dominates. Sometimes he’s a bit nefarious and morally dubious; most often, however, he’s righteous and affable. Like Tom Cruise or Matt Damon, he is, let it be said, a pure pleasure to watch on screen.

Which is why audiences flock to his movies. His track record is nearly without fault. He doesn’t do risky independent films; somewhat humorously, his lowest grossing films are the ones he chose to direct himself. He plays big men, leading men, and he plays them at least once a year. He’s not Nicolas Cage, taking anything that comes his way to pay off the mortgage on his 52 houses, but he’s not Daniel Day-Lewis, or even Will Smith, either. He works. And it’s not as simple as a “one for me, one for them” industry algebra — the type of visible rotation you see in the careers of Clooney and Damon. There’s a fine line between his plainly populist works and his prestige ones, usually marked by the extent to which he’s willing to play up the moral ambiguity of his character. And this most recent turn, as an alcoholic yet valiant pilot in Flight, is in the later camp. He’s marvelous in it, but he’s also very easy to despise.

Such dexterity is central to Washington’s picture personality, with its dominant themes of charisma and skill. I’ve never seen Washington not charismatic: whether he’s evil or good, broken or whole, he’s always charming. You can’t take your eyes off of him. You see that he deserves whatever splendors he’s achieved, and if he hasn’t achieved them, then he deserves them anyway. Even in Flight, when his character is (no spoiler) a huge drunken piece of shit, there’s a moment when he comes out of the hotel room, captain’s uniform on, Rolling Stones soundtrack turned to 11, and you’re like DAMMMMMMMN, I can totally forget he was just sniffing lines at 7 am! Before flying a plane!

Why? It’s a nifty editing trick — and the soundtrack, jeez, you put that soundtrack on behind anyone, have them walk in slo-mo, and suddenly they’re charisma manifest. But it’s also a pure Denzel moment — a moment you see in almost every film — when he takes the movie by the horns and let’s you know he’s in control. Not because he looks good walking down the hallway, but, in the case of Flight, because he’s evidenced that he’s got this character down: schlubby and hungover in one scene, on top of his game the next. That’s theme #2: the talent. The Oscar-Winning, the every-famous-figure-playing, the I don’t talk about my process guy. He just does it; it’s just natural. It’s real, unadulterated talent.

What I’m interested in, then, is how Washington has participated in the cultivation of this second discourse — a discourse that simultaneously bolsters his masculinity and appeal to a certain movie-going demographic.

He’s done it in two ways:

1.) Naturalizing Acting

Because Washington’s life is seemingly without scandal, interviews tend to focus on his actual films — and many of them, including a lengthy NY Times profile from last month, focus exclusively on it. The profile begins with a key quote from Washington:

When he was young, “being a movie actor wasn’t on my radar at all,” Mr. Washington said. “I took an acting class at Fordham, and it was kind of easy, or I enjoyed it, I should say, and people told me I was good. When I started out, I was just thinking about the stage; it was never my goal to get to Hollywood. But here I am.”

So humble, so un-meditated! He didn’t try to be good, he just was. And while he put in his time — the stage, then commercials, then television, and finally the big-time in late ’80s — the talent was always there, just waiting to shine.

He says that his process is a combination of “inside out” (meaning finding the psychology of the character and then going from there — a Method tactic) and “outside in” (more in the Laurence Olivier school, in which you analyze the character and consciously “play” him, as opposed to “becoming” him). In other words, he uses a few tricks — he learned to box for The Hurricane, he learned the sax for Mo’ Better Blues, he spent a lot of time in a flight simulator for Flight — but he’s no Daniel Day-Lewis or Joaquin Phoenix. He prepares, but he doesn’t overthink it. In the interview with the Times, he uses the metaphor of the pilot: the director, crew, and other actors need to trust what he’s doing. He’ll surprise them, but they need to trust that he’ll get the plane, er, film, on the ground safely. Indeed, Washington’s acting is always confident; there’s a swagger there. His characters have swagger, but his acting has swagger was well, if that makes sense.

