For all the ease with which one can and does deride Gwyneth Paltrow, there is something stealthily brilliant about her, a 41-year-old in that decade during which an actress' career falls off a cliff, standing atop a thriving alternative career she has built from the ground up.
It's odd that she is cast as such a pallid, drippy figure, when the new market in which she competes is, in some ways, tougher than the movies. Martha Stewart, the original lifestyle guru, is in trouble; even Oprah is flagging. But here is Gwyneth, surging ahead with her cookbooks and fashion lines and even a travel app, understanding intuitively how to make the web work for her, as so many of us must do these days.
To this end, the already much-mocked announcement of her separation from rock-star husband Chris Martin by way of her Goop website – and its newsletter, and a mobile alert – is a canny move: if your personal life has to be the subject of mass interest and internet speculation, you might as well get a traffic boost for your business out of it. Who needs a publicist when you can simply post a status update online? (Even if a second set of eyes on the headline "Conscious Uncoupling" might have been useful.)
"It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate," begins the note read 'round the world over the last day and a half. Gwyneth goes on to explain, mysteriously, that “in many ways” the couple is “closer than we've ever been” after 10 years of a marriage now ending.
The message concludes, as celebrities in strife tend to, with a pointless call for privacy. But the whole exercise confirms what we've known for a while: that behind the wan exterior, old Gwyny is sharp as a tack and intuitively understands online culture in a way her rivals perhaps do not – that for all the blather about privacy invasion and over-sharing, in certain circumstances, the power of your own social network allows you to retain some measure of control, no matter how famous you are.
It also makes Gwyneth more human – well, ballpark. If the Facebook status is a way for mere mortals to announce a breakup to their social group, "Conscious Uncoupling" is merely a turbo-charged version of that very modern impulse. Gwyneth has no option but to live her life in public, but as the non-famous increasingly choose to follow the same path, the gap between Them and Us may be narrowing.
Of course, celebrities will always claim to have insights unavailable to the rest of us – in this case, the implication that giving real thought to a separation when there are children involved is a radical new approach to ending your relationship. Conscious uncoupling as opposed to what, exactly? Tripping over and divorcing by accident?
Still, I think it's largely a win for Paltrow. A few months ago, Graydon Carter killed Vanity Fair's Gwyneth take-down, and we should grab this opportunity to follow his example. After all, she did once say that “the Met Gala sucked”. And she was surprisingly great in that cameo on Glee.
And Gwyneth is nothing if not resourceful. Visitors to Goop are offered all the delights we have come to expect from the actor: fashion tips, health advice, ingenious food-free recipes.
Alright, you have to block out the memory of quotes like the one she gave to the New York Daily News a few years back – that she would “rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup”.
But making this announcement on a website where she is also selling things is like a tax on our prurience. Maybe you went to her site hungry for salacious detail and came away with a $315 throw cushion. In which case, serves you right – and bravo Goop!
There are limits to how much credit one can give Gwyneth Paltrow, of course, and despite her status as taste-maker to millions, I don't think the term “conscious uncoupling” is going to take off. It's like that scene from Mean Girls: “Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen!”
