That's right Gwyneth, you take your heart and soul and unused lingerie (still in packets marked in pounds, shilling and pence) out of this apartment with its rococo façade and into an altogether cosier house, a real one stocked with cut price crockery and last night's well cooked leftovers, plaid couches that swallow you and tartan beds you can swim in. We don't want you here anyway. Not because I'm a stereotyped completely two dimensional bastard whose neuroses are convenient to the plot and suspiciously photogenic. Speaking to myself in a mirror indeed. I must be mad, or a really bad scriptwriter. Or maybe the director, I mean, as a novelist I should be able to make things fall into place, really fall with intense gravity as if there was no stopping it once the ball began rolling, but I'm not the one with the funny small seat and the fellating yes-men. Instead my life just clunks forward and backward, too much like clockwork to be steam-driven. How can a passionate breakup be so utterly mundane? Is it me? It's me, right?
Well, it's certainly not you, you big American star. I was speaking to your dialect coach and your accent is absolutely marvellous, apparently. Your performance is impeccable, your looks radiant, and while you glow, other people sweat. But you're so empty. Director's in your front seat, but he's lost in one of these damned London suburbs with cobblestoned streets that Americaners would like to think litter England like McDonalds franchises. You know, the ones that keep curling over themselves. Very boring. You can harp on in whichever accent you choose, whichever Gwyneth you want to be, America's favourite virgin high priestess of the No Sex Before Marriage brigade, or the British Helen with either short or long hair, freshly cruel attitude or limpidly subservient sexiness, and you'll still be breathlessly enthusiastic about the novelty of your life, that wonderful, crazy, weird twist. Oh, please. It only lasts for a minute, and it's about the only thing that stops the movie from being a soppy love story. A love story that any adolescent could write. And your death! How melodramatic, and expected. So much for novelty.
As for your partner, John Hannah, the great big dweeb has totally lost it. At least I'm still having a tortured psychologically messy affair with that American woman, a hardball playing bitch in love. You've opted for the fairytale, the neat ending. And neat endings are so boring. You'd think that I would have known that, but I seem to have lost hold of it in the endless boozings and bonkfests that so distract me from my writing. Your boyfriend, though, is a work of art. That is, fictional. Perfect looks, perfect sense of humour (although regurgitating Monty Python doesn't work as well onscreen as it does in a real dinner party), perfect personality, even perfect faults - a separated wife, about which he is so torn up about that he doesn't tell you. I could puke. Remarkably convenient, wouldn't you think? And you do think, I presume.