Squire: What Robert Pattinson Knows Can Save Us All

You want to hate him. But then you get to know him, and he gets to know him­self, and you won­der if Vam­pire Boy might just turn into the man who teaches a gen­er­a­tion of jaded sex sym­bols how to be movie stars we love.


By sep­a­rat­ing his sur­pris­ingly mod­est per­son­al­ity from his gra­tu­itously over­sexed per­sona, Pat­tin­son has obliquely demanded that he be taken seriously.

A funny, unex­pected thing hap­pened to me on a recent Sat­ur­day in New York: I lit­er­ally ran into Robert Pat­tin­son, and he left me… starstruck. He had to earn it, though, as I tend to cow nei­ther to celebri­ties nor the young male heart­throb kind. I’d met the actor at an event for his new film Remem­ber Me, which comes out Fri­day, but an acci­den­tal encounter with him and his entourage in a hotel cor­ri­dor — where the stench of syco­phancy lin­gered like stale piss — got things off on the wrong foot. About twenty min­utes later, Pat­tin­son and a not-quite-as-rank entourage greeted me and a hand­ful of other jour­nal­ists. I didn’t expect much. His vagina aller­gies aside, the world’s most con­spic­u­ous vam­pire since Drac­ula is noto­ri­ously shy, and Remem­ber Me wasn’t espe­cially good. What was left to discuss?

A lot, as it turned out, most of which hinged on the basic sep­a­ra­tion of per­sona from char­ac­ter, of pub­lic from pri­vate, of myth from man. Not that Pat­tin­son him­self, as one of the world’s most in-demand men, would dare reduce his life to such binary terms. Instead, he went on and on about his lim­i­ta­tions. “If I could do sup­port­ing roles in things, then I’d love to do that,” he told me. “But it’s dif­fi­cult to get sup­port­ing roles because it would be really weird most of the time. ‘Well, there’s the guy from Twi­light play­ing the park­ing war­den,’ or some­thing.” He smiled and laughed beneath that noto­ri­ous shock of hair, not quite swear­ing off ambi­tion as much as sug­gest­ing the cost of self-importance was sim­ply too steep to pay — even for a twenty-three-year-old who made $18 mil­lion last year. He was down to earth about being stratos­pher­i­cally famous, and it was… refreshing.

Now I don’t know what exactly I expected from Pat­tin­son, but it def­i­nitely wasn’t this kind of canny pro­file man­age­ment. In a day and age when other young sex sym­bols seem to grap­ple with the bur­den of per­spec­tive, Pat­tin­son tran­scended his brood­ing pul­chri­tude with mod­esty and charm. “What can you do?” he seemed to ask. It’s a shame he couldn’t infuse Remem­ber Me with some of that lilt, but ulti­mately, the movie needs it much less than the gen­eral cul­ture around Pat­tin­son. And by gen­eral cul­ture I mean feed­ing frenzy from mid­dle school gym class to the upper reaches of Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and, yes, to the lives of ordi­nary grown men who like going to the movies.

Indeed, Pat­tin­son might do well to host some sort of sem­i­nar for his col­leagues: Per­sona Con­trol in the New Age of the Sex Sym­bol. From his co-stars in the Twi­light fran­chise to the megas­tar­lets and over­ex­posed princes around whom increas­ingly more of Hol­ly­wood orbits, you can sense the resent­ment of what fame has wrought. I often find them bristling and pout­ing their ways through sur­real every­day sce­nar­ios like the one above, con­sumed with anger and fear that they can have any­thing they want except what they really want: to be taken seri­ously. But as an out­sider, it never occurred to me to take some­one like Robert Pat­tin­son seri­ously at all — until he relin­quished the com­pul­sion to con­vince me. That was the star move, and don’t be sur­prised to see it adopted by an entire gen­er­a­tion of would-be stars once they real­ize that, if they want to sur­vive this racket, they have no other choice.

