The Awful Truth about Kat and Dogs

I have seen Katherine Heigl’s future, and its name is Janeane Garofalo.

Or it was, rather, until about a week ago.

For those old enough to recall, Janeane Garofalo famously spoke out against the “old boys club” atmosphere at Saturday Night Live (of which she was a cast member) and later criticized what she felt to be the sexist ending of The Truth About Cats and Dogs (of which she was the star) while they were still promoting it. Despite her growing popularity at the time (she was widely hailed as the voice of Generation X), fewer and fewer people wanted to work with her, and when her next mainstream movie (The Matchmaker) fizzled, she was effectively banished from the mainstream.

Katherine, too, has been showing signs of acute Garofalism: She famously criticized the writing and plot lines in Grey’s Anatomy, was one of the more outspoken combatants in the divisive feud over the outing of co-star T.R. Knight, and accused Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (the comedy that catapulted her from TV star to movie star) of sexism. All it would take was one flop to make the risk of her verbally sabotaging a film outweigh her commercial draw, and she’d begin descending the slippery slope from celebrity to personality to oblivion.

But then something happened: Eight days ago, Katherine announced that she’s ready to stay with Grey’s Anatomy if they’ll have her, describing the set as “one of my favorite places to be”.

Why the sudden change?

Presumably she revisited the same realization she had when she determined to keep working out when she’d rather not, or to keep her hair long and blonde ever since Roswell was canceled: Hollywood is a business. And if she can’t play ball with it, it’ll find someone else who can easily enough.

Sure, it’s easy to admire someone with the chutzpah to speak out against The Man now and then, but to borrow from Churchill, “if you don’t rock the boat when you’re 20 you have no balls, if you don’t learn to toe the line when you’re 30 you have no brain”.