But as Washington and his profilers also emphasize that he doesn’t exactly know how he does what he does. Again, the pilot metaphor is yet again apt: as the passengers on the plane, you don’t know exactly how you get on the ground; you just do. Even the pilot might not understand exactly how he nails a difficult landing. But he does, and it’s better not to ask questions how it happens. You could transwer this metaphor to that a chef: it tastes good, doesn’t it, so don’t ask questions!

Or: Hey fans of Denzel, stop asking questions about why he’s so good: he just is! You’ll ruin it if you think about it too hard! Washington uses these metaphors himself. He’s reticent to talk about process. The proof of his skill is on the screen: why complicate it?

It’s a masculine conception of acting — how it happens, why it works. It distinguishes him from the feminized, emotional method actors; the weirdos and the drama nerds. Washington loves acting, but he doesn’t overthink it — or least that’s the image he’s cultivated.

2.) “I Don’t Know How to Be a Celebrity”

Which brings us to Washington’s own cultivation of non-celebrity. He only gives interviews to promote new films, but he’s not a cagey interviewer. In the four major profiles I’ve read, all of them given over the last four months, he’s talked openly about his parents’ divorce, his own history with his father, his children, even his relationship with his wife (and how she feels about Michelle Obama thinking he’s hot). Some actors cultivate anonymity by keeping interviews focused on their craft, but Washington seemingly answers any question he’s asked.

Because Washington’s life is scandalous/gossip-worthy, however, the focus remains on his acting. Interviewers also love to emphasize that he’s a non-celebrity: GQ told him “In some ways, you’re a cipher. There’s not much you put out there.”

Washington’s answer is just so perfect:

But that’s not my job to put stuff out there. Sidney Poitier told me this years ago: “If they see you for free all week, they won’t pay to see you on the weekend, because they feel like they’ve seen you. If you walk by the magazine section in the supermarket and they’ve known you all their life, there’s no mystery. They can’t take the ride.” My professional work is being a better actor. I don’t know how to be a celebrity.

“I don’t know how to be a celebrity!” Seriously, that’s perfect. What a way to endear yourself to your public, especially to men (and/or women) who dislike celebrity culture, then to say that you literally do not know how to do it. He also demonstrates his business acumen: even if he knew how, it’d be a stupid move. People wouldn’t like him. [Sidenote: His logic is faulty. Some stars on the covers of magazines do great business. But he's correct that just being on the cover of a magazine, aka gossip-worthy, doesn't mean that your movies will do well.]

Now what’s remarkable about this statement is the fact that it is embedded in an interview with a popular magazine. His picture was, in fact, on the cover of that magazine, which could be found in the check-out aisle just last month — only the magazine was GQ, not Us Weekly. He talks about his family and personal life, it’s just that they’re not scandalous enough to merit continued coverage. It’s not that he’s cagey, or an asshole, or annoyingly private — all characteristics that actually make people dislike a star when they hear about them. He’s forthcoming and wholly affable in interviews. He loves to talk sports. He loves the Yankees. He loves his kids. He is such a Dad, a Grown-Up Bro. He doesn’t have a cell phone and is only mildly annoyed that someone is running a Facebook page pretending to be him. He’s a purely analog star, a student of the Hollywood old school. But it doesn’t make him look stodgy or behind the times, the way that Tom Cruise’s fumbling Twitter efforts do. He’s outside of the game. He’s above it. He’s just doing what he does, being with his family, giving interviews, speaking truths. His daily code of life: read the bible. His advice to black men: put your slippers under the bed so you have to get on your knees in the morning.

I talk a lot about star production on this blog — about how stars and their teams work really hard to create images that resonate, that matter. The brilliance of Denzel is that his incredibly resonate image is posturing as the complete lack of one. He’s the anti-celebrity, the devoted actor, a model of masculinity. A star who says he doesn’t know how to be a celebrity. As our lives become more and more saturated with obvious manipulation — aesthetic, rhetorical, political — Denzel’s anti-image is increasingly refreshing. But as I tell my students, being apolitical is a political position; the absence of politics is a political statement. So too with images: the anti-image is one of the most potent images of all.

 

“One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you. I learned that on the campaign.”

Barack Obama has a star image. The quote above should make that clear. There’s “the real” Obama — the living, breathing, guy with bodily functions — and there’s BARACK OBAMA, the public image, the thing Obama talks about above. And that image is an ideological construction: an accumulation of photo ops, statements, sound bites, and things we, as a public (American or otherwise) need/want him to be.

