I am happy to wager that the celebrity chatshow is the worst product of contemporary popular culture. Amid all the slop and dreck we manage to produce – the straight-to-Netflix movies, the soulless remakes of classic TV shows, the twee true crime podcasts – there is nothing more immiserating than the late-night sofa and stars forced to occupy it.
Given this, I think we are supposed to be very impressed with Graham Norton’s show on Friday night. Wow! Substance emerges at last from the forced anecdotes and PR gambits. Here’s what happened: Saoirse Ronan (promoting Blitz) sits between Paul Mescal (promoting Gladiator II) and Eddie Redmayne (promoting Jackal) with Denzel Washington (also Gladiator II) on Paul’s far side. Some bonhomie and chatter leads Redmayne to explain that he was taught to use his phone as a self-defence weapon, which leads Mescal to ask: “Who’s actually going to do that, though?”
It’s boring on paper, and it’s boring on the screen. But here’s the glittering moment – Saoirse Ronan cuts across the men, amused at the concept of self-defence, and says: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.” There is a moment of awkward silence before Ronan breaks the tension with a kind of fake sassy “Amirite, ladies?” gesture to the audience. Cue applause and immediate internet virality. This is great news for Ronan and her movie, and pretty good news for all the blokes too: more eyes on the stars means more cinema tickets sold.
We are supposed to be basking in the feminist triumph of it all. Classic men! Joking about something women have to take very seriously. And how wonderful of Saoirse not to tolerate it. She is right that this is something women think about. I am especially sympathetic to the fact that she struggled to get a word in edgeways, the men flanking her had no compunction to talk across her as though she was not there. Marina Hyde is full of praise: “Oooooof. The look on the other actors’ faces after Saoirse has detonated this chat-icide bomb is hilariously mesmerising.” (Really?)
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But watching this clip as it circulated the internet (accompanied by similar “yass kween” style plaudits), I was forced to interrogate what I really thought about it. And it is this: the lighthearted joshing between the men is fine, it’s a chatshow. The landing zone is polite banalities, not what observers might call “truth bombs” or “mic-drop moments”.
The entire format exists in service of the celebrities on the sofa. Ronan benefits from her great moment. So do the men she supposedly showed up. The whole chat show industrial complex is noxious and nauseating: fake conversations, risible attempts to display authenticity, celebrities using their personhood to sell us something. The participants are as culpable for it as the organisers.
And it led me to one of my favourite soap boxes. These people are actors – very good ones, as well. Their entire job is to occupy the mind and body of someone else, not to be interesting themselves. In fact, I would make a bet that actors trend “less interesting” than almost anyone else, precisely because of their jobs. But somehow we are all locked in a weird mutual lie, whereby we pretend for some reason that these people are beacons of insight; that they are more interesting than the roles they play. Having watched plenty of Graham Norton and the like across the years, it’s patently obvious this is not the case.
This is the Faustian pact they chose. To be impossibly beautiful and maintain perpetual youth, to be rich and famous and adored and admired, comes with trade-offs. By making a career out of being someone else, they necessarily forsake their “voice”, sublimating themselves at the altar of hollow stardom.
As Hyde rightly pointed out, we can only assume there are PR teams carefully constructing statements for the men of the couch, so when they are asked about speaking over Ronan and not taking women’s anxieties seriously, they will be ready with a perfectly sensitive answer. And the empty demoralising feedback loop continues apace – the charade that this is all about something more than simply selling movies.
If I had it my way, I would cancel it all. Not out of some intellectual haughtiness; that I would rather watch, say, Martin Amis tell stories on that stupid sofa. Trust me, I wouldn’t. But because we cannot keep lying to ourselves that there is value to be gleaned here. Hollywood is one of humanity’s greatest inventions; the value these actors add to the artistic realm cannot be overstated, their talent cannot be lauded enough.
But the whole conceit of the chat show – the vanity, the shallowness, the fake niceties, the bad acting, the pretend authenticity – is intolerable. Ronan was right, but it doesn’t matter: none of it is real, and we don’t have to debase ourselves by pretending a viral moment emerging from the artifice is some kind of great victory. Amirite, ladies?