Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winning actress and qualified electronic engineer:
Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning French actress, will not apologise over remarks she made describing the 9/11 attacks as a conspiracy and believes that the comments had been taken out of context and misunderstood…
Cotillard said that the towers were destroyed not as part of a terrorist plot, but because it would have been too expensive to rewire them. She also reheated an old conspiracy theory about the 1969 moon landing never having happened.
Of course, working in the entertainment industry does not disqualify Ms. Cottilard from having opinions, nor (heaven forbid) should she ever be restrained from expressing them. However, and equally, I am not disqualified from calling her an ignorant jackass. I hope she spends the rest of her career in French dinner-theatre emoting pointlessly before an audience of coughing, hawking, shouting, farting, senile old-age pensioners who are slupring down a mediocre bowl of bouillabaisse before shuffling home to die alone in a heatwave. How do you like them pommes, Ms. Cotillard?
I’m sure there’s a rational reason for her statements, such as “She’s picking up Radio Saturn on her bridgework.”
I think it’s the job. Movie people are surrounded by illusions and make-up all the time, so they are probably always looking for conspiracies and fakery, always trying to see how it was ‘really’ done. And being French (and thus having a grudge against history for favouring the Anglo-phone countries) can’t help either!
Bravo! I couldn’t agree with your sentiments more. Thank you for saying it.
I think the best part about “freedom of speech” (what we here on this side of the pond call ‘the first one’) is that it doesn’t differentiate between meaningful or downright seditious speech one way or the other…..
You can be just as stupid as you want to be. And really, what’s wrong with that?
I doubt actors are nuttier than other people. There are probably just as many/few moonbats in other professions, only they rarely get a chance to voice their opinions in the media.
I might share Mr Tremayne’s hope for Cotillard to experience career meltdown if I really cared about the political opinions of performing artists.
I don’t. So I wish the talented and eccentric Ms Cotillard a long, happy career. May she believe whatever weird thing she wants as long as she can deliver the goods in front of the camera.
I’ve been a student of moon conspiracy theories for years and it’s astonishing just how many apparently sensible people think it was all faked. I used to get upset about it but now I just direct people to http://www.badastronomy.com.
I think if someone from previous centuries visited the 21st century, they’d be dismayed that the huge spread of education and information actually appears to have made people more stupid.
A pity: I enjoyed her portrayal of Edith Piaf; such a shame to realise that there goes yet another luvvie with his or head full of nonsense.
Perhaps what she needs is for Sarko to give her right good seeing-to, if you know what I mean.
Seriously, though, she is free to say what she likes, just as the rest of us are free to decide that this woman is an idiot who cannot bring herself to realise that there are fundamentalist thugs out there trying to impose their own totalitarian system on us. Not that they’ll succeed, of course.
Well she’s certainly a creative moonbat, I hadn’t heard that one before. Rewiring. Huh.
The lady appears to have been sniffing the same substances as her subject, Edith Piaf. Perhaps Marion Cotillard should consider not immersing herself so deeply into her subject studies in future.
Either way she wins today’s moonbat award, complete with being forced to read the combined blogs of Monbiot and Toynbee every day for a year.
Just goes to show you can’t get a sparks in Manhatten for love or money…
And there is no way Ross & Rachel etc could have afforded those flats…
I think you mean “electrical engineer”.
Stupid is as stupid does though. Celebrities only have their reputation and talent to trade on, you’d think they’d be a bit more guarded on what they say in public.
Alisa,
There is natural selection. People in many professions are selected for some proved ability. They also need some connect to reality to survive, else they end up in an asylum.
Actors are exempt. Exempt from the need to posses any mental capabilities. There is no selection process that weeds out the nuts. On the contrary, a little excentricity helps in their profession.
I’ve not read her statement, but if it really is related to re-wiring costs I give her credit for the sheer looniness of it all. However, the moon-landings stuff is pretty old and dull.
One has to remember that these beliefs, while daft, are not greatly more daft than the belief that God created the world a few thousand years ago, or that what star sign you are allows your future to be predicted.
As I get older I’m getting used to the idea that perfectly nice people often hold a handful of bizarre opinions and prejudices. I’ve gone from being annoyed by these to being generally unconcerned – all part of life’s rich pattern etc.
J,
Just one thought. A few thousand years ago is a mere six orders of magnitude off what modern Cosmology says. And by the standards of Cosmology that’s not too bad. “Cosmologists – always in error, never in doubt”. Keep in mind that 100 years ago galaxies hadn’t been discovered and the actual age of the universe was an unasked question. Science had sort of settled on the idea of the universe as eternal. So, quite frankly, for the really big questions I don’t think religion has such a bad record. Certainly not compared to bullshit-mongers like Hawking or Linde or Guth who cheerfully promote utterly post-empirical science of the sort that would have Karl Popper developing high angular momentum in the grave.
You’re right about astrology though. I’m sure Pluto’s reclassification as a minor planet has prompted outpourings of epic shite from the astrological community. I have met people in that community and not a single one of them has even owned a telescope, much less knows how to align an equitorial mount. I type with my TAL Mizar just in the edge of my view.
My name’s Nick and I’m a recovering Astrophysicist.
