Dear Gossips,
Yesterday, Maria excoriated the Bezos-Sanchez wedding in Venice in the greatest piece of journalism of our time. She read Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez and their tacky ass guests for filth, she exposed the shallow spectacle for what it is: A Divorced Man* Attempting To Recover, Yet Somehow Seeming More Divorced Than Ever. (*Credit Hunter Harris)
The Bezos-Sanchez wedding has entered its second day. The guests are zooming around Venice in boats. Leonardo DiCaprio looks like he doesn’t want his picture taken with these fools, yet he is still among them, just another fool. I saw a photo of Kim Kardashian and thought it was Lauren Sanchez for a second. Success?
A city besieged, a populace beset, a wedding bedamned. Remember when the uber-rich built libraries and universities and museums for the benefit of the masses so that they didn’t get their heads lopped off? Now they build mega-yachts and demand that historic bridges be dismantled so that they can pass. None shall pass! Stop ruining American democracy and build a f-cking library.
What irks me about this spectacle is that it is for me, but I do not want it. Jennifer Lopez’s wedding to Ben Affleck was over the top, a wretched display of conspicuous consumption, probably an environmental disaster on some level. But it did not irk me. In fact, I cheered it on. Why? Because I believe that Jennifer Lopez loves love. I believe she loves a big, beautiful wedding. I believe all that spectacle, no matter how much of it spilled over onto us, and thanks to her oversharing her personal diary in a movie, pretty much all of it spilled over onto us, was FOR HER. JLo’s wedding was ABOUT JLO. And so it was good and right and gross but in a Valentine’s Day kind of way. Cheesy, sure, but mostly harmless.
The Bezos-Sanchez wedding is not harmless. It wants what the Clooney-Alamuddin wedding had. But you can’t buy class, you can’t buy taste, and no matter what the commercials tell you, you can’t buy glamour. You can rent all of Venice and treat a great, historical city that happens to be incredibly environmentally delicate like a playground, but it will still be nothing more than a Party City facsimile of glamour, because these people are Without. Without taste, class, or glamour. Without friends. Without purpose except to hoard. That’s all this is. It’s Jeff Bezos’s hoard, displayed before the world.
Celebrities can often seem out of step with the world, especially when Times Are Tough. But celebrity is a product of the masses, it is born of our collection imagination. However much we resent it, we also promulgate it. There have always been celebrities, figures elevated in the collective imagination for their accomplishments, their beauty, their daring, their catastrophic decision making, their talent. But the cohort of Famous Rich did not emerge from our collective consciousness. They emerged from exploitation and policy failure, they linger against our will. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are not celebrities we chose, they’ve been thrust upon us.
The Bezos-Sanchez wedding is malevolent. It is a pox on all our houses. It is a show for the masses, a king preening before his resentful subjects. None of this is about love, it’s certainly not about Lauren Sanchez. It’s about Jeff Bezos and how he’s Not Divorced, how he definitely has friends who would hang out with him if he was a broke ass nobody. It’s not a spectacle, it’s a craptacle. It’s King Henry parading Anne Boleyn through the streets of London.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
