I get heart palpitations when I look at DiCaprio’s Wikipedia page. When I realised he has an entire separate one for his glistening filmography, my mum had to resuscitate me (the doctors said I was technically dead for seven minutes). No other actor can boast a trajectory like Leonardo’s: Critters 3, The Quick and the Dead, J. Edgar, and The Glorification of Cocaine and Investment Banking: I Know He’s a Bad Person but Am I Still Allowed to Empathise with Him? – he’s has a perfect record, always moving from strength to strength, and hasn’t had a single duff movie in his career. He is, I don’t hesitate to say, an actor so good that he has become a cinematic aff ront to the supremacy of God.
What’s that I hear his detractors (both of you) say? “Oh, Mr Culture Editor, but he’s never won an Oscar!” you shriek with captious, selfsatisfied smugness, like a child who’s just become aware of his own genitalia and wants to show off about it. Well, here’s some news for you from the inside of the world of culture (where I live): the reason they haven’t given Leonardo an Oscar yet is because they’re going to rebrand the Oscars as ‘The Leonardos’ after he dies. Now shut up and cry at the ending of Titanic like the rest of us.
So just what is the secret to Leonardo’s success? How can someone be so admired, so consistently plied with awards, so universally adored, that the words “Do you like Leonardo DiCaprio?” have become an idiom synonymous with “Is the Pope a Catholic”? How can any one person have become so mega-famous they have had to devise a series of elaborate disguises to avoid the paps, including wearing ridiculous masks, hiding his entire upper body in umbrellas and covering his face with tissues (Google ‘Leonardo DiCaprio hiding from the paps’ and thank me later).
Now, in a Cherwell exclusive, I wish to share with you a theory I have developed over the last few years working in close collaboration with the Film Studies department at Columbia University, as well as the Phrenology Department here in Oxford (surprisingly the only one remaining in the world), about the truth behind Leonardo’s juggernaut-like career.
Much like Samson’s hair, Leonard’s power lies entirely in his head – and not just in the sense that if you cut it off he will die. Through a careful comparison of the size of Leonardo’s head across his entire movie career, we can see a defi nite trend: Leo’s head has grown constantly as his career has developed, always in direct proportion to his acting ability. Soon, our researchers predict, his head will in fact become wider than his shoulders – it is at this point, the research indicates, that Leonardo will deliver an acting performance so powerful that merely watching the opening sequence could prove fatal, as anyone who watches it will shed so many tears of both joy and sadness their body will become dehydrated and hyponatremic, and they will shrivel up into a raisin-like shell of a person.
The more apocalyptically-inclined proponents of this theory have on occasion expressed their concerns that Leonardo’s head will one day become so large it may in fact cause a global disaster, as if the moon or another planet-sized extraterrestrial body were to collide with the earth. But even should this happen, there is always a silver lining: one man’s apocalypse is another man’s hope for a long overdue von Trier-DiCaprio collaboration. So there you have it: Leonardo’s continued success can be assured so long as his body continues to deposit fatty residues on the sides of his skull. Much like Gatsby, we live in hope.