His star image also includes “exclusive, all-access” profiles of him published in Vanity Fair - profiles that acknowledge the presence of a star image. And this is key: just because it acknowledges Obama’s star image doesn’t mean it doesn’t participation in its reification.

So take a look, then, at the opening to Michael Lewis’s recent “exclusive, all-access” (read: authentic) time with Obama:

At nine o’clock one Saturday morning I made my way to the Diplomatic Reception Room, on the ground floor of the White House. I’d asked to play in the president’s regular basketball game, in part because I wondered how and why a 50-year-old still played a game designed for a 25-year-old body, in part because a good way to get to know someone is to do something with him. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of a game it was. The first hint came when a valet passed through bearing, as if they were sacred objects, a pair of slick red-white-and-blue Under Armour high-tops with the president’s number (44) on the side. Then came the president, looking like a boxer before a fight, in sweats and slightly incongruous black rubber shower shoes. As he climbed into the back of a black S.U.V., a worried expression crossed his face. “I forgot my mouth guard,” he said. Your mouth guard? I think. Why would you need a mouth guard?

“Hey, Doc,” he shouted to the van holding the medical staff that travels with him wherever he goes. “You got my mouth guard?” The doc had his mouth guard. Obama relaxed back in his seat and said casually that he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out this time, “since we’re only 100 days away.” From the election, he meant, then he smiled and showed me which teeth, in some previous basketball game, had been knocked out. “Exactly what kind of game is this?” I asked, and he laughed and told me not to worry. He doesn’t. “What happens is, as I get older, the chances I’m going to play well go down. When I was 30 there was, like, a one-in-two chance. By the time I was 40 it was more like one in three or one in four.” He used to focus on personal achievement, but as he can no longer achieve so much personally, he’s switched to trying to figure out how to make his team win. In his decline he’s maintaining his relevance and sense of purpose.

Basketball hadn’t appeared on the president’s official schedule, and so we traveled the streets of Washington unofficially, almost normally. A single police car rode in front of us, but there were no motorcycles or sirens or whirring lights: we even stopped at red lights. It still took only five minutes to get to the court inside the F.B.I. The president’s game rotates around several federal courts, but he prefers the F.B.I.’s because it is a bit smaller than a regulation court, which reduces also the advantages of youth. A dozen players were warming up. I recognized Arne Duncan, the former captain of the Harvard basketball team and current secretary of education. Apart from him and a couple of disturbingly large and athletic guys in their 40s, everyone appeared to be roughly 28 years old, roughly six and a half feet tall, and the possessor of a 30-inch vertical leap. It was not a normal pickup basketball game; it was a group of serious basketball players who come together three or four times each week. Obama joins when he can. “How many of you played in college?” I asked the only player even close to my height. “All of us,” he replied cheerfully and said he’d played point guard at Florida State. “Most everyone played pro too—except for the president.” Not in the N.B.A., he added, but in Europe and Asia.

Overhearing the conversation, another player tossed me a jersey and said, “That’s my dad on your shirt. He’s the head coach at Miami.” Having highly developed fight-or-flight instincts, I realized in only about 4 seconds that I was in an uncomfortable situation, and it took only another 10 to figure out just how deeply I did not belong. Oh well, I thought, at least I can guard the president. Obama played in high school, on a team that won the Hawaii state championship. But he hadn’t played in college, and even in high school he hadn’t started. Plus, he hadn’t played in several months, and he was days away from his 51st birthday: how good could he be?

The president ran a couple of laps around the gym, then shouted, “Let’s go!” He himself divvied up the teams so each one had roughly the same number of giants and the same number of old people. Having put me on his team, he turned to me and said, “We’ll sit you first, until we get a little bit of a lead.” I thought he was joking, but actually he wasn’t; he was as serious as a heart attack. I was benched. I took my place in the wooden stands, along with a few of the other players, and the White House photographer, the medical team, the Secret Service, and the guy with the buzz cut who carried the nuclear football, to watch the president play.

