The longer you stare at an image like that one — and I don’t recommend it — the clearer this paradox becomes. It’s not that Bezos seems like an odd, wealthy bachelor who would never get hitched; it’s that for a couple of years now, he’s exuded what can only be termed “Big Divorce Energy.”
It’s confusing to find out he’s headed for splitsville when he strikes you as a dude who already has the first marriage in his rearview mirror. The updated clothes, the clean-shaven dome, the ripped revenge bod: “powerful divorced guy vibes,” as the Outline‘s Brandy Jensen put it.
And as she goes on, she pulls out the personal part, which is that these weird and funny bits of psychoanalysis of strange older men is part of her own sexual history with “dads” and people who radiate, as she calls it, “big divorce energy.”
Alvita, played with big divorce energy by an intoxicating Clare Perkins, swaggers around in a tight scarlet dress that – to use a phrase of my mother’s – she “falls out of” carefreely. Her voice is gravelly and feels like it could go at any moment, but not before she gives her husbands an earful, summoning each one for a bit of public humiliation. One is outed as a non-starter in the sheets, another as a fan of Jordan Peterson. Eek. The message is one of sex-positivity: Alvita has no time for “slut shamers” and “uptight churchy men” (Chaucer’s sermonising priests). She wants power and bodily autonomy; she wants – quite explicitly – to be satisfied.