Demi Moore is a throwback to the no-holds-barred, support-staff-devouring lady movie star of yore. She has, practically single-handedly, revived the old-fashioned, enjoyably schlocky woman’s picture. Think of her oeuvre, and its many, many iconic contributions to pop culture consciousness: “Ghost” (the “Unchained Melody” potter’s wheel scene); “Indecent Proposal” (is it so wrong for a girl to sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars — especially when the alternative is Woody Harrelson?); “Disclosure” (a female sexual harasser! Hmm!).

I will always see a new Demi Moore movie (usually, I confess, alone) because I know I will always have a good time. This includes, of course, last year’s event, “Striptease,” with its multiple amazements: the $12 million salary; the ferocious body-sculpting; the casting of Demi’s own small daughter in a film that shows Mommy naked and pawed at by drooling men. Then the taking of two small daughters to view naked Mommy on-screen at the “Striptease” premiere.

And, inevitably, the nonsensical quote regarding the situation. “A non-issue,” she told a Tatler reporter at the time. “I’d never do anything I’d be embarrassed for my children to know about.”

No wonder Demi Moore is a dedicated Barbie doll collector. Her every utterance has the hypnotic inanity of Talking Barbie’s “Math is hard!” Here’s a tidbit from the September In Style, the one with Demi and the question “What’s Sexy Now?” on the cover. Inside, she opines that “the sexiest thing of all is the truth.” Granted that In Style brings this sort of thing out in people, the sheer un-truth of that idea is still rather gemlike.

There are those at Castle Rock, the producers of “Striptease,” who consider my Demi appreciation perverse. Of course, they had to work with her, and “Striptease” wasn’t the first time. During “A Few Good Men,” she first earned her nickname Gimme Moore, refusing to board a Lear jet for the promotional tour because the eight-seater didn’t have room for her and her six assistants to occupy two seats each. She was also a trial on “Striptease,” insisting on showing up at the press junket with a “G.I. Jane” shaved head instead of long, flowing stripperish locks.

The clever effect, of course (clever from Demi’s point of view; annoying from Castle Rock’s), was to deflect attention from “Striptease” to herself and her next project — and to remind everyone that, rumors of her slipping career to the contrary, there would indeed be a next project.

Which brings us to “G.I. Jane.” Like every Demi Moore event, the film’s theme — can women serve as well as men in the military? — is preternaturally in tune with the Zeitgeist. (If only it had come out at the exact same time as the Kelly Flinn affair! Never mind. The post-Kelly release date is close enough.) Also like every Demi Moore event, and pretty much every quote that comes out of her mouth in connection with said event, it is fundamentally dishonest.

To begin with, there’s the title: “G.I.,” of course, is an Army term, and the movie is about the first female Navy SEAL. But that’s a mere marketing trifle compared to the main issue, which is that Demi’s character must pass the same extraordinary physical tests the male SEALs do. Not in the real world, she wouldn’t. American military standards have been lowered to accommodate women to the point that, for instance, where the old requirement was that two men be able to quickly carry a wounded comrade off a bombed ship in a stretcher, now four people do. Bad news for the guy in the stretcher; irrelevant to Demi Moore.

“I hope that it offers a positive vision for women, especially those women who might say, ‘I’d like to do that, but I’d never make the grade,’” she says in the September Harper’s Bazaar. Well, they wouldn’t make the grade. Which isn’t to say that “G.I. Jane” doesn’t draw you in.

She’s appealing in the same way June Allyson was as the determined, stereotype-shattering, turn-of-the-century female doctor in the 1952 “The Girl In White.” But “The Girl In White” was based on a true story. “G.I. Jane” is a fantasy. There are no female Navy SEALs. After a while, the movie makes you feel suckered.

The sweaty, half-naked collage of Demi doing grunting, one-armed push-ups is “G.I. Jane’s” version of the money shots from “Striptease.” I know how hard it was for me to work my way up from bent-knee “girl” push-ups to the real kind, so I was impressed. Maybe she should be a SEAL! But then I remembered those endless one-armed push-ups, sans all the grunting, Jack Palance did on the Oscars a few years ago when he was, what, 70?

Like all successful salesmen, Demi believes completely in her product — which is never merely her current movie but always really herself. Perhaps because of this deep, unwavering faith, she is notoriously humorless; her pranks on Letterman seem about as lighthearted and spur-of-the-moment as D-Day. A while ago I heard a story about the casting agent who got Demi her first big feature film role, in “Blame it on Rio.” Demi ran into the casting agent a few years later and announced, “Can you believe what a fucking great actress I’ve become?” The agent at first thought Demi was joking. She wasn’t.

Naturally, such self-absorption makes her an irresistible target. Last year, irritated Castle Rockers amused themselves with a series of fantasy “Striptease” ads: “Demi Moore — like you’ve never seen it be … No, wait!” “Demi Moore — like you’ve frequently seen her before …” “Demi Moore — this time she’s moving!” And, finally, when the film was desperately repositioned as a laugh-riot: “‘Striptease!’ It’s rated ‘C!’ For Comedy!”

