Sure, Gwyneth. It certainly sounds expensive, if you have no idea how much it costs. For Paltrow, $8,980 is an amount she doesn’t have to think about. It isn’t most of a year’s rent, or the price of an okay pre-owned car. It’s chump change; it’s a bill she charges to her card without a second glance. Not since Lucille Bluth has any person so thoroughly embodied the spirit of the question, “What could one banana cost? Ten dollars?” It’s spectacular.
Recent celebrity trials, involving Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, or Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, have revolved around the serious issues of domestic abuse. But with Paltrow, viewers can indulge in an unabashed delight, a serenely sanctimonious schadenfreude.
Here is the white woman to end all white women, born and bred into unimaginable privilege, who has used her considerable platform primarily to spread her vision of inaccessible wealth and thinness. She left her little California coastal enclave to spend a weekend swanning around the mountains, in a town overrun by rich and famous Angelenos seeking second homes. She bought her kids ski lessons that cost $9,000 and didn’t bat an eye. She managed to crash on a beginner’s ski run, a place where 3-year-old children regularly follow their instructors in single file without breaking anyone else’s ribs. Whether she hit someone or she didn’t, he’s injured, and she’s unscathed, and on top of all of that, she seems basically disdainful of the whole affair.
Given all this, it’s a perfect storm for pop culture lovers. It’s so rare to be able to claim the moral high ground so easily, to point and laugh at a rich person on trial for doing rich person things. There is no reflexive self-interrogation, no, “Am I a bad person for laughing at this?” If anything, Paltrow’s aura of utter untouchability has swung back around into a good thing. As writer Louis Staples tweeted, “Only Gwyneth Paltrow could … somehow come out of [this] looking iconic.” However entitled she seems to be, she’s delivering a goofy, guilt-free spectacle. It’s a master class in performing celebrity.●
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