{"id":425481,"date":"2026-01-20T12:47:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T12:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/425481\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T12:47:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T12:47:08","slug":"its-a-brooklyn-v-beckham-inc-disaster-what-happens-when-the-elephant-in-the-room-goes-rogue-marina-hyde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/425481\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a Brooklyn v Beckham Inc disaster: what happens when the elephant in the room goes rogue | Marina Hyde"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way 2026 has started, none of us wants to see the word \u201cnuclear\u201d in a headline, so on some level you have to feel glad that last night\u2019s news alerts announcing in real time that someone \u201cgoes nuclear<\/a>\u201d and \u201claunches nuclear attack<\/a>\u201d related to Brooklyn Peltz Beckham. At time of writing, the story<\/a> about his Instagram broadside against his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, accusing them of treating him as a commercial prop all his life was by far, far and away the best read on the Guardian site, as well as the most deeply read. Again, I\u2019m glad this blow-up wasn\u2019t used as geopolitical cover, because if there was a time for Trump to invade Greenland largely unnoticed, maybe this was it.<\/p>\n

Whoever wrote Brooklyn\u2019s intercontinental ballistic Instagram \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t the childlike authorial voice<\/a> behind regular \u201cI always choose you baby \u2026 me and you forever baby\u201d posts to his wife \u2013 the sentiments will be his. Here\u2019s a sample: \u201cMy family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first. Family \u2018love\u2019 is decided by how much you post on social media, or how quickly you drop everything to show up and pose for a family photo opp \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Wow: elephants. Brooklyn Beckham can\u2019t photograph them<\/a> but he sure can address them when they\u2019re in the room. If you watched Victoria Beckham\u2019s lavishly produced Netflix documentary last October, you might have wondered why it didn\u2019t even glance on the biggest elephant in Brand Beckham\u2019s room: the clear and agonising no-contact rift<\/a> with their eldest son that has been festering since last year and beyond. But most big documentaries these days aren\u2019t documentaries any more in the way previous practitioners of the craft might have understood the word. As her husband\u2019s was before it, Victoria\u2019s doc was a self-commissioned advertorial on which the subject also served as executive producer. This is the haute version of the curated, public-facing existence that defines our dysfunctional age, but it trickles all the way down via fourth-tier influencers and that friend of yours who can\u2019t stop posting about her perfect life. The Beckhams, at the vanguard of celebrity culture ever since both it and they exploded in the late 90s, are a part of how we all got here.<\/p>\n

Before I go on, I should say I find this family rift desperately sad. I can\u2019t imagine the agony of being cut off by a child, and hope I never have to. All parents make mistakes, and all children do too. I believe the Beckhams truly and deeply love their children \u2013 but, to adapt Logan Roy<\/a>, they have made it hard for them to be serious people.<\/p>\n

Brooklyn Beckham has been commodified since he was a foetus. The story of Victoria\u2019s pregnancy was sold by his parents. When he was born, David and Victoria sold the first pictures of him. They sold intimate looks around their home and his nursery. They sold their wedding, staying up till 3am on the night of that big day, deciding which pictures would be featured in OK! magazine. They sold everything \u2013 mostly, back then, to OK!. Its proprietor, Richard Desmond, wrote in his autobiography<\/a> about spending what felt like every Friday at Victoria\u2019s parents\u2019 house with the young couple, where they would all \u201cplot and plan the next features we\u2019d do\u201d. A huge cheque was always involved, and the Beckhams wanted the limelight \u2013 all of it \u2013 so much.<\/p>\n

But as time went on, David and Victoria acquired more sophisticated advisers who understood the rapidly morphing potential of controlling image and brand, and built a vast and diversified empire for them off the back of it. When social media came along, the Beckhams channelled their business through its pipes. As I\u2019ve written here before<\/a>, they were past masters at not simply turning to their children and telling them they loved them, but photographing them, tagging them and sending the message of love via social media. Alchemically lucrative \u2013 but an accident waiting to happen?<\/p>\n

I honestly think the Beckhams are now so lost to this commercialised version of family life that they probably long ago lost the ability to comprehend how weird and potentially corrosive it is. I keep thinking of the line in Goodfellas where the mafia wife Karen says: \u201cAnd after a while it got to be all normal.\u201d And maybe there is something rather \u201cfamily\u201d with a capital F about the Beckham mob. The trouble is, with families not being meritocracies, every now and then the gene pool is going to throw up a Fredo Corleone or a Christopher Moltisanti who just isn\u2019t suited to the weird life, and can only play out as a liability. Again, as covered here before, it has happened a couple of times with that other deeply strange family business, the Windsors.<\/p>\n

The Windsors, of course, don\u2019t have a choice. The Beckhams\u2019 wealth is estimated at about half a billion<\/a>. That is more money than even they could ever spend, and the only truly credible explanation for why they continue to live their life so remorselessly out loud is because they still crave the attention. And, realistically, because they have forgotten how else to live.<\/p>\n

They are the unicorns of this lifestyle, but not exactly alone. Some of us have always been Instagram and Facebook refuseniks, and never publicly posted pictures of our lives or families or any of it. But it\u2019s not the norm, and billions of people have entirely forgivably got sucked into a world where they are the product, where they work for free for the tech lords, who successfully devalued the idea of privacy at the altar of their big lie: that \u201cbeing connected\u201d via their networks is far more important than privacy; that it is a win for humanity; that it is social. But it isn\u2019t. Societies are in a mess. Literacy\u2019s in a mess. Young people\u2019s mental health is in a mess. The world\u2019s in far more of a mess than it was when the techlords found it.<\/p>\n

I see Keir Starmer\u2019s thinking about banning social media<\/a> for under-16s, so maybe someone could stick an amendment on any bill, banning parents from plastering their kids all over it from the moment they\u2019re born. Maybe they can\u2019t meaningfully consent to working in Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s content mines any more than celebrity kids can meaningfully consent to being monetised by their parents. Or maybe all those ships have sailed.<\/p>\n

As for what David and Victoria Beckham will do, David was pictured at Davos<\/a> this morning. Encouraging times. But clearly they will also be locked in crisis talks, and my bet is that they\u2019ll issue a statement saying how much they love Brooklyn and always will, and something like how there will always be a place waiting for him at their family table. And I truly believe all that. As someone behind the scenes will say as the team approves it, it\u2019s authentic. But even that word has been corrupted, hasn\u2019t it? It has come to suggest a monetisable easy charm, an ability to make staged commercial situations seem appealing, an instinctive capability of embodying a brand or a lifestyle. We live in an age of dangerous slippage, from private to public, from living to trading, from the idea of ourselves as agents of free will to unpaid and unwitting products. Not to interrupt his brief main character moment \u2013 but Brooklyn Beckham\u2019s the least of it.<\/p>\n

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n