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Why stars name babies Moxie, Moses and Apple
Posted in honor of the placenta eating whackjob's blessed event.It's a measure of what we have come to expect from celebrities to consider that if Henry Fonda were alive and having children today, it would seem as likely for him to name his daughter, say, Hanoi, as simply to call her Jane. I dunno. Traitorous Commie Bitch Fonda kinda sings. It seems almost unimaginable for any 21st-century movie star to send his children out among the Hollywood elite equipped with ordinary names like Michael, Eric, Joel and Peter, as Kirk Douglas once did. This point was driven home again last week, when Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Chris Martin, the frontman of the band Coldplay, named their newborn son Moses. Moses? That's a lot of pressure...Who's your Messiah now, ya little bastard!!! It was an unlikely enough name for a baby boy born in 2006, but perhaps less startling than the much discussed (and mocked) handle his sister, Apple, born two years ago, will carry through life. Hopefully Gwyneth has already made the financial arrangements for her lifelong therapy. And this possibly payback to her parents for naming her Gwyneth... Not that a name like Apple Martin stands out among celebrity children anymore. The director Peter Farrelly plucked that very name for his daughter before Apple Martin came along. Even that name seems drab compared with Hollywood baby names like Pilot Inspektor, cooked up by Jason Lee, the star of "My Name Is Earl," Oh, yeah. Big, biiiiiig star... or Banjo, the inspiration of the "Six Feet Under" star Rachel Griffiths, or Moxie CrimeFighter, a name chosen last year by the comedian and magician Penn Jillette for his daughter. Wait til she meets her future sister Pepsi Gangbanger. And I'll sue his ass off if he takes that one... Skeptics scoff at the mad rush by stars to come up with exotic baby names as another means for the attention-hungry to grab headlines. But psychologists and others who have worked with high-profile performers say that the naming of children can function as a window into a psyche. Perhaps subconsciously, they say, stars seize the opportunity of parenthood to express their obsessions, ambitions and inner quirks in a way that is, for a change, unscripted and not stage-managed by publicists. Ah, yes. The "all about me" thing. Well, I am just so shocked... Mr. Jillette, for example, managed to satisfy a number of interests and objectives when he and his wife, Emily, gave their daughter her highly individual name. "You're likely to be the only one in any normal-size group with that name," Mr. Jillette said by e-mail, adding, " 'Moxie' is a name that was created by an American for the first national soft drink and then went on to mean 'chutzpah,' and that's nice." Besides, Moxie CrimeFighter fits right into the creative world. "Everyone I know with an unusual name loves it," he wrote. "It's only the losers named Dave that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think. They're named Dave." Remember that Penn when Moxie tries to run you down in her Mercedes when she's about 13 and on another coke binge... Not all performers present their decisions in such terms. "Apples are so sweet, and they're wholesome, and it's biblical," Ms. Paltrow said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2004. "And I just thought it sounded so lovely and clean." ("Moses" meanwhile is a song that Mr. Martin wrote for Ms. Paltrow in 2003.) Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww... But while middle-class parents increasingly trade in standard names like Karen and Joseph for fancier ones like Madison and Caleb, movie stars seem compelled to push the baby naming further. The names may be merely distinctive (say, Maddox, Angelina Jolie's Cambodian-born adopted son) or bizarre, like Makena'lei Gordon, Helen Hunt's daughter, inspired by a place name in Hawaii. Celebrities may not so subtly be saying that for them ordinary rules need not apply. "Subtly", my ass... If celebrities are the new American aristocracy, the exotic baby name can sometimes function as the equivalent of a royal title, a way for a privileged caste to bestow the power of its legacy on future generations. God, I can't wait for computer generated animation to put these folks out of business. "There's a sense of 'I'm special, I'm different, and therefore my child is special and different,' " said Jenn Berman, a clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills, who has worked with actors. "It's unconscious, but they think, 'We're a creative family, you have the potential to be creative, so here, I bestow you with the name 'Joaquin,' " Dr. Berman said. Or his brother, "River". Who died of a heroin overdose outside Johnny Depp's Viper Room. So I guess a whacky name isn't always your expressway to the big time. As artists, actors often consider it their duty to shake up assumptions, defy conventions and push the frontiers of the possible. To settle for a tedious name for the child would almost be a form of spiritual surrender, said Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist, who has also worked with Hollywood clients. And screw sentencing the kid to a life of merciless taunting. This is about ME, dammit! "They're expressing their creativity, and they're also expressing their fear," Dr. Fischoff said. "It would be very embarrassing for people to think of them as normal." Don't worry. We don't. Posted by: tu3031 2006-04-20 |
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