GQ writer apologizes for insulting Twilight and Robert Pattinson fans

If there were ever a more (self-proclaimed) "snarky" commentator on the fandom of Remember Me and The Twilight Saga: New Moon star Robert Pattinson, this might just be it.

Said Alex Blimes on June 3rd,

[B]land compliments and gushy endearments aside, no one has really been able to explain how he differs from the other beautiful, intelligent, gifted young actors out there. As I say, I've no argument with any of your points. Pattinson really is quite a guy, and I join you in wishing him all the best, I really do. But still, did he just get lucky, or is there more to it that that? Perhaps we'll never know.

Meanwhile, there's something else that's bothering me. I'm posting this stuff on GQ.COM, a site aimed primarily at British men. I take it you're not all regular visitors, so how does it work? Do you sit by your terminals with your hands down your pants, staring at your Twilight screensavers and waiting for your "Robert Pattinson" Google Alerts to ping, drawing your attention to some tossed off slandering of your hero's name? In the absence of a sexy vampire in your lives, what the hell is eating you women?

After said post, as you might imagine, Blimes was inundated with answers to his questions. One such answer was from a pseudonym commentator named "Fluffynuts" (who, by the way, in the original post caused Blimes to initially state that he would "shut up in [his] face").

Said he/she,

Mr. Bilmes's wide-eyed innocense is hysterical. His magazine is part of the media system and your job is to create hype. And people buy into hype all the time, whether it be an actor, fashion, cars, diets, etc. Obviously there are people out there who see Robert Pattinson as Edward and couldn't give a flying fig about the man behind him. There are people who wouldn't know him from a hole in the ground had it not been for Twilight. There are people who like him in SPITE of the fact that he played Edward. At the end of the day, I believe that plenty of women have said it best: When it comes to what women want and find attractive, men somehow can be completely in the dark. Is it a logic thing? That men want tangible assets for the objects of their desire? Legs, boobs, nice hair even if the only thing holding it up is about as interesting and trite as a wet noodle? Are women less shallow and find unconventional things attractive if there is some substance there? A sense of humor, intelligence, self-deprication, and what might pass as a hint of something more than a shell? All I know is that the men (and women) who blather on and on and on about how they don't "get" it sound just as vapid and vacant as the fans who can't put a coherent thought together on the guy. There are a million cliches for it. There's no accounting for taste. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And this one: An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance. Good, bad or somewhere in between, Robert is going to be faultless to some and irreparably faulted to others. It's the difference between recognizing the human element and simply accepting an image. I wrote something flippant to GQ to answer what I thought was a flippant question. Alex Bilmes obviously wants hits more than he wants enlightenment and I don't think there is any one thing a fan can say or a thousand things a thousand fans can say that will give him the answer that he's looking for. What he fails to understand is that the answer to his question is just as complex as the man he's asking about appears to be. As far as my referenced sign off- I find it ironic that the only comment Mr. Bilmes chose to make an example of is a quotation from one of Mr. Pattinson's films. And NOT the one with the laughably sparkly vampire.

The very next day, a new post came from Blimes, apologizing (sort of) for his vapid remarks about Pattinson's fandom. Said he on June 4th,

I feel I owe you all an apology. You're right: what I wrote yesterday was snarky and dishonest and mostly designed to rile you and I'm not proud of it. I'm sorry.

The truth is I am genuinely curious about Robert's appeal. I'm a heterosexual man, 36 years old, gainfully employed, in a relationship. We simply don't have these kind of obsessions, and I for one find them hard to understand. I mean, I think Megan Fox is attractive, but I don't spend much time thinking about her. Certainly don't feel the need to communicate with fellow Meganites, to defend her when she's maligned, to shout my love from the message-board rooftops.

This is not in any way to belittle your feelings for Robert or denigrate your activities online or off-. None of this is meant to sound condescending. I'm a person who considers himself reasonably intelligent and who spends his working life monitoring, reporting on and interacting with celebrity culture. I'm fascinated by fame, and famous people, and drawn to them for reasons I don't fully understand myself. So I can empathise with your love for Robert, even if I wonder at its intensity.

We all know his antecedents, of course, from James Dean to Leonardo DiCaprio. There's nothing new about the worship of screen idols, but it's been a long time since I've seen anything approaching the strength of emotion that surrounds Robert. That's why I'm so curious.

While a debasement of Blimes' commentary is probably not in order for purposes of this discussion, it is a wonder why, after all that Pattinson has accomplished and looks to accomplish in the near (and, hopefully, distant) future, one such as him - a so-called prober of all things celebrity - could not understand the nature of Pattinson's appeal. At any rate, the apology was issued.

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