The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.
That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be to complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.
Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), we're rooting for them both to stay beautiful distractions and teach their new neighbors how to relax.
