{"id":42502,"date":"2013-03-06T14:14:01","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T14:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=42502"},"modified":"2013-03-06T14:50:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T14:50:40","slug":"why-everyone-hates-anne-hathaway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/why-everyone-hates-anne-hathaway\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Everyone Hates Anne Hathaway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Since the Oscars there have been dozens of articles I\u2019ve noticed links to, and some I\u2019ve skimmed or read, in different kinds of publications, about how \u201ceveryone\u201d (or \u201cEVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET\u201d<\/a>) can\u2019t stand Anne Hathaway, and I haven\u2019t been able to make heads or tails of it. (See The New York Times<\/i><\/a>, Huffington Post<\/i><\/a>, Slate<\/i><\/a>, The Daily Beast<\/i><\/a>, Express<\/i><\/a>, CNN<\/i><\/a>, and Salon<\/i><\/a> for just a few of the elaborate theories.) Usually, offscreen shortcomings of movie stars don\u2019t really affect my judgment of their work (or, more important, of their onscreen personae, which is a far more ephemeral, elusive, valuable, indefinable quality); I didn\u2019t stop liking Woody Allen 15 years ago when we all learned that the real man wasn\u2019t the moral paragon he played (and wrote) onscreen, and I don\u2019t have any problem enjoying Tom Cruise or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis movies. (It\u2019s true that Willis isn\u2019t as egregious an example as those other three but he just seems like he\u2019s generally kind of a jerk and the Kevin Smith anecdotes<\/a> about directing him seem to bear this out.) I have no problem enjoying Clint Eastwood\u2019s onscreen presence even though he supported Ross Perot and talks to furniture on TV.<\/p>\n

But this is different. I’m in the same boat: she drives me nuts. And I haven’t seen most of her movies, which usually makes me suspend judgment, and I thought she was totally fantastic in The Dark Knight Rises<\/i> (after her very first scene, I whispered to my friend, “I rescind all criticism.”) And the clip of her singing that big song seemed very good to me (and I generally don’t go in for staggeringly consequential Broadway numbers); I was fascinated by the “live singing” gimmick and actually came very close to going ahead and seeing the movie, before I came to my senses. Even Joan Rivers let me down: I thought she, if anyone, could nail it, however crassly; could put her finger on what nobody seems able to define, and I listend with bated breath when she was asked what she thought of Hathaway. But Rivers whiffed it, and just made gagging noises; even the queen of horrible putdowns (who, I remember, called Mondale and Ferraro “Fritz and tits” 29 years ago) came up empty.<\/p>\n

But last night, I finally figured out what’s wrong with Hathaway: it comes down to one word. I gave in and followed a link to another think piece<\/a> about Hathaway’s Oscar night behavior, wherein she’s quoted as responding to a question about getting married and then winning the Academy Award. And she said it was “the cherry on top of a wonderful, wonderful dish of vegan ice cream.”<\/p>\n

And that’s it<\/i>\u2014that one word explains the whole thing. Not “a dish of ice cream,” which is a fairly straightforward conclusion to the frequently-used “cherry” metaphor: the cherry is something extra, the better thing after the (more important) good thing. (Olympic athletes talk this way; everybody understands.) And not just a “wonderful, wonderful” dish of ice cream, denoting excitement, breathlessness, winsomeness, and other good things that we like to see when people win things and are charmingly flustered. Vegan<\/i> ice cream.<\/p>\n

Because Anne Hathaway is a vegan<\/i>, and she’s going to make sure that, while she’s on television, she’ll use the opportunity to proselytize for her cause. (Which I have nothing against, either in terms of form or content: I had no trouble with Marlon Brando’s stunt<\/a> with Sacheen Littlefeather or, especially, Michael Moore’s challenge<\/a> to George W. Bush. I like<\/i> it when the Oscars are “politicized.”) But look what she did: she stuck that carefully-considered word\u2014totally unnecessary for her simile: it’s ice cream<\/i>; it tastes good and you put cherries on it no matter what kind it is\u2014into the middle of a sentence that was supposed to be so natural and off-the-cuff that she said “wonderful” twice. She’s “gushing,” but she’s also making a point.<\/p>\n

And that’s the whole ball game; that’s what’s wrong with her. Not only is she condescending to me and everyone listening (because she figures that this is an appropriate opportunity to advertise and to advocate her dietary preferences); she’s insulting us (mildly<\/i> insulting us, admittedly) because, like somebody who “accidentally” name-drops their school or their job title or salary, she thinks we won’t notice what she’s doing; she genuinely believes that it will come across as an inadvertent nuance in her excited word-flow, and not as a carefully placed node of self-aggrandizement or advocacy.<\/p>\n

I don’t know about you but I hate<\/i> people who do that: brag or lecture in a way that I’m not supposed to notice. So that’s what’s wrong with Anne Hathaway; the subject is now closed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the Oscars there have been dozens of articles I\u2019ve noticed links to, and some I\u2019ve skimmed or read, in different kinds of publications, about how \u201ceveryone\u201d (or \u201cEVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET\u201d) can\u2019t stand Anne Hathaway, and I haven\u2019t been able to make heads or tails of it. (See The New York Times, Huffington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42502"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42502"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42516,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42502\/revisions\/42516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}