And yet, you have to go back to Joan Crawford to find anyone to compare with Demi Moore. Joan had a similar range of incarnations, from Flat-Chested Flapper in “Our Dancing Daughters” to Suffering Sacrificer in “Mildred Pierce” to Butch Babe in “Queen Bee”; Demi’s evolution from Flat-Chested Belle of the Brat Pack in “St. Elmo’s Fire” to Suffering Sacrificer in “Indecent Proposal” to Butch Babe in “G.I. Jane” loosely follows this previously trod path. She is a Joan Crawford for the ’90s: the girl of humble background who through sheer force of will transformed herself into a movie star while retaining her shopgirl soul.

But you’ve got to hand it to her. Unlike Joan and some of her contemporaries, who adopted because they didn’t want to risk losing their figures, Demi’s constantly lactating figure only seems to improve with each new child. Like the title character of “Rebecca,” she is an idealized brunet no real woman can ever measure up to. A bitch goddess, but a goddess all the same.

When the music pauses I order one of them to get me another Red Bull. He nods and bows; he likes being ordered around.

“Chivalry is not dead,” he says.

“Good to know,” I say.

The other one tells me I’m beautiful and I can see he means it. Then he gets that look in his eye — soft, sweet  — and asks if I’m OK. Every person I’ve talked to in the past two months has looked at me like that and asked if I’m OK. It is driving me insane.

“Never better,” I say, and I mean it to sound bright but it comes out sarcastic.

This good-looking boy, maybe 23, tells me not to give up on love. “Just … don’t stop believing.”

I laugh. “Like Journey.”

“Exactly,” he says earnestly. “We’re all on a journey.”

I could tell him that believing in love is not my problem. If anything, I believe in it more than ever. I understand its strangeness, its tender bloodthirstiness, how it’s large enough to contain hate and humiliation inside it and still exist. Love is every kind of emotion at the same time. It’s more complicated and terrible than I ever knew, and it has filled me, fractured me.

But seriously, why would I say that to him?

So instead I smile and nod without speaking. It seems fine with both of us. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing nothing but talking. I’ve negotiated and discussed and confessed and processed and prayed. None of it has made much difference. The next time I fall in love, I decide, I will do it all in silence.

Then somehow it’s a couple of hours later and I’ve lost track of my two handsome boys and even worse I’m out of Red Bull. There’s more dancing and a lot of people pressing up against me and in a moment when the crowd shifts I think I see you on the other side of the pool, your white shirt reflected in the turquoise water, and my chest lurches but it’s somebody else and I feel both empty and relieved.

The day I knew it was over, we were camping. It was my idea to go out into nature, into a place that felt simpler, where we’d talk and just be ourselves with nobody watching. We hiked up to a bluff where we could see the ocean, and the air smelled of spicy juniper and warm earth. We held hands and were gentle with each other, as if we might shatter, and looked at the view.

For a little while it was really nice, and I thought maybe we can do this. And then I felt everything around me sinking. I understood: It was the gentleness that told me it was over. We were wrung out. We’d reached the point where all we wanted was not to wake up each day and face the wreck of it.

Now it’s 2 in the morning and we’re in a private room at a club on Sunset and the music is muffled and electric and a beautiful girl with a squeaky voice tells me my hair looks great and I say thank you.

“The best thing about L.A.,” she adds, leaning in like she’s sharing a secret, “is that there’s no humidity. Everybody’s hair looks so perfect.”

I want to laugh at her but I can’t, because every woman wants to be perfect. She notices my lips twisting in this almost-laugh and says sweetly, softly, “Are you OK?”

I reach out to wring her neck. Mistaking this gesture for something else, she grabs my hands and holds them warmly and we sway together for a while. Then somebody offers her some ecstasy and she promises she’ll be right back. As she disappears into a churn of bodies my gaze follows her across the room and I know you’re not even in the country but I see you on a platform dancing with a blond girl in a silver skirt and gleaming skin.

If you were here, these are the things I would say to you:

You have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.

That show you’re on is terrible.

I know we’re both to blame. Every day we devised new ways to rub each other raw, scraping the vulnerable spots we’d always known about but left untouched. We were experts at it, geniuses of punishment. And yet, if you offered me the choice, I wouldn’t go back, I wouldn’t give up any of it, because it made me something different, broken but bigger, than I had been before.

Which is another way of saying that I will love you forever, even if that love has no path forward in this world. No journey.

And somehow it’s dawn and we’re in the car with the windows rolled down and the air smells of car exhaust and fried food and my chest is burning in a way that’s not totally unpleasant and my breath is full of diamonds. The sky is beginning to lighten and I know the sun is on its way up even though I can’t see it yet. You’re in the seat next to me, holding my hand, and I’m not sure if this is now or then, a wish or a memory, and I don’t really care, because your smile is bright and there are splashes of neon across your cheek, pink then red, and I’m laughing at something you just said and the car’s going so fast it feels like flying and for a moment, everything is beautiful and so, so perfect.

