DISAPPEARING KNIGHTLEY
Dear Keira:
Welcome back. Most of us haven’t seen you since “Pirates of the Incomprehensible Plot Developments 3: The Curse of the Rushed Script,” and I always look forward to the next round of magazine cover puns, especially the ones that don’t make sense. Last week, when the front page of “Backstage” screamed, “Day for Knightley,” I thought: that is so perfect. Because you are just so pertinent to a discussion of François Truffaut’s much-loved 1973 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.
You and I have a long history. Five years ago I stepped out of the 7:15 p.m. showing of “Bend It Like Beckham” on a cloud of wonderment. I was thinking, er, who was that blonde girl with the dancing eyebrows and the mischievous underbite? (Also I wondered: could I get arrested for noticing her?)
In 2003, when that giant billboard of your face next to Johnny Depp’s and Geoffrey Rush’s stretched over half of 42nd Street, you nearly caused my death under the wheels of an M104 bus. I watched “Love, Actually” later in 2003. Also in 2004, 2005 and 2006. You know the guy who films you constantly when he is supposed to be filming his best mate, your husband? You know how he comes up to your door and holds up that placard saying, “TO ME, YOU ARE PERFECT?” I am that guy, Keira, except I don’t happen to have your address.
Love knows no limits, Keira. In 2005, I sat through “The Jacket” for you. It’s a movie about a guy played by Adrien Brody who is straitjacketed, placed in a morgue drawer and shot full of hallucinogens by a scientist, then finds himself zapped 15 years in the future, where he meets you. As I wrote in my review of the movie, “Give me a morgue drawer anytime if it’ll take me to Keira.”
In 2004, FHM (Forlorn Horny Males) dubbed you the 79th sexiest woman in the world. In 2005, you were No. 18, and in 2006 you were No. 1. In the language of Bugs Bunny, hubba-hubba and a-oo-ga.
I appreciate the way you were game to strip down to your 1930s netherwear and get in that fountain at the start of “Atonement.” So why was I covering my eyes during this scene?
The world loves you, Keira. But with each succeeding film you are giving us less of you to love. Are you on the Dr. Mengele Diet? You have become the width of this exclamation point! I don’t know who has lost more weight in the last few years: you or Jared from the Subway ads.
I know you enjoy appearing on the cover of Vogue and Bazaar and all, but here’s the dirty little secret of anorexia: it isn’t imposed on women by men. No guy has ever told his girlfriend, “Honey, I would like the experience of making love with you to be a little bit more like wrestling with a bag of rakes.”
Women are steered into anorexia by other women, and by gay men. If a woman has a slice of chocolate cake after lunch at the Conde Nast cafeteria (I know – not likely, but we speak of hypotheticals) all of the sad lollipop women around her, with their large heads and stick bodies, will secretly be thinking, either: Poor thing. She doesn’t have any self control at all, does she? She’ll never get a man. Or: Who does she think she is? She is actually enjoying food? She should suffer like me! Meanwhile, if there’s a straight man around (again, hypothetical), he’s thinking: Wow! A girl who doesn’t have scary food-related dementia! I must get her numerals!
Keira, you probably enjoy wearing the work of top designers to important awards shows such as the Oscars, and also to unimportant awards shows such as the Golden Globes. Are you aware that the ideal body type for the average couturier is the 105-pound cabana boy they remember from some long-ago summer in Ibiza? They don’t care if you get to be so thin you could hide behind a parking meter, because the less like a woman you look, the better.
You are an actress (or maybe a female actor – I don’t know how PC London is these days), so you will appreciate gratuitous posturing and meaningless allusions to “Hamlet.” It was Shakespeare who said, “Get thee to a nunnery,” but it is I who say, “Get thee to an all-you-can eat restaurant, preferably an Italian one.” There’s an Olive Garden across the street from here, in Times Square. I’ll be there tonight at six. I’m buying.
