Sure, he starred in the second-highest-grossing film of all time and has the money-in-the-bank Terminator Salvation queued up for later this year. But it wasn't until this week that Christian Bale achieved the cultural ubiquity characteristic of true stardom, thanks to the leak of an obscene tirade he hurled at the director of photography on the Terminator film when the latter accidentally wandered into a shot.
This torrent of profanity, which makes Mark Wahlberg's dialogue in The Departed sound G-rated, was remarkable enough in its original form, but it has gradually proven to be merely the raw material for a variety of online experiments in invective. There's a catchy techno remix from YouTuber RevoLucian, and another from sortilegus. There's the a-phrase-for-every-occasion Christian Bale Soundboard. And perhaps best of all, there's the dada metacinematic splicing of Christian's highly unChristian commentary into the suffocatingly cuddly trailer for He's Just Not That Into You (below). All, I should caution, are profoundly, deliriously NSFW.