ONTD

Before this post delves into the recent, rapidly spreading yet anonymously sourced rumors that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have reconciled, thereby restoring peace to the town of Forks, Wash., let’s quickly recap how we got here. And by here, I mean this day, Sept. 19, 2012, when People magazine declared that the real-life Bella and Edward have spent time together roughly two months after Stewart hooked up with her “Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders.



As those with reliable short-term memories will recall, the Robsten affair became something noisy very quickly, turning the Internet into a vampire-bloody pool of “Twilight” grief, public Twi-pologies and ridiculous stories about arguments over dog custody.

During the end of July and almost all of August, the celebrity blogosphere was dominated by reports of Pattinson’s allegedly broken heart, and reports of actual glitter-broken hearts erected in his honor, and assessments of the situation offered by everyone from Nutty Madam to Will Ferrell. The din over the break-up continued as Pattinson made the media rounds to promote “Cosmopolis,” and Kristen Stewart emerged to support “On the Road” at the Toronto Film Festival. Then things seemed to quiet down. Until now.

Which brings us to the People story, one of many vague accounts of the Reformation of Robsten.

The People report states that Stewart and Pattinson “met up over the weekend” and that an “insider” thinks “they’ll be a couple again.”

Which doesn't really sound intense enough. So Us Weekly amped up the language a bit, describing their possible reconciliation as a “dramatic make-up”that happened in Los Angeles. Like the People report, it does not indicate specifically where or how said tete-a-tete occurred, but it quotes an anonymous source who says, “They’re working it out.”

E! Online was a tad more transparent, reporting that two separate sources — both insiders, one would assume — have confirmed that the couple has met up at two undisclosed locations and are indeed getting back together.

Of course, these reports merely follow on a story published earlier in Britain’s The Sun, which claimed Pattinson has forgiven Stewart, and that they’re living together again in “the same Los Angeles compound where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a place.”

In summary, a lot of these details don’t entirely synch up, and no one has spoken on the record to confirm that the two are back on. But the rumors are apparently enough to bring sweet comfort to some Twi-hards, and to give Hollywood Life permission to get back to the important work of surveying readers about whether Stewart and Pattinson should have each other’s babies.

Actually, let’s give Hollywood Life credit for writing the sentence that probably explains all the rest of this nonsense: “One thing the talking between the two has achieved is that they will both appear on the Breaking Dawn red carpet TOGETHER!”

For those who have long believed that the Stewart/Pattinson relationship ran parallel to the marketing of the “Twilight” franchise, all of these reports are arriving right on schedule. They broke up just in time to maximize publicity for Pattinson’s “Cosmopolis,” and will reconcile just in time to do the same for the last “Twilight” film and Stewart’s appearance in “On the Road.”

If that theory is accurate, then just before tickets for “Breaking Dawn Part 2” go on sale Oct. 1, there will probably be another big story — maybe the leak of a photo of them kissing again for the first time — that sends the Twi-Twittersphere into a state of rapture. Later, Stewart and Pattinson will do pre-“Breaking Dawn”-release interviews in which they talk about the affair for the first time and how they worked through the heartbreak. And, finally, they’ll emerge on that red carpet, blissful, chic and together again just in time to celebrate the teen vampire romance that first allowed them to fall in love. That’s a great publicity-narrative arc right there.

Am I saying that the entire relationship between Stewart and Pattinson is fake? No, although I will confess that I spent several minutes on Tuesday trying to process what’s happening in this Stewart/Sanders conspiracy-theory video on YouTube. What I am saying is that their relationship is probably being used for all its maximum promotional power, which means that the actual reality of what’s happening is bound to get distorted.

The notion of exploiting a couple for movie marketing purposes is not exactly new. It’s a tactic used as along ago as 1950, when Elizabeth Taylor married Nicky Hilton right before she walked down the aisle onscreen in “Father of the Bride.” Does it make the feelings between the famous man and woman in question less genuine? No. But it makes it hard to believe that anything we read about them is the truth.



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