The misadventures and mummy issues of Brooklyn Beckham – articulated in a verbose Instagram post about how much he hates his parents and why – has stirred feelings, even in those least likely to care about anything to do with the Beckhams, senior or junior. The reason why is simple: the 26-year-old man child of Lord and Lady Beckham is the perfect emblem of his spoilt generation.
Brooklyn Beckham is a very rich young man, and everything he has and has done has been thanks to the immense privilege he was born into
Along with their totalising hostility towards things deemed racist or imperialist or anti-trans, they are also the first generation to celebrate cutting off your family if they fall short of your expectations.
‘I do not want to reconcile with my family,’ Brooklyn sulkily wrote. You tell ’em, son. Depressingly, Brooklyn is not alone. Cornell professor Karl Pillemer found that 27 per cent of Americans over age 18 (more than a quarter) were estranged from a family member. These family breakdowns are a tragedy, but they are seen by the younger generation as something to celebrate.
‘I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life,’ he wrote. Keep telling yourself that, Brooklyn.
The long-simmering tension with Brooklyn’s parents stems from a two-horned beast. First, their alleged negative attitude to his wife, the heiress and actress Nicola Peltz (whose surname he has added to his own); and second, their alleged loyalty to brand over family; commerce over more traditional bonds of love.
Brooklyn accused them of ‘performative social media posts’ and ‘inauthentic relationships.’ He ominously alludes to a parental crime most of us wouldn’t have had a clue had taken place, with reference to ‘the lengths that they’ll go through [sic] to place countless lies in the media, mostly at the expense of innocent people.’ Mostly, eh? ‘Countless lies’? They sound positively Machiavellian, evil, even sociopathic. When really, surely, they’re just vain, rich and famous.
The moment that I entirely ceased to pity Brooklyn with his dim eyes (despite what he says, he looks like the kind of bloke that could easily be controlled, not least by the woman he is clearly gaga for), was when he listed Victoria’s infractions.
‘My mum cancelled making Nicola’s dress in [sic] the eleventh hour despite how excited she was to wear her design, forcing her,’ – one can literally hear the yowls of indignation leap off the screen – ‘to urgently find a new dress.’
He bitches about the olds’ attitude to seating arrangements and what seems to be some kind of pre-nup: ‘signing away the rights to my name’.
Has any rich-boy utterance appeared more bratty since Prince Harry flounced out of England? Here is this talentless, barely literate young man and his probably equally average bride – both of whose personal endowments can be summed up by inherited wealth and blandly perfect looks – throwing a rage that his mum interrupted the clichéd rituals of his wedding:
‘My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance to a romantic love song. In front of our 500 guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead…’
Cutting his parents out of his life forever is bewilderingly harsh
Marc Anthony! ‘In the schedule’! The horrifying spectre of your own mother instead of your wife!
Brooklyn then went on to accuse her of dancing ‘very inappropriately on me in front of everyone’, deploying that dead-souled combination of school marm and cry-baby favoured by his generation. I have yet to see the inappropriate dance, but it is safe to say that Freud would have enjoyed it.
Brooklyn Beckham is a very rich young man, and everything he has, and has done, has been thanks to the immense privilege he was born into, which is completely bound up with all the conniving desperate commercialism of his parents.
Given all this, it is no surprise, with plenty of time to ruminate on such things, that he has ended up devoting his life to a tantrum about the well-chronicled tension between fame and family. I am sure that spidery Victoria and peacocking David – and the clan’s vast social media tentacles – make for a genuinely challenging set of nearests and dearests.
But even if they are guilty of all they are charged with by the ‘traumatised’ Brooklyn, cutting them out of his life forever is bewilderingly harsh. Especially as it’s not hard to see that his parents love him; he is his mummy’s first-born and I was quite moved by images of the young Posh caring for him when he was just a baby and she in her twenties, fresh from the Spice Girls and newly a WAG, in the Netflix documentary about her.
I’m not even sure they’re such awful parents. Hadley Freeman, who ghostwrote Victoria’s 2006 biography, described Posh and Becks as ‘both incredibly sweet, incredibly involved with their children, very loving as a family’. Freeman did allow that ‘there is this problem with some famous people, which is that they are addicted to their fame, and they are addicted to how people see them,’ as she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
So I cannot say I am on Team Beckham quite, but I am certainly not on Team Brooklyn who, as far as I can tell, is in the midst of a whiny, arguably emotionally abusive campaign against his mum – potentially doing far more damage to his parents than they have done him. Brooklyn needs a psychoanalyst, not a global feud – and fast.
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