MILLENNIAL DIARY
Katy’s lockdown fright with human mirror Orlando
IT’S been said often enough recently: we’re not all in this together. People like you and me aren’t in it with the celebrities in their mansions. The celebrities in their mansions, have it much, much worse.
I have been checking in weekly with Katy Perry, whom I believe to be slowly deflating, like an old helium balloon, under the influence of partner and impregnator Orlando Bloom. Last week, Perry talked about how difficult she’s been finding lockdown, and the waves of depression she’s been experiencing (like all of us, on a five-day cycle) during her first pregnancy.
But there’s always Orlando, whom she describes as ‘like a mirror’ helping her recognise what she needs to ‘work on’.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but if you get me in front of one of those magnifying mirrors at a hotel, and I see my pores and whiskers, I won’t leave the room for 30 minutes.”
This is a disturbing metaphor. A real magnifying mirror is horrifying enough, and most women with access to one will choose to only brave it briefly once or twice a month — for the chin hairs. It’s like weighing scales in that way: unhealthy to check too much. Living with a walking, talking magnifying mirror (which, by its nature literally only picks up problems that are invisible and harmless) sounds like fresh hell. And this is not the first time Katy has compared her husbandto-be to an alarming inanimate object.
In January’s Vogue India, in what I innocently thought would be one of the saddest things of 2020, Katy talked about Orlando as ‘an anchor’ who ‘holds [her] down’.
She added, sinisterly and inexplicably, ‘and he’s very real’. We don’t have the time or space here to delve into my theory that she’s actually engaged to an experimental self-improvement hologram.
This was when she first said: ‘‘I can’t believe I see all the things that I never saw and I need to work on. That’s what your partner is.”
Orlando Bloom is a living nightmare.
A couple of months ago she added to the chilling fresco. “I have consciously or unconsciously picked a partner that makes sure I keep evolving into the best version of myself,” she said in an interview. “There’s a lot of friction between my partner and I, but that friction… can breed a lot of light.”
I’m exhausted. Are you exhausted? She must be absolutely exhausted.
I think, perhaps, the best metaphor of all that Katy has used to describe her coupling, is ‘a never-ending cleanse’. Living with Orlando Bloom is like enduring constant and unrelenting diarrhoea and starvation. Orlando Bloom’s love is a disease, a chronic illness. Someone send Katy some Immodium and a parachute.
Robert Pattinson is frequently mistaken for a generic boring basic hottie, a Chris Hemsworth, or a Chris Pine, or any of those Hollywood Chrises who all look related. And even celebrity enthusiasts/ apologists like me have to make a concerted effort to remember that he is not R Patz, eye-candy and cultural shorthand for everything that is silly about teenage girls.
But GQ finally got the message across last week, loud and clear, with a lockdown profile of the man that would be unbelievable if it wasn’t impossible to make up: Robert Pattinson is a weirdo.
He’s so incredibly weird that the only way to understand how weird he is, is to observe him over Zoom in his natural habitat: alone, at home, talking about eating out of tins, refusing to work out for his Batman role, and making a tin-foil cornflake pasta burger in a microwave.
Indeed the main preoccupation of the interview for much of the internet was the cooking. Pattinson tells how he had a business idea last year, for fast-food pasta you can hold in your hand.
After unsuccessful meetings with potential partners, he thought putting it in GQ might help: on camera, he attempted to create his
Piccolini Cuscino (Little Pillow) invention using presliced cheese, microwave penne, ketchup, sugar, a hollowed out burger bun, a lot of foil and an enormous novelty lighter (for ‘his brand’). It ended in a smoking, blacked-out microwave. Perhaps it’s all real: perhaps Pattinson’s radiant beauty means no one has ever stopped him from putting tin foil in the microwave, they’ve taken one look into his gorgeous eyes and said: “I’ll do that for you, Rob.”
Pattinson is the kind of beautiful that means no one has once called up him on the bats*** nonsense that flows, unfiltered, from his beautiful mouth.
We’re likely being played, but is it weirder to invent a tin-foil cornflake pasta burger and make an open call for business partners in GQ, or is it weirder to pretend to have invented a tin-foil cornflake pasta burger, and make an open call for business partners in GQ? Even if all of this is some kind of elaborate performance art about the nature of fame and beauty, even if every interview since Twilight has been a complex practical joke, it remains a very, very strange thing to do.
The self-directed cover shoot includes photographs of Pattinson crumpled on the floor among a tableaux of objects: a box of Special K, a tin of beans, a bottle of brown sauce. Some are out of focus. Many, taken from below, look like the kind of thing you get in your Tinder inbox directly before the unsolicited pics begin. They are magic. He’s beautiful. Who cares.
For the first time since Bic made a pen for women in 2012, we’ve been seen. Once again, the real needs of women existing under the capitalist patriarchy have been met by a benevolent corporation: Hasbro a while ago released a Monopoly game for the ladies, where women get paid more than men when they pass go.
It “introduces Mr Monopoly’s niece, a selfmade investment guru, here to update a few things!”
Now, we won’t get into whether Ms Monopoly is actually self-made or Kylie Jenner self-made with her tycoon uncle, but it’s fair to say that the announcement missed the mark. The internet was livid.
But just because Ms Monopoly didn’t go down well, it doesn’t mean games for girls are always a terrible idea. I’ve had some I’m planning to approach Robert Pattinson with — Operation could become Lady Doctor, and include a removable womb. Careful now!
Or LadyScrabble, where you get triple word points for ‘girlboss’ ‘SheEO’ ‘sponcon’ ‘hun’ and the bicep emoji. There could be Jenga, where the pieces have boobs (a teachable moment about inconvenient bodies), or perhaps Connect Four where women have to connect six, or Hungry Hippos where the Hippos are bumcheeks and the food balls tiny thongs. This is what they call the feminist agenda.
Perhaps we could get a few of the world leader lads to sit down for an evening of Pandemic: The Jacinda Ardern Edition.