LITMIR.BIZ

       My Green-Eyed Monster

      Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director who said ‘moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.’ I want to have Charlie’s laidback attitude to fucking about, fucking around, acting like an overgrown boy. I envy his ability not to care more than anything. I just can’t help myself caring, in some small part, about everything. I like to call it passion, a passion that seeps through me and won’t be silenced on so many topics.

      Phil has it too, the ability not to care about the little things, to take life easily, and let the troubles fall away from him as he strolls through his years. I pretend that I am shocked, but in truth I am only angry that I can’t do the same. Phil’s easiness doesn’t seem quite so mindless, or destructive, mostly because I am not having a relationship with him, and his actions can’t hurt me. Charlie’s still do.

      But sexual envy is, of course, not the only kind. We envy other people’s lives, mostly the lives with more money in them, that seem less like hard work. The general populace spends most of its time envying one small band of break-out characters, who are managing to escape the humdrum existence of the rest of us with our money worries and failed relationships. We envy them, and criticize them, and throw abuse in their general direction, and are repelled at their sexual shenanigans, while secretly, and not so secretly, we all want what they’ve got. We all seem to want to be famous. Is it just the money that we want, or the ability to make ourselves look prettier with the cosmetic surgery that they can afford? Being famous seems to me to be a lot of hard work, so it isn’t their schedule that we want – how many of us have to work a twenty-hour day on a regular basis? Our moral outrage when another one of them is arrested for mucking about with fully-grown adults at midnight on Hampstead Heath when there are honestly no kids about is in most parts envy, and that’s what we have to understand. These most beautiful powerful creatures that move about in a world we glimpse but can never touch have a different set of rules to us, rules that apply once you have got past the celebrity gates, and not been blackballed for wanting it too much, or being undeserving. They don’t have to worry about what their boss will think, or their friends. They don’t have to worry about the norms of our society, they are not applicable to them. They move in a world of the most beautiful, desirable creatures on earth, all of whom offer themselves up for the taking. And they dip their fingers in whichever pies suit for the day. A man here, a woman there, they are not the ugly Joes we pass on the street, they look like angels. Given a world where nothing is frowned upon, where you are powerful enough to move from person to person without fear or shame or recrimination, where your sexuality, in private at least, is not an issue, wouldn’t you do the same? If you truly had the ability to sleep with all of these angels, would you turn them down based on the fact that you couldn’t have kids together, or some ancient book says you can’t? I don’t think so.

      Of course as we envy their lives, and their cash and their cars, we never stop to think that they envy us. They envy us our freedom to move from our front door to our car door without having a camera stuck in our face, but in some way their huge amounts of cash are supposed to compensate for this. They lusted for fame and therefore they deserve to have the flashlight of our envy in their faces every minute of their waking lives. I’m not sure, when you actually think long and hard about it, what is more valuable – the cars, or the privacy. I’d like a Ferrari and a holiday home on the Med, but I don’t want my sexual moves to be plastered all over the papers for my mother to read. We can only stop our insane jealousy dressed up as outrage when we decide that we are happy with what we are, that we are where we want to be, and doing all the things we want to do. But who is? Just those famous elusive souls. And maybe they aren’t so happy after all, because whenever they slip up, everybody gets to hear about it.