I particularly liked the Yahoo news article (Link) which said “But faced with losing out on a career in the notoriously patriotic Hollywood film industry, the actress has claimed her comments were misunderstood and taken out of context.”. Notoriously patriotic? Can that be the same Hollywood?
Jacob: one cannot be a good actor without certain mental capabilities. These capabilities are different from, say, the ones required to be a good engineer. But to simply say that actors are stupid, is…well, stupid. Also, there are many intelligent people in all professions, who are also various degrees of nuts, anywhere from just a bit weird, to clinically certified. anyway, I think that the major reason for all these stupid political views that we hear from so many actors these days is their ignorance on the issues about which they speak (and ignorance is not the same as lack of intelligence). But I can tell you from personal experience, that this ignorance is not specific to their profession. It’s just that people who belong to their profession are interviewd disproportionally more often.
If I stopped enjoying the work of every artist, musician or actor with silly or even plain loopy political views, there really wouldn’t be a lot left for me to enjoy. So I largely just shrug my shoulders a little.
This is something dug up from an old interview, when Cotillard was much less famous than she is now. Hopefully she now has managers and agents who will tell her not to make remarks of this kind to journalists. If it weren’t so offensive with respect to 3000 dead people, an “it was all about rewiring the building” theory would have an almost endearing loopiness about it. I think it is actually rather less worrying than the “Israel did it and it is somehow all about the Jews” theories.
I am with Michael Farris. I hope she continues to do good work, and if she does I will enjoy it.
As for the moon landings conspiracy theories, I am thinking that the fact that they are now so far in the past almost in a way seems to provide support for such theories. It is now almost 40 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. In most ways we are almost unimaginably more technologically advanced than we were then. Why then have we not been able to go to the moon again? I can of course give answers to those questions – ones that rather sadden me – but if I were 20 it could almost feel like the moon landings were a myth or a tall story. Of course, people in the 1960s quite did genuinely lack the technology to convincingly fake such footage, but oh, it seems that NASA have conveniently “lost” much of the best footage.
What I want is for somebody using modern technology and a fraction of NASA’s budget in the 1960s to go bacck to the moon, and to do it soon. My hunch is that such theories would then die pretty fast, particularly if they find Alan Shepherd’s golf balls lying around.
“working in the entertainment industry does not disqualify Ms. Cottilard from having opinions, nor (heaven forbid) should she ever be restrained from expressing them.”
But it is reprehensible using a public platform gained through a different discipline to propagate views of which she has no knowledge.
The problem for most people is that the only events similar to 9/11 have been on the cinema screen,so they are left comparing reality to the simulated.
Nonetheless I am looking forward to “Edith Piaf II,The Return Return of Edith Piaf,Edith Piaf Meets the Mummy” etc.
Maybe you want to reconsider – I certainly don’t agree with what she said but wishing misfortune on others really isn’t appealing. In the immortal words of LiLo ‘Calling someone else stupid doesn’t make you smarter’
I haven’t said that. Some are, or might be, by accident, quite smart. Only that their profession doesn’t require it, nor does the need to make a living, which they have solved their own way.
On the other hand, idiots with Ph.Ds are quite common too, see Bob Zubrin or Joe Romm. (I don’t link to idiots).
I know you haven’t said that. I do think though that any real talent requires certain kind of intelligence. I just wish that people stopped forming opinions on issues they know nothing about, let alone voicing these opinions.
Michael Jennings,
Feel free to contribute some money, and join hands with Richard Branson and Paul Allen, and maybe the moon will be reached again after some decades or centuries.
Man hasn’t returned to the moon because, after the novelty of the first visit, people couldn’t think of a good reason to keep coming back.
At the moment, I too, can’t think of such a reason, and am opposed to any government moon landing project. People who have a different view are welcome to pool their resources and go to the moon, without my tax money. Nobody’s holding them back. I promise a loud cheer when they land.
At the moment, I too, can’t think of such a reason, and am opposed to any government moon landing project.
I don’t seriously believe that government is likely to do it any time soon, and certainly not in the lean, efficient way it needs to be done if it is going to be the stepping stone to bigger things rather than another dead end.
They used to say that football players are notorious boors. They are in the same category as actors or musicians – they have some special talent which is unrelated to education or wisdom.
Just remember that a degree in electrical engineering doesn’t mean that the woman graduated at the top of the class. I actually got a university credit for calculus, a just scraped by credit I should add, which does not make me a mathemitician.
Jacob: true. Anyway, we are getting into definition of intelligence here, and I don’t find it very interesting, not to mention it is way OT. That woman is a nut, that’s for sure.
” They are in the same category as actors or musicians – they have some special talent which is unrelated to education or wisdom.”
Jacob has obviously never written anything in counterpoint or even strict canon
Typo. She’ll never work in Bollywood again.
And she is far from an anomaly.
Hmm. She’s kind of hot, and fairly stupid. There’s a lot to be said for that combination.
“The proof that 9/11 was a inside job, Marion, is hidden…inside…my pants…look…closer.”
Electrical wiring? You mean this was all a glorified insurance scam?
Even the Truthers are scratching their heads over that one.
It appears she got the publicity she was after.