Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Gwyneth Paltrow: Totem Of The Hipster Class Wars

Posted on | July 22, 2010 | No Comments

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Image by nyer82 via Flickr

Before I had ever lived outside the East Coast, I was well familiar with Gwyneth Paltrow‘s life work and family scenario. I had frequently visited Williamstown Theatre Festival, founded by her dad, and my father’s favorite access was Blythe Danner, Paltrow’s mother. Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite movies, won an Oscar both for Paltrow and Tom Stoppard, a legend in theater circles who’s still seen as a playwright based on somewhat overwrought academese outside of theater circles. The Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production of Travesties is among the best experiences in theater I’ve ever had.

Being an internet generation product, I was used to making fun of celebrities being as much a part of my cultural diet as theater, art, and film, a reality probably on the “worse” side of “for better or worse.” That meant that things like The Hater at the AV Club, Gawker, and Defamer were godsends when they first arrived: the paradigms already well established, and here were smart, young outsiders who could take on pretty much anyone without a need for access or discretion.

What that also meant was I got to see which battles were being fought by those young outsiders, and it exposed the uglier sides of my generation. Right now hipsterland in Brooklyn is a mix of the kids of upper-to upper-middle-class suburbanites from the NYC area and kids of upper-middle-to-lower class individuals from the rest of the country who managed to get a valuable college degree that’s proving less valuable over time. In hipsterlands in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other places, the number of wealthy suburbanites shrinks. In just about all those places however, Gwenyth Paltrow is disproportionately picked out as a celebrity target. More than Paris Hilton, more than Lindsay Lohan, the snickering at Gwenyth Paltrow scares me to death.

Lohan and Hilton have precedents, at least. Lindsay Lohan was the child star shielded by the Disney machine abandoned once her coke-addled antics made her less profitable. Paris Hilton was the celebrity for the sake of celebrity, a purer distillation something that was around at least since the mid-90s with Pamela Lee, and hence all of my media-active life. Gwyneth Paltrow however, is not a celebrity for the sake of celebrity. She has talent, though the misogynist anonymous criticisms of that talent are no different from any other female celebrity. She engages in several other antics of celebrities, such as flavor-of-the-month religious trends, her own fashion line, crying woe-is-me about haters with little sympathy from the rest of the world. I get that. But the hatred of Paltrow is not a product of her behavior, which is the same as any Bradgelina/Ben Affleck/JLo/Tom Cruise monstrosity. The hatred of her is because of her roots.


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Keep in mind that Angelina Jolie and many other celebrities who are mocked come from rich families, many of them second or third generation Hollywood products. Paltrow is a strictly high-art world product, from the east coast elite circles whose hypocritical snobbishness was exposed in the ’70s and ’80s burned out at least two subsequent generations from high art. Paltrow went from a theater royalty family to another US Weekly cover model, which for many people my age is a much greater sin than other US Weekly types. Unlike Angelina Jolie, who continued the batshit celebrity legacy of her rich father, or Paris Hilton, who embraced the same bad behavior, however self-manufactured, as any spoiled rich kid, Paltrow was the product of a cultured, respected family who should have known better. The hatred of Paltrow is based less on her behavior and more on her behavior being seen as a wasted opportunity of a privilege of cultural, not monetary, value.

If you were raised in the middle of nowhere and would’ve killed to be raised in the world that Paltrow was raised in, I get why she’s so particularly hateable. Perhaps that’s why I’ve seen more hatred of her from Chicago/Midwestern circles, where class tension is a more public problem than in other urban locations. But most of the people who hate her the most have solid liberal arts degrees and are living in cultural meccas—in other words, they’ve accomplished by themselves the upbringing Paltrow was handed.

Yet these people, most of my contemporaries, will never be as successful as Paltrow, even if a good many may have more talents. The doors Paltrow could enter from birth have been closing rapidly, and the closing of those doors, combined with the unprecedented number of Americans trying to fit through them, is harboring a lot of resentment, frustration, and rage that has yet to be sparked, in part because of the futility anyone sees of potential sparks. This is the underlying forces of resentment epitomized by Paltrow, but much larger than any one person can contain.

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