Entertainment

It's Cyrus Vs. Lawrence After the Oscars

by Alanna Bennett

What is the truth in the case of Drunken Jennifer Lawrence V. Madonna's Stairs? Will we ever truly know? Can we ever truly know? According to Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Lawrence's Oscar-night story of puking on Madonna's porch is a fallacy. But who do we believe??

The facts are these: Jennifer Lawrence has been making the rounds on her X-Men: Days Of Future Past press tour telling a story about how on Oscar night she went from participating in Ellen DeGeneres' selfie scheming to puking on the porch at a Madonna party. According to Lawrence she "looked behind [her] while [she's] puking and Miley Cyrus is there like 'get it together.'"

BUT, according to a tweet sent out and then quickly deleted by Cyrus, "that never happened." So what did happen?

Surely Cyrus' aborted response already has the Jennifer Lawrence truthers in a tizzy. "She's not really a cool girl!" they shout. "She's just a Cool Girl(TM)!" "She didn't genuinely fall at the Oscars!" "That's not her real post-pixie bob!"

But the truth might be full of shades of gray. Maybe Cyrus wasn't at that party at all, and never saw Lawrence that night, and this is all just fuel for the massive PR machine that surrounds every major movie star and every major blockbuster release — it's certainly a possibility. Or maybe — and perhaps even more likely — it's a little bit of that, and a little bit of a perfect example of the nature of the human anecdote.

Here are some possibilities for what really went down:

  • Jennifer Lawrence is a bold-faced liar, a heathen, and is addicted to falling in public.
  • Miley Cyrus was nowhere near Lawrence that night.
  • Lawrence puked and was judged by a Cyrus look-a-like, perhaps a drag queen or Gwen Stefani.
  • Cyrus judged Lawrence, but not for puking. Perhaps she witnessed that failed attempt to get J. Lo to dance with her?
  • Cyrus witnessed Lawrence puking but did not say "Get it together," or anything at all.

Having sat through many an anecdote in my day — parties, everyday conversation, being a human near other humans — that's how anecdotes work about 60 percent of the time: We project a more complete narrative onto the characters we're populating our anecdotal world with. I haven't actually ended any dates with a "Fuck you," but I've certainly thought it, and I've certainly included it in stories without the explicit asterisk saying that no one actually said that during the interaction.

This is getting strangely nit-picky with a story that was told on a talk show to entertain the masses and is most definitely not an important event in the history of humanity, but if you look at how Lawrence tells the story, she says the following:

And I look behind me while I'm puking and Miley Cyrus is there like 'Get it together.'

Under the rules of anecdotes that's hardly an ironclad quotation. Nowhere is the word "says" there, so it would hardly be a lie if in reality Cyrus just happened to be nearby and Lawrence — who, it should be noted, was inebriated — projected her mid-puke insecurities on the pop star. Which seems legit.