With Amal Clooney, We Finally Have the Consummate Feminist Superhero. Let’s Not Ruin It

(Photo: XPX/Star Max/Getty Images)

Every time we glimpse her, Amal Alamuddin Clooney is bored. Flanked by tittering, self-congratulatory figures at the Met’s Costume Institute Gala, Amal alone is not impressed. She’s at the hottest event in town, standing next to the Sexiest Man Alive, but wears the pained grimace of a city councilwoman enduring a hearing or a tired parent indulging a deluded little child. We saw the same look at the Golden Globes, one halfhearted, disinterested smile amid a sea of thrilled, smug faces, and we’ll probably see it again at every award show George Clooney drags his wife to. Amal Clooney was born to bestride the narrow world (or at least Hollywood) like an over-it colossus. That’s exactly what’s so mesmerizing about her.

It’s no secret that Americans have been looking for their own version of royalty to swoon over for years now. We tried to shove a glass slipper on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s foot, but she was too sophisticated for all of that taffeta, plus she kept squabbling with her prince, whose struggling vanity projects never matched the aristocratic flair of his patriarch. We tried pushing Beyoncé and Jay Z into a castle on the hill, but we turned on them. For a while, we grudgingly accepted Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes — Tom even called his bride “Kate,” as if that would erase her penchant for bad bangs and suede demi-boots. Yet as Tom grew creepier and Katie’s style read more Chico’s than chic, it became clear that Suri was the only member of the family with the proper bearing for the throne.

But before Suri could come of age, there was Amal Alamuddin, the barrister with a heart of gold and a head of luxurious black hair rising like a phoenix from the smoldering flames of countless unfit Yankee royals. Over the past month, we’ve watched her dash from one engagement to the next looking like an exotic, luxe-brand Princess Diana upgrade, from dinner at Caravaggio wearing a $4,695 Alexander McQueen jacquard-knit dress on April 28, to a D.C. press conference for the imprisoned president of the Maldives on April 30, emerging from lunch at Jean Georges in a $4,000 vintage Courrèges coat on May 1, and later that night, at the Public Theater with her parents, her $4,600 Alberta Ferretti chiffon dress flittering in the breeze. Every step of the way, Amal is so magnetic she seems dreamed up by Disney’s marketers to lead a generation of princesses into the future. Their extraordinary heroine is sharp, compassionate, and multicultural, a valiant demigoddess with caramel skin who won’t sleep until the world’s most persecuted under­dogs are safe from oppression. Amal isn’t just destined for the American throne; she’s destined to make all other royals — real or fake — look a little empty and foolish by comparison.

Just look at what she’s done to George Clooney, reducing our American prince to the status of adorable sidekick, like an animated chameleon or snowman who provides comic relief and gentle chuckling in between his master’s courageous adventures in saving the world. As George leads Amal through the crowd in his baggy jeans looking docile and outclassed, Amal pulls all the focus. The set of her glossy red lips tells us she has better places to be. She doesn’t have time for this foolishness.

By Heather Havrilesky