FT Blog: Punked Fiction?

Demi Moore’s somewhat unbelievable monologue about using leeches as a beauty treatment on David Letterman on Monday night seems to the latest easily recognisable Pop Fiction stunt - but like the Paris Hilton one before her, I think it’s a bit of a Punked on the star themselves as well as the media.

When Paris Hilton traipsed around Los Angeles with a supposed Buddhist guru last month, I don’t think anyone took it for anything other than a stunt. Not necessarily a stunt for the then-unannounced TV show but a stunt all the same - because that’s all Paris Hilton really is, a series of publicity stunts. So many times she’s said something - like being a vegetarian or a born again Christian - or done something to get attention that she’s forgotten all about a few weeks later. These stunts aren’t because she has a sudden brief belief in a diet of pasta or God but because she wants people to think she’s deep, or nice to animals, or whatever she wants to think about that week.

Because of this, the guru thing was utterly believeable - “ooh look what Paris is trying to pull now. How dumb does she think we are?”. It wasn’t that we’re gullible that we accepted it; we accepted it because we have such a low opinion of La Pazza Hizzy. We didn’t think she’d found a new spirituality, we thought she’d just found a new temporary fashion accessory. The only thing seemed to reinforce the fact that Paris is shallow and publicity-craving. Was Paris poking fun at her own stunts? Possibly but if she’s aware of what she’s doing with it all, then she’s either incredibly self-deceiving or her whole life, not just this single stunt, is a joke on the media. If so, haha.

The same, to a slightly lesser extent, with Demi Moore - but at least Demi’s seemingly scripted monologue was closer to satire than a one-note joke. In my opinion (as a former satire writer), good satire (and I’m not saying Pop Fiction is trying to be good satire instead of just stunts) should start off reasonably believable and build on that to become ridiculous - like Jonathan Swift’s infamous ‘A Modest Proposal‘ or the celebrity public service announcement sections of Brass Eye - or like a lot of the Punked stunts. Demi sort of does that with the reference to her turpentine bath etc and she uses faux science (enzyemes etc) to reinforce the ideas - we’re so used to hearing scientific terms bandied about in adverts and other endorsements that we often accept them without thought: “oh scientists say so, then it must be true”.

But still, at the end of the day, a lot of people seem to be treating this Demi/leeches story as fact because we’re so used to hearing crazy things about celebrities and about Mrs Kutcher in particular. It’s poking fun at the public perception of them but at the same time reinforcing it: “Demi does do crazy things like that, therefore this is not completely unbelievable”.

Still, both of those are a lot more interesting that the other really one-note stunt on the show - Avril Lavigne sporting a pregnancy belly for a few days? Yawn.