Question Celebrity

That message, besides the obvious, lurks behind the flipping of the celebrity bird? You see elevated middle digits almost daily -- Queen Latifah confronting paparazzi at the beach; moody T-shirted heartthrobs breakfasting al fresco; cranky, recently spurned sexpots exiting organic grocery stores. Jack Nicholson has been giving photogs the bird for decades, and other tough actors o' the '80s (Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis) employed it as a strategy against nuisance press.

Finger, finger, finger, finger. The gesture has lost its potency. Not so long ago, editors wouldn't publish bird-flipper pictures; today they are common, ho-hum. Once in a while, someone on the Web collects them and organizes them into least- and most-effective rankings, immediately diffusing the message with mockery. Colin Farrell does a nice one, especially the lazy-hangover-on-a-late-Sunday-morning kind; Lindsay Lohan looks absolutely ridiculous flipping the bird, no matter how she does it, a child even at perfunctory acts of obscenity. (I've wondered if all that no-panties folderol last year wasn't really just an intentional yet misguided update of the finger? A reverse mooning?) Fingers-to-the-paparazzi are among the hollowest gestures in Hollywood, in that you have someone signaling that they've had it with intrusive fame, even as they obviously structure their lives around courting it.

Celebrities expect us to believe that the finger is meant (and only meant) for the media -- and not you, the loyal fan. But look not at their fingers and into their eyes: Celebs are so mentally messed up now that I think the finger is actually meant for everybody -- media, publicists, managers, relatives, exes and even young fans. It's the only response to the losses (of soul, of anonymity, of innocence, of dreams) that today's 24-7 cycle of superfame brings.

Witness Naomi Campbell, who pleaded guilty to assault in January for hurling a jewel-encrusted cellphone at a housekeeper. At her little bit of court-ordered community service at a New York City municipal waste facility in March, Naomi was flipping a very elegant bird without lifting a finger. She dressed to the nines every day and turned it into beautiful, beautiful PR -- a "take that" to the judge, the public, the paparazzi, the gossips. As a horde of photographers snapped her daily walk into garbageland -- click-clack, click-clack -- you could almost hear her sentiment with each glamour-filled step: bleep you, bleep you, bleep you.

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