The Beckhams: As L.A. as they come
THERE IS AN ugly self-hatred among Angelenos. We’re so ashamed of L.A.’s vapidness that we insist the city is actually a secret hotbed of intelligentsia, throwing a “festival of books,” building giant museums we have no artwork to fill and trying to trick billionaires into believing that it’s still super-important to own a newspaper.
So when my defensive friends heard that David and Victoria Beckham were moving here this summer so he can make $50 million a year playing for some professional soccer team that he claims exists, they were disgusted. Do we really need another couple who’s into Kabbalah? Who is BFF with Tom and Katie? Who sold photos of their $500,000 wedding -- in which they sat on matching gold thrones -- to a tabloid? Who named their kid something as attention-needy as “Brooklyn”? Do we need another breast-enhanced wife who is famous for nothing but shopping and partying, as evidenced by the fact that she lists her occupation as “fashion designing”?
Hell yes, we do. These are exactly the kind of people who keep L.A. the most culturally important city in the world. We need our Paris Hiltons, our Jessica Simpsons, our Pamela Andersons. They give us purpose. They’re why people dream of moving here. You think any hot young actress moved to New York when Salman Rushdie got an apartment there? And don’t you think she regrets it now that she married him?
Every day that Posh and Becks lived in London was an insult to our city, a dangerous argument that you could be an international celebrity and act totally L.A. but live somewhere else. But the Beckhams eventually figured out that the only way to make sure that magazines take photos of them every single day is to fight it out here, in the premier league of celebrity. The Beckhams moving here is like Princeton getting Einstein, if Einstein were really attractive and not so good at physics. So really, much better than getting Einstein.
We’ve already missed out on a decade’s worth of Beckham embarrassments that could have been ours: David getting a tattoo of Victoria’s name misspelled in Hindi; Posh’s feud with Naomi Campbell; David’s fauxhawk; Posh writing a book called “That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between.” Now all that will be ours. We’re going to get to watch David Beckham -- who will soon be as bored with soccer as we are -- embark, inevitably, on a humiliating movie career. I’m already working on a script for “Kazaam 2.”
Look, I understand the desire for diversity, for a little class, for wooing a Malcolm Gladwell or swooning over a Mario Batali, even if he only deigns to give us pizza. It strokes our ego. But that’s not why I moved here.
I moved here to see hot people -- preferably hot famous people -- doing incredibly stupid, hot, famous things. So the more the better. I want to see Becks and Posh at the Ivy, feigning horror that the paparazzi invaded their privacy. I want to see Chateau Marmont or Hyde in the background of their obligatory sex tape, instead of being disoriented by shots of Notting Hill.
Sure, it’s uncomfortable to know that these people represent us, the same way Wall Street barons represent New York and nobody represents Sacramento. But the mistake is in believing that living in the epicenter of shallowness makes the rest of us shallow. It’s the opposite. Escaping your times in the quiet ahistory of suburbia makes you shallow. In L.A., we have to constantly confront the darkest sides of our egos: our desperation to be recognized; our discomfort with our place in the social hierarchy; our willingness to eat in bad, overpriced restaurants to seem cool.
In a society obsessed with making other people’s MySpace top eight, Los Angeles is dizzy with empty fame. Posh and Becks will only add to our greatest unnatural resource. I’d rather be here, studying this economy close-up, than writing about it from New York or London. Mostly because the people are uglier there.
*
