Saturday, January 19, 2013

"I don't think people understand," she says.

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.
Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. She's sitting on a sectional sofa in workout clothes and a sweatshirt that hide her body, her knees folded beneath her.
The sacrifice's year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.
Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec. She's a screen saver on a teenage boy's laptop, a middle-aged lawyer's shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.
"It's so similar. It totally is," she says quietly.
God give me strength. The "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read" school of journalism is alive and well in Esquire. You can read the whole grisly car crash here if you're a glutton for punishment. I also can't help but observe in passing that our heroine's limbs seen to have been Photoshopped by someone with very curious ideas about human anatomy, possibly having never actually seen a flesh and blood woman.

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