Obama was 20 or more years older than most of them, and probably not as physically gifted, though it was hard to say because of the age differences. No one held back, no one deferred. Guys on his team dribbled past him and ignored the fact he was wide open. When he drives through the streets, crowds part, but when he drives to the basket large, hostile men slide over to cut him off. It’s revealing that he would seek out a game like this but even more that others would give it to him: no one watching would have been able to guess which guy was president. As a player on the other team, who must have outweighed Obama by a hundred pounds, backed the president of the United States down and knocked the crap out of him, all for the sake of a single layup, I leaned over to the former Florida State point guard.

“No one seems to be taking it easy on him,” I said.

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” he explained.

I thought to myself, It must be hard not to take it easy on the president.

The point guard laughed, turned to another guy on the bench, and said, “Remember Rey?”

“Who’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey pump-faked, turned, and just connected with the president right in the mouth,” the other guy said. “Gave him 16 stitches.”

“Where’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey hasn’t been back.”

Obama could find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star, but this is the game he wants to play. It’s ridiculously challenging, and he has very little space to maneuver, but he appears happy. He’s actually just good enough to be useful to his team, as it turns out. Not flashy, but he slides in to take charges, passes well, and does a lot of little things well. The only risk he takes is his shot, but he shoots so seldom, and so carefully, that it actually isn’t much of a risk at all. (He smiles when he misses; when he makes one, he looks even more serious.) “Spacing is big. He knows where to go,” said one of the other players as we watched. “And unlike a lot of lefties, he can go to his right.”

And he chattered constantly. “You can’t leave him open like that!” … “Money!” … “Take that shot!” His team jumped ahead, mainly because it took fewer stupid shots. When I threw one up I discovered the reason for this. When you are on the president’s basketball team and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. “Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” he hollered at me. “You got to get back and play D!”

So what do we have here? A president who likes to play basketball? Well, sure. But it’s also a powerful contribution to Obama’s image, structured, as it is, by strong lines of competitiveness, fairness, tenacity, and vivaciousness. The metaphor, of course — and the reason Lewis leads with this anecdote — is that Obama lives his life, and leads the country, the same way he plays basketball: with integrity, verve, humor, the sort of skill that characterizes those who can play at any game they put their mind to….even against those with better training, longer pedigrees, and stronger natural skills.

Let’s do a little decoding:

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back.” = He hates sycophants, suck-ups, and others who aren’t honest about him/his skills

“No one held back, no one deferred.” = Obama craves a level playing field; always wants to bounce his ideas and skills against those who are his equal or better.

“You got to get back and play D!” = Hey Famous Writer, I hold you to the same standards of play, authenticity, and effort as I hold myself.

“He used to focus on personal achievement, but as he can no longer achieve so much personally, he’s switched to trying to figure out how to make his team win. In his decline he’s maintaining his relevance and sense of purpose.” = Duh.

None of this symbolism is too hidden. But the best part of the section is what’s hiding right in plain sight: the basketball itself. Sure, the way Obama plays basketball is a metaphor for his political life. But the fact that he plays basketball at all — it’s difficult to overstate how important that is.

Because if you know anything about Obama’s image, you know he plays basketball. You know he loves sports. You probably know that he used to unwind by shooting hoops with his “body man.” You know that he does his own Final Four bracket, that he proposed to revamp the College Bowl system. That he’s a White Sox fan. And while many presidents have been sports fans — hell, W. even owned a team — Obama is the first contemporary president with an image cornerstone of sports.

And not just any sport. Obama seems to like baseball and watch football, but basketball, that’s signifies something different:

Basketball is:

• Intensely physical
• Demands a different sort of stamina
• Dominated (currently) by black men…
• …within an infrastructure run, owned, and funded by white, upper-class men of privilege.
• Heavy on the shit-talk: the best at the game are true wordsmiths
• Associated with a physique that is not threatening
• Born and popularized IN AMERICA

Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Put differently, are you understanding why Obama’s team would be keen to associate the president with sports in general and basketball in particular?

Am I reading too much into this? Did Obama’s team say “hey Barack, play more basketball?” No way. As Obama himself is keen to emphasize in the interview, he can’t fake sentiment or passion — when he does, it comes off as fake. I think he loves basketball. But I think that it’s no accident that Lewis was invited to this game….or, even more importantly, that Lewis decided that the sentiments and characteristics manifest there would work perfectly in the start of the most high-profile piece of the President in the last weeks leading up to the election.

