Quality | 2010.02.20
The parable of John Terry | Libby Brooks
Speculations on celebrity infidelity furnish us with modern fables – blurring further our grasp of reality
In my more generous moments, I like to think most fair-minded readers employ a look-away-now approach when it comes to celebrity malfunction – a self-imposed super-injunction, if you will. Still, some stories become impossible to sidestep, not purely by dint of their omnipresence, but because they have been crafted into modern parables that demand attention, exposition and – ultimately – judgment.
Take the tale of John Terry . We are told he will miss his team\'s weekend fixture in order to visit his estranged wife and their children. Having survived the amphitheatre of the football pitch after allegations of extramarital affairs with the former partner of a team-mate and sundry other women, Terry\'s poor performance against Everton on Wednesday was presented as a manifestation of moral failure worthy of the imperial thumbs-down, rather than the more quotidian explanation that a sportsman might be having an off night.
It is all too tempting to finger Rupert Murdoch as puppeteer for the passion play. The connection between Sky-inflated Premiership wages and News of the World revelations about players being privately undeserving of such salaries is a join-the-dots not worthy of a four-year-old. But, while Terry\'s personal life may hardly be the stuff of a David Cameron fairytale about the socially cohesive benefits of matrimony, nor is it uniquely unedifying in the orbit of alleged misdemeanour. This week alone, only those whose look-away-now function operates at optimum will have avoided the fact that Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are suing the NoW over reports of marital discord, or that, on a more mundane, British par, the television presenter Vernon Kay is attempting to rebuild his marriage after admitting to sending saucy texts to a topless model.
What distinguishes these evidently painful personal events is the stories they warrant told. Unlike the hyper-caste status of Pitt and Jolie that informs speculation about their union, with Terry there is little distinguishing the brouhaha from a racy episode of Footballers\' Wives. But also abroad is the contemptuous implication that this is The Jeremy Kyle Show with stockbroker belt mansions and designer dresses. The underlying message is: look what happens when you give a chav too much cashTerry is no better than he ought to be.
For Kay, the plot is different. His compromise with celebrity culture was to present himself and his wife, Tess Daly, as professionally Northern, flummoxed by fame and as sexily un-sexual as the Sunday supplement lifestyle spreads required. The suggestion that he might not be entirely content with his imposed lot derails everything the magazines had to say about him.
Popular culture can only cope with a person with a palatable story, from X Factor contestants onwards, and when their narrative tires, we leave them to the wolves, because that moral currency has storytelling appeal, too. So it was with John Terry: a testosterone-giddy young man, at the peak of his physical prowess, given a blank cheque that extended from Gucci to girlfriends. Then a primed audience affects outrage when he fails to act as a role model.
Meanwhile, we are congenitally incapable of deploying our rage at the bankers whose very public misconduct has impacted on us all. Popular culture furnishes us with endless opportunities to judge others on their looks, lifestyles, love affairs – even, occasionally, on their singing and dancing skills. And it is judgment presented as entirely without consequence – as easy as clicking a button and as lasting as a late night channel-surf. But popular modes for collective action on the things that really matter like soaring inequality, are increasingly retarded. As the line between public and private blurs, so does that between private fallibility and public piss-taking.
Stories are everywhere, and it\'s only human that we crave them to make sense of a muddled world. There is something satisfyingly certain about condemning from the sofa. But it also exposes, in the least tabloid-friendly way, our disconnect between reality and the real.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]b/11/the-parable-of-john-terry
