How boring is this story about the Beckhams Living to seek through the life of wealthy families, pure avant-garde
More has been written and said about (heterosexual nuclear) families than one could possibly imagine. Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen wrote about them, as did Natalia Ginzburg and Philip Roth. It may well be the most discussed topic of all, second only to love and romantic relationships. That doesn’t mean we’re tired of it, quite the opposite. We still love family dramas, and if they involve the famous and the powerful, even better. One example? Just think of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, and their (constantly speculated about, never fully clarified) fallout with Kate Middleton and Prince William, with Queen Elizabeth, Charles, and the entirety of Buckingham Palace. Now, among the great pop(-ular) culture families under the magnifying glass, there are also the Beckhams.
What’s going on between Brooklyn Beckham and his family
What happened? Honestly, everything and nothing. The Beckhams, a collective unit made up of mum Victoria, dad David, and children Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper, in order of age, are one of the public’s favorite families. For years, they were talked about as an alternative royal family. Their family photos delighted our feeds; we loved knowing more about them. So much so that they even produced a documentary just for us. Remember? The one with the meme of Victoria denying she grew up wealthy. And then another couple. Not even Taylor Swift has given us this much material.
Then one day, the spell broke. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when. Cynics trace the rift between the eldest son, Brooklyn Beckham, and his parents back to the day he decided to marry Nicola Peltz in 2022. Others dig deeper, finding something unsettling in the way the family seems to absorb all of their sons’ girlfriends. Yesterday, Brooklyn himself poured fuel on the fire of speculation with a series of Instagram stories (white text on a black background) in which, among other things, he wrote: “I don’t want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled: for the first time in my life, I’m standing up for myself. My parents have controlled the narrative about our family in the media my entire life. Performative social media posts, family events, and inauthentic relationships have always been part of the reality I was born into. Recently, I’ve seen with my own eyes the lengths they’re willing to go to in order to spread countless lies in the media, often at the expense of innocent people, just to preserve their facade. But I believe the truth always comes out,” and so on. In short, Brooklyn Beckham resents his parents for trying to interfere in his married life and for having raised him under the umbrella of a precise, tightly controlled, fake, constructed brand that made him feel unable to fully express himself.
What do we know? Factions and parasociality that won’t go away
Needless to say, social media exploded. Some people analyze the text, others hunt down photos from the occasions mentioned by the eldest son to do fact-checking, some take sides, and others, repeating a pattern we’ve already seen and that is frankly also a bit misogynistic, cast Nicola Peltz as the goddess of discord who shattered the family idyll, coming between mother and son like a real viper. The truth, however, is that there is no single truth: there are versions of what happened, layers, cover-ups, distortions, Instagram posts that embellish and beautify it. There is fiction, there is the Beckham brand, and there is the desire to break free from it and create a new one. What seems to be missing - at least for some - is the ability to discern and understand that what we see on social media is storytelling, always and without exception, especially when it comes to famous people. On the other side, there is parasociality. We lose sight of the fact that we don’t actually know these people, that following them on social media doesn’t mean having a relationship with them, that we’re watching them the way we’d watch a Saturday afternoon movie on TV when we’re bored. From this perspective, the situation becomes dull. Are we really playing along with two now-distinct family units that simply want to assert themselves in the public eye, providing us with an endless supply of publicity? Don’t we feel used? Not even a little? Maybe we should, if only to scale back the speculation and the amount of energy spent untangling knots that aren’t ours, about which we know only what they want us to know.