Finally, the brilliance of a basketball game — and Lewis’s self-effacing participation in it — is that it doesn’t seem like publicity, or image-building, at all. It seems like a window into the authentic, all-access Obama. And the very best publicity, of course, is the publicity that convinces us it’s no such thing.

 

 

The facts:

1.) Princess Kate, aka HRH Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, aka Kate Middleton, takes off her top while sunbathing in a private villa. (A HUGE private villa near Aix-en-Provence).

2.) A paparazzo, supposedly standing on a public road, takes photos of Kate sans top. This road is at least 500 m away (1640 feet) and would need a super high-powered zoom lens. The photos are grainy, but her top is gone.

3.) French and Italian publications (both owned by that upstanding dirty bird Silvio Berlusconi) publish the photos, which soon proliferate across the internet/other publications. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that the understanding is that any British publications who reprints them will be in “big trouble” (an Irish one already is).

4.) The Royal Family calls foul. On Monday, September 17, the royal couple files a complaint and a request for an injunction against Closer, the French (yet Berlusconi-owned) publication that published the “full suite” of photos. To wit:

The duke and duchess have asked for the injunction order to be accompanied by a warning that the magazine would be fined €10,000 (£8,000) for every day that it did not comply with an injunction and fined €100,000 if it tried to resell the photographs. The judges will rule on the case on Tuesday at lunchtime.

I’m writing before the verdict comes out, but here’s what you need to understand:

1.) French privacy laws are much, MUCH more protective than American ones. That’s why Brangelina has a house there; that’s why (until recently) Vanessa Paradis and Johnny Depp lived there (that and Paradis was, well, French). It’s much easier to be a celebrity there, in part because the invasion of privacy laws are explicit and carry heavy fines: you cannot “take, record, or transmit, without his or her consent, the picture of a person who is in a private place.” In other words, invasive paparazzi = illegal. The question remains, however, whether this giant villa (with photos from a “public” road) was a public place. If it is, then these photos are, indeed, illegal.

2.) IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER. Because whether you think that the royal family has made this worse by pressing charges, that “it’s a private issue,” or even that Kate showed a non-characteristic lack of media savvy, the point is that the war is won: the scandal isn’t Kate’s; it’s the media’s.

Put differently, her actions are not, in fact, scandalous. No one in Europe — and her “subjects” in particular — are scandalized by the fact of a 30-year-old woman taking off her top (presumably to avoid pesky tanlines, the very manifestation of low-classiness) while sunbathing. Scandal occurs when someone trespasses on the fringe of the status quo, or challenges the popular understanding of his/her image. Princess Kate may be classy and wear sleeves at her wedding, but topless sunbathing is not outside the realm of her expected behavior — in part because she is, as many are keen to remind, not royal-born. Yet any objections over her lack of royal born-ness were aired leading up the wedding. Now, that’s old (and out-of-touch) news: she’s the new people’s princess.

And she’s not the first people’s princess — a point the couple’s lawyer’s have been keen to underline in their case, highlighting the fact that Prince William’s mother was victim to similar “invasions of privacy” that led to her death almost 15 years ago to the day.

Which is all the makings for a perfect MELODRAMA:

The villains: the same paparazzi forces that killed the beloved Princess Diana.
The victims: the privacy-seeking “first couple” of Britain; son of Diana + heir to her popular “title.”

And once you successfully frame a gossip story in terms of melodrama, it essentially takes care of itself. The conversation suddenly has nothing to do with Kate’s nudity and everything to do with rights to privacy, special rights of royals/political officials to privacy, and the general exceptionalism of a beloved people’s princess. No matter what happens in court, it seems clear that the entity “behaving scandalously” is not the Duchess of Cambridge, but the photographer and, more to the point, the entities that would publish those photos (hence the suspension of the head of the Irish Star-Times).

Society, working with the help of media outlets, works to censor those at the center of scandal. Fascinating, then, how various media outlets have become the locus of that scorn….even when a Princess’s breasts are involved.

UPDATE: The French court has found in favor of the Royals, and will be forced to hand over the original photos and pay a $13,000 every time the images are republished.
Victory: Kate and Wills.