10月 16 2008
英语阅读 Split that is end of an era – and tragedy for Pilates
Hadley Freeman 八卦麦当娜和盖·里奇的离婚新闻。
Split that is end of an era – and tragedy for Pilates
Hadley Freeman
The Guardian,
Thursday October 16 2008
Madonna has elevated many unlikely items into cultural signifiers: conical bras, yoga teachers and Kabbalah centres, to take a brief and Proustian tour through the singer’s career. But few would have predicted that British director Guy Ritchie would join that eclectic roll call. This coupling was, for a moment, as exciting as it was unexpected. A cult(ish) British director and an American superstar? To a country so fond of self-deprecation, and for so long in the grumbling, intimidated shadow of its bigger and brasher transatlantic neighbour, it was as though the hometown boy had pulled the prom queen.
If there’s one movie this couple should have made, it was Richard Curtis’ Notting Hill. Their wedding in a castle in Scotland, attended by George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Donatella Versace, was like a fairytale for all involved: her, him and the British magazine reading public.
It started, as most things by Madonna once did, a trend, with various A-list Americans descending on the capital.
Suddenly, thanks to this recently unknown director, strange species such as Gwyneth Paltrow were stalking the land, getting off with unlikely British men and making foreign noises about “packed macrobiotic lunches” and “in-house Pilates machines”.
Yet national doubt soon set in and instead of this partnership elevating the couple in the public’s eyes, it diminished them both.
While British audiences have long found the appeal of Ritchie and his dubious east London accent mystifying, it perhaps explained what brought him and Madonna together: here were two people rivalled only by each other in their capacity for brass-necked make-overs. For Madonna, this constituted swapping a persona based on Pope-baiting provocation with that of spiritually aware exercise obsessive; for Ritchie, it meant jettisoning his childhood as stepson of a baronet in favour of a blizzard of dropped aitches.
Madonna’s adoption of a lady-of-the-manor look when she and Ritchie first married was as cartoonish as her husband’s take on Britain, with his East End gangster movies and weekend shooting trips in plus fours. How could it fail? Two characters from Dick van Dyke’s Guide to Britain – perfect!
Logical, perhaps, but the marriage made this once infallible pop culture icon suddenly seem, well, a little silly in British eyes. Could she really not see how clumsy his mockney poses were? How one note his movies are? She became styled by the media as the gullible, image-chasing harridan. He was the henpecked husband. These were images that no amount of adoptions, children or film collaborations could shake off.
It’s easy to mock Ritchie now and his “Alright guv, I’m on t’ dog and bone” film genre, but when he and Madonna met he was – and this is an actual quote – “the British Quentin Tarantino”.
He would bring her cinematic credibility, the one thing that has always eluded her, and she would bring him international fame. Well, one of them was right, if perhaps not in the way he imagined. Ritchie, sweetly, forgot that cinematic maxim: never make a movie with Madonna, especially if you’re involved with her. It took Sean Penn years and an acrimonious divorce to get past Shanghai Surprise. Rupert Everett’s friendship with her, and nearly his career, failed to live through The Next Best Thing. But Swept Away was a new low in husband/wife film collaborations and, if only to avoid a repeat of that, it’s hard not to see this divorce as the best possible outcome for both.
The divorce has been predicted since pretty much the week they returned from their honeymoon. Already celebrity columnists were opining yesterday that marriage to Madonna is “very tricky” (this was then followed by one particular columnist’s admission “I never met her”.)
It seems unlikely that intimidation of his wife’s success was what did it for Ritchie in the end, seeing as that was hardly a surprise she sprung on him after the ceremony. More likely, it is just another instructive tale that when a couple is brought together by celebrity then ultimately it is celebrity that will bring them down. Maybe he thought there was more to her behind her image, maybe she thought there was less behind his. It’s a tragedy for their children and an end of an era for London. And for the Pilates machine manufacturers of Great Britain.
