Courteney Cox & David Arquette: Candid and Refreshing, or a Weird Marketing Trick Designed to Make Us Super Uncomfortable?
By Courtney Enlow | Posted Under Celebrities Are Better than You | Comments (24)
A fun and helpful Courtney Enlow article clue: if my title’s a stupid-long question, it means even I don’t actually know the answer.
Just one day after a joint announcement that the two had split, David Arquette did the most natural thing we all do after a heartbreaking life change—went straight to Howard Stern and detailed how the two hadn’t bonebanged in four months.
After that, Arquette would pop on Stern just about weekly to discuss various aspects of the split, his horniness, how their daughter was handling things, his horniness, and other things you only discuss with your best friend or the entire satellite radio listening audience. And horniness.
The strangest thing, the part that took it from “too much information” to “too personal for me to handle” was this: though he was discussing incredibly intimate details, it actually never felt disrespectful. He spoke very lovingly of Cox and their life together. And though the act of divulging this information in and of itself seems like a betrayal or disrespectful action, it didn’t to listen to it. He said things like, “I want love in my life. I need love in my life” and “[Cox] didn’t want to be my mother — but I kind of need a mother.” It was just sad.
But it went from kind of strange to some kind of bizarro honesty summit when Cox joined Arquette on Stern and shared right along with him.
“This is one of our problems in our relationship. Whenever I would need consoling from David, he could not literally put his arm around me for one second without completely getting a boner.”
She added: “[He] was never like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry your Dad is dying. Can we f**k?’”
Arquette, 39, interjected: “Come on!”
“No, that’s the truth,” she countered.
“That time I was good,” Arquette said. (Her father, Richard Cox, died of cancer in 2001.)
“Okay, maybe that one time,” Cox acquiesced.
We presently live in a society where we, if not celebrate, then at least encourage, the overshare. We feel it’s perfectly fine to ask people when they’re getting married, when they’re having kids, if they’re trying (which is essentially asking someone if they’re fucking on the regular) and all kinds of incredibly intimate, personal questions as though they’re standard small talk, and no class of people feel more comfortable with this than the celebrity media.
It’s become so commonplace, I can’t remember the last time I stopped and thought, “why the hell are they asking Kim Kardashian if she and her boyfriend of four days hear wedding bells?” Something so ridiculously bizarre has just become normalcy.
So, when David Arquette, well-known on his own, but married to an actually quite famous and therefore somewhat inaccessible celebrity, tells us details, not just of their sex life (which gossip rags tend to find a way to report on, if not from the horse’s mouth) but of actual human emotion, something we rarely, if ever, hear about from the celebrity standpoint.
I’m going to share something now that will be met with one of the following: a) an incredulous eyeroll and a lecture about how celebrities are people, too, or b) an incredulous eyeroll and an emphatic “goddamn duh.” You people sure roll your eyes at me a lot. Anyway, the truth is this: celebrities are not real. While they are actual physical specimens of human life, nothing we see is ever real. Between makeup or plastic surgery and extensive hair magic, it’s not like we’re typically privy to their real physical form, but more than that, the celebrity persona is generally fake. Paparazzi are called to catch “candid” shots of a famous actress and her child immediately following a scandal, a “source” will “leak” information to People Magazine about someone’s love life or upcoming project that so obviously came from that person and their people that “source” basically just means “camp” at this point. Personas are created and become truth in the eye of the public and we rarely if ever see the real person, and even then, it’s because the real person is either just fucking nuts, or fairly cool and normal, and even then it’s impossible to tell the real ones from the fake nuts and the faux cool.
So when a famous person divulges real, dark human emotions? It’s weird. It’s too much. And that’s probably not fair. I mean, the celebrity fawning society expects these people to be at their beck and call for photos and gossip and adorable pictures of their children, which is so goddamn weird, but as soon as shit gets real, they can’t handle it.
So, now that I’ve been made involved in this split, I hope the two work it out in one way or another, be it together or apart, and find some peace. But please, don’t tell me about it.
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Comments
Posted by: Bob Kelso at April 19, 2011 2:08 PM
No wonder they split up when he likes Cox! HAHA!
*hides*