If You Close Your Eyes and Wish Really Hard, Kate Hudson Will Go Away

The news is telling us that Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson are back together after a tumultuous breakup that featured depression, drug use and attempted suicide. Wilson, according to an anonymous friend, "definitely doesn't want to dwell on it. He wants to put it behind him."

The news is also telling us that Wilson and Hudson got together in 2006 during the filming of You, Me and Dupree. The news goes on to inform us that they broke up in 2007 but managed to remain friends.

I don't believe any of it. Because I'm pretty sure that Kate Hudson doesn't exist.

I've always liked the notion of the folie à deux, that phenomenon by which two people can generate a powerful shared delusion. I propose that the belief in the existence of Kate Hudson is a folie à tout, a worldwide hallucination that the daughter of Goldie Hawn is a real human being who deserves even a picosecond of our attention. Or maybe, like money or nation-states, Kate Hudson is an agreed-upon fiction, a necessary ghost that would otherwise make the experience of watching Fool's Gold even more depressing and incomprehensible than it already is.

I realize that what I’m proposing edges close to the absurd, but I bet it’s pretty easy to fake the existence of a human being, even one photographed as regularly as Hudson. The circle of people who have regular, intimate contact with her is relatively small – friends, family, manager, lawyers, and personal staff. Beyond that there are people on film sets and ordinary folks who see her eating at Spago or poking through the racks at Bloomingdales. For those sightings, I imagine it’s easy to hire a Kate Hudson impersonator – especially if no Kate Hudson exists. This is an impersonator’s dream: to be liberated from matching the likeness and attitude of a real human being. Why do you think so many Elvis impersonators abound? Because there is no living Elvis to break the illusion.

Beyond those celebrity sightings, Kate Hudson fades to unreality. To the rest of the world, we swarming billions, she is nothing but light assembled and sustained – a beam on a wall, a whipping phosphor bead, a stream of bits from a sensor. Where is the Kate Hudson in all that? Nowhere but our minds. Yet even in that nowhere land, her movies still suck.

The antidote to believing in Kate Hudson is to immerse yourself in things that have no Kate Hudson in them whatsoever. Nick Cave’s album Dig, Lazarus, Dig is gloriously 100% Hudson-free. The new Criterion Bluray version of The Third Man has no Hudson. None. Harold and Maude, which is crying out for a remastered version, is a tunnel into the real world, where no boardroom dreamed her up, no marketer persuaded us to watch her movies, and Owen Wilson never had to fall in love with a mediocre phantom.

The alternative - that I live in a world where Kate Hudson is real - is pretty much unthinkable. So I'll be over here listening to Nick Cave.