It's the question that has divided the world. Permanently destroyed friendships. Condemned families to generations of icily silent Christmas dinners together. The question, the all-important question, is this: are you Team Orlando Bloom or Team Justin Bieber?
After gossip site TMZ released a grainy, rubbernecking video of Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber engaging in some minor-level fisticuffs at a restaurant in Ibiza this week, people have been lining up to proudly state their allegiances. On Team Bloom is James Franco, who came out in support of his fellow actor on the US satire show The Colbert Report this week; and Leonardo DiCaprio, who allegedly cheered Bloom on from his table inside the restaurant. And on Team Bieber is ...
Well, fine, nobody's on Team Bieber. Why would they be? Bieber, who is rumoured to have got close to Bloom's then-wife Miranda Kerr in 2012, appeared to instigate the restaurant fight by yelling "What's up, bitch?", and then immediately scarpered away to Instagram photos of Kerr wearing a bikini and Bloom crying. It's crystalline obnoxiousness. It's gold-plated villainy.
To borrow a well-worn Guardian phrase, Justin Bieber is peak brat.
But you have to pick a side, because the stakes couldn't be higher for either of them. Orlando Bloom is fighting for nothing less than his dignity, and Justin Bieber is fighting for the bragging rights to say that he's marginally tougher than the Helen Flanagan look-alike from The Hobbit.
Most importantly, they're both fighting to salvage their waning careers. Justin Bieber hasn't released a truly popular song since the one about babies that he recorded back when he looked like a foetus sitting underneath an Afghan Hound, and Orlando Bloom knows that his career will all but dry up as soon as Peter Jackson runs out of ways to wring JRR Tolkien's corpse dry.
In that respect, their fight has an unmistakably tragic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane quality to it. It's hard to think of a more pathetic celebrity scuffle. Perhaps the only real precedent is the fight that took place between Kid Rock and Motley Crue's Tommy Lee at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards over Pamela Anderson, to whom they were both at one time married. Like Bloom v Bieber, it was a scrappy, embarrassing almost-fight between two preening dunderheads whose best days are behind them. And, like Bloom v Bieber, nobody won. Especially not humanity.
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