For starters, take Kris­ten Stew­art, bit­ing her lip in protest — as per usual — on her way to the podium on Oscar night. Pattinson’s Twi­light co-star was all gor­geous, coiled sulk — a hilar­i­ous coun­ter­weight to co-presenter (and her other Twi­light co-star) Tay­lor Laut­ner, whose plas­ticine perma-grin defied Stewart’s pub­lic exis­ten­tial cri­sis. Laut­ner may seem all looks and no brains, but at least he knows when to live in his abject super­star­dom. Not so with the nineteen-year-old Stew­art, who despite grow­ing up in Hol­ly­wood and hav­ing acted half her life still insists on play­ing the out­sider. But what, exactly, are young women like her defend­ing against? Ask any­one who’s worked with Stew­art and they’ll tell you she’s too stub­born, too ambi­tious, and too sen­si­tive to sput­ter out-of-control — to throw away the tal­ent that she’s clearly dis­played in smaller films like The Cake Eaters and Adven­ture­land. In fair­ness, I can’t imag­ine the pres­sure of being teth­ered to her Twi­light siren, Bella Swan, for years to come, either. Yet this con­trived dis­tance between the Stew­art who’ll soon appear as a young Joan Jett in The Run­aways and the one who’ll throw her­self at Pat­tin­son and/or Laut­ner this sum­mer in Eclipse has stretched too thin to sup­port the young woman in the mid­dle. Dis­com­fort in one’s skin is one thing. Snarling enti­tle­ment is another.

Maybe Megan Fox, at twenty-three, can save her­self from the same fate. Much has been made of her appar­ent moti­va­tion to cor­ner the mar­ket on sex sym­bol­ism and voice of a gen­er­a­tion, but I’m one of the few peo­ple who’ll stick up for Jennifer’s Body, which pur­posely enlisted her to demon­strate the steep costs of sex­u­al­ity for sexuality’s sake. That she played along with it (and pulled it off, I swear) was a tes­ta­ment to the “seri­ous actress” Fox can be — the clever young woman who spot­ted and took the oppor­tu­nity to redeem her own myth. The prob­lem is that Fox spent the entire run up to Jennifer’s Body explain­ing the joke to death, com­plete with the angry punch line, “I am a seri­ous actress.” Whereas once she couldn’t out­run the Trans­form­ers fran­chise fast enough, now she appears to real­ize it can enable both con­trast and free­dom in her career. She may have missed this with Jennifer’s Body, but she’ll do bet­ter going for­ward. Or at least as well as the cur­rent face of Empo­rio Armani under­wear and the pistol-packing pros­ti­tute in this summer’s mega-comic-movie Jonah Hex can do with­out blam­ing every­one else for turn­ing her into a car­toon. Pro­fes­sor Pat­tin­son would tell her to just own it, and he’d be right.

Again, I don’t pre­tend to know what it’s like to nego­ti­ate this ter­rain at such an age, and I def­i­nitely wouldn’t ascribe this com­plex to beau­ti­ful young women alone. After all, though they’re a lit­tle older (and should thus know even bet­ter), you can’t escape the likes of John Mayer and Ash­ton Kutcher swoon­ing at their sounds of their own voices. Mayer is Mayer, know­ingly edgy enough to infu­ri­ate but too much of a self-righteous pussy to com­mit — just another blame-the-media type, even if one of the media is Twit­ter and he’s bury­ing him­self 144 char­ac­ters at a time. Kutcher’s not as bad (is any­body?), though I love that he thinks Twit­ter gives him some lever­age against those who’d dare to com­pro­mise his pub­lic cit­i­zenry. “It’s a beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ment,” he said recently. “You can take the con­trol back in your rela­tion­ship with the media. You can dic­tate your own view.” Yes, Ash­ton, because your encoun­ters with Lady Gaga or your upcom­ing film Killers — a roman­tic com­edy with that other persona-embattled young thing, Kather­ine Heigl — demand only the purest stan­dard of dissemination.

But just in case the lessons of Pat­tin­son are lost on them all, there may yet be hope for youth. Watch and see what hap­pens with Greta Ger­wig, the indie dar­ling whom Noah Baum­bach recruited as the female lead in his upcom­ing Ben Stiller dram­edy Green­berg. She already has acquired a sort of mini-legend from her con­certed, clothes-allergic “Mum­blecore” efforts like Han­nah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Week­ends. But Gerwig’s pres­ence oppo­site Stiller — and her charm in the pro­mo­tional realm over the last month — may por­tend a new kind of model for the acces­si­bil­ity of the earth­bound hot­tie. Which also brings to mind Alice Eve, whose She’s Out of My League directly addresses that very acces­si­bil­ity with a schlub played by Jay Baruchel; Eve has done just fine express­ing her con­cerns about objec­ti­fi­ca­tion with­out all the bale­ful moans and mopes.

And of course, there’s Pat­tin­son him­self — that new ambas­sador of extrater­res­trial beauty — who seems to get how fleet­ing, how absurd, how extra­or­di­nary it all really is. Oh, and how to make it work. Shouldn’t we all be so lucky?



Source Via RPLife Via thinkingofrob