Smash hit

“Can I touch them?” begs the camera.

And a hand picks one up and gives it a lascivious little squeeze. It is a culturally loaded moment, a YouTube grab, an image of surreal, vacuous depth. It’s the asking of permission that gives it its faux poignancy, as if these blobs of goo were still intimate parts of her, as if somehow, even disembodied, they held the aura and sexuality of Jordan. The tentative grope was grubby. This is, of course, what Jordan’s breasts must actually feel like. They are secular relics, Jordan a postmodern St Agatha, who is always painted carrying her own amputated breasts on a plate. Jordan’s implants could be donated to the Design Museum or taken round schools as a learning tool. Maybe, in time, women will want to touch them for good luck, for success in love or finance, as a protection against cancer. There is nothing private or intimate about Jordan. These breasts were made as a marketing tool, a chest billboard, a logo like McDonald’s golden arches.

This documentary was a recycled compilation of other documentaries by the same director, a second payday, cut with interviews and statements by people who had made money out of these bags of plastic — glamour photographers, agents, reality-TV producers. They were all as pointless and self-inflated as the breasts they suckled a living from. And each, to justify his or her silly and embarrassing role, had to inflate Jordan beyond being a humiliated, arrogant, aggressive, self-denigrating money-grabber. It’s fashionable and coolly counterintuitive to say Jordan is a role model, a self-made (oh the irony) woman; that to laugh at her or be mildly repulsed is to be a snob and an elitist. So the apologists and minders of Jordan have split her in two: Jordan, the sexless flaunter of cartoon breasts, and then Katie Price, businesswoman, dressage champion and Mother Courage.

How easily we are absolved from responsibility for our other halves. Hitler: vegetarian, animal lover. Katie Price: humanitarian, carer for the disabled. A million teenagers may want to be just like her, may see her nudity-to-riches story as an inspiration, but like an awful lot of things teenagers think, the wish doesn’t make it right. Jordan isn’t any of the things others would like her to be. She isn’t a hellish symbol of the spineless, workshy, oversexualised immorality of modern society, neither is she a postmodern image of popular culture and commerce and the work/life balance for strong women. She is what she aspires to be, what it says on the box — a topless model and an ageing aid to masturbation. Perhaps we could beatify her and make her the patron saint of cynicism.

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