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…remains under construction. One of the most thoughtful contributions so far is one of the earliest: Girl, Interrupted: The Life and Death of Brittany Murphy, posted Sunday afternoon on Jezebel:

It’s something we’ve watched in progress throughout this entire decade: young women who are held up as the next big thing (Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears) and then brushed aside or openly mocked after they no longer fit an expected mold. It is both a story of self-destruction and mass-destruction, the business of creating and destroying a star; sometimes it’s caused by internal forces, and sometimes it’s fed by the rest of the world.

Still, today even Jezebel jumped on the dirty-gossip tip, with Brittany Murphy and the Hollywood Starlet Syndrome:

In recent years, Murphy became one of those tabloid mainstays whose misfortunes, real or circumstantial, outweighed the impact of her actual career. On gossip blogs, the read on her life was brutal and efficient. A typical one, after news of her 2007 marriage to Simon Monjack, who had recently been arrested for staying in the country on an expired visa:

“Brittany Murphy is crazy and gets engaged like once a month, so if I was an illegal, I’d feel pretty good about my chances. She also never knew her father and used to be kinda fat. So all you have to do is tell her she looks good in her dress, and a little while later she’ll say there must be something about you because she “normally doesn’t do anal on the first date.”

Cruel and misogynistic, but not diverging terribly from the facts.

Ugly stuff, and it’s going to get uglier. So let’s remember the good times:

Goddamn she was funny.

David Schmader—former weed columnist and Stranger associate editor—is the author of the solo plays Straight and Letter to Axl, which he’s performed in Seattle and across the US. His latest...

14 replies on “The Ballad of Brittany Murphy”

  1. It’s really F8ing sad. She was a beautiful woman, but since in LA woman have to all be 5’9″ and 90 lbs, she developed an eating disorder aided by a drug habit and died. Sad.

  2. That blog post is unbelievably horrible. I’m amazed that I can still be shocked at how inhuman people can be. Sad, sad, sad. And we wonder why these women starve themselves. Thanks for posting those clips from Clueless. I adore her in that movie.

  4. Hortense (Jezebel’s weekend editor) consistently brings some of their best writing to sensitive issues, and is why I’m more likely to read on the weekends.

  5. Jezebel isn’t the one that said “she ‘normally doesn’t do anal on the first date'”, but a nasty little stain called “idon’tlikeyouinthatway.com”. I’ve run across them before; that’s typical of their oeuvre. Hating celebs, and saying repulsive things about them, is a big industry now.

    It’s not even really gossip; it’s a collective ritual hoping to bring down the next Anna Nicole, or someone, in the most gruesome way imaginable. We all do it; I do it. Think of all the times you’ve casually said something about Paris Hilton or somebody. But that’s why we watch: we WANT them to make a sex tape, say something stupid or racist on TV, get in a car accident, die of a drug OD.

    Especially the hot girls. America as a culture today thrives on watching hot girls suffer.

  7. every site keeps harping on the shitty, forgettable movies she made and ignoring her greatest, most iconic achievement, her brilliant performance as Luanne on King of the Hill for the last 14 years.

  8. dude you grabbed the first clip results on youtube when you searched for CLUELESS and they are not the best. You’re a virgin who can’t drive.

  9. 8: Dude, you’re full of shit. These are exactly the clips I’ve been hoping to find since Sunday (when they were nowhere to be found on YouTube, at least by me). Thanks for playing.

  11. saturday night i wanted to watch clueless but ended up eating pizza in the bathtub with a bunch of friends and my cat instead. when we woke up the next morning, she was gone. sad.

    so i watched it last night while i was drunk. it was bittersweet. she’s so great in it, it’s sad that she had to become a replaceable part in the hollywood machine.

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