You don’t have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to suspect there’s more to the story than “exhaustion.” Exhaustion doesn’t usually merit a 911 call. And an anonymous source who claims to have seen the incident report told E! Tuesday that Moore was “shaking” and otherwise “acting like she was suffering from a seizure,” which certainly sounds like something serious went down – and may have been part of a larger problem.

But from the moment the news broke, there was skepticism that a beautiful, wealthy woman — even one whose recent divorce proceedings render her Twitter handle painfully obsolete — could have it all that bad. The very first response on E!  was a weary “Stress? What stress? I swear, these Hollywood socialites wouldn’t last a minute in the real world!” TMZ, where the story originally broke, had similar sentiments. “Stress? WTF! Obviously she hasn’t been out in real America lately,” wrote one disgusted commenter. On People, a commenter complained, “I am exhausted too. Where is my article in People?” while another said, “For rich people it’s called exhaustion. For the rest of America it’s called working a full time job, plus overtime, running a household, raising kids and paying your bills. Now I know why I am exhausted.” A commenter named Lucy added, “Try working 2 jobs, 60 hours a week, looking after your own household with no hired help and tell me about exhaustion! ” And at ABC News, a woman named Ann wrote, “I look frail and tired EVERY DAY. I am fed up with rich has-beens being a piece of ‘news.’” Wow, all that real-world stress and exhaustion sure makes people angry.

The idea that a lady with an army of handlers to clean her mansion, iron her designer clothes, and mix up her cleanse shakes is stressed out may justifiably stick in the craw of anyone trying to wring one more winter out of that crappy pair of Payless boots. The story, for Moore’s detractors, is black and white: Entitled woman with a jet-set lifestyle hits a bumpy patch when her marriage to her handsome TV star husband  flatlines, can’t handle the “real” world, and has the luxury of retreating to some zillion-dollar-a-week oasis where she is no doubt right now getting a caviar and gold leaf facial – all while the rest of us are picking off-brand Cheerios out of the carpet.

Divorce, sickness, job insecurity and family obligations happen to the rich and poor, the famous and the obscure. And very, very few among us have the resources of a “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” star. There are no medals or cash prizes handed out for enduring hardship without a personal trainer or Kabbalah retreat. But it’s certainly not as if a celebrity’s choice to “seek professional assistance” creates a shortage of it for everybody else. Some movie star’s in treatment? Oh well, dammit, now where are the rest of us supposed to go? She’s doing something for her health? Gosh, what a bitch.

If, for whatever reason at all – the end of your marriage, the disappointment of a professional flop, the plain old chemistry in your brain – you were at the end of your rope, wouldn’t the absolute best and smartest thing in the world be to get whatever assistance you possibly could? Or does having a big bank account somehow render an individual impervious to heartbreak or depression? Because I’ve got to say, based on what we know of celebrity, it does not.

There’s still far too much stigma attached to the issues of mental and emotional health and illness. And the idea that anyone, regardless of fame or income, isn’t supposed to be affected by profoundly life-changing events is absurd. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that getting help is for the weak. Just because you can afford “exhaustion,” there’s still no shame in having it — and there’s no shame in getting treated for it. Sure, most of us have to get through storms on the strength of our own, decidedly low-budget, counsel and support. But we still find it in our own ways, because we need to in order to survive. And those who don’t aren’t stronger or more “real” – they just tend to become angry commenters on the Internet.

Exactly what happened in a San Diego Hard Rock hotel a few weeks ago is known only to those who were there. But that particular detail – and Leal’s eagerness to share it – show just how much attitudes and behaviors have changed in the last few years. And that taking risks is no longer the great taboo it once was.

Late last month, right around the time Sara Leal was allegedly getting her Magnum-free freak on, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was releasing a sobering study  on the dramatic rise in unprotected sex among young people worldwide. Since 2009, the number of teens forgoing contraception when they bed a new partner has spiked 39 percent in the United States – and a harrowing 111 percent in France. Unsurprisingly, among the reasons cited were not liking it and not having adequate access to it. The CDC estimates there are “approximately 19 million new STD infections each year, which cost the U.S. healthcare system $16.4 billion annually.” 

Leal is not some doe-eyed high school sophomore, but at 22, she’s young enough to have a different perspective on the risks of unprotected sex than her AIDS-era elders. Whatever she and Kutcher may or may not have done, however, her cavalier boast seems a way of making the story more intimate and authentic. She didn’t just have sex with a TV star, folks – she had the real kind! The kind you’d have with a boyfriend! And then they talked about astrology.

Whatever one might think of the morality of a tale that involves the words “Ashton Kutcher” and “hot tub,” what’s really skin-crawling about Leal’s tell-all is the utter lack of concern she seems to have for herself or her sexual partners. Instead, she paints a picture of being swept up by a handsome, famous man with “good endurance.” And by insisting the encounter was condom-free, she seems to want to imply a certain level of intimacy and trust — while instead coming off as dangerously deluded.

Condoms aren’t synonymous with spontaneity or romance. They tell a person, look, we’ve got to protect ourselves here from any potential diseases. They immediately signal that both parties have had a sexual past and a likely future. Opening the package and getting the sucker on don’t always go smoothly – and they feel different once you’re going at it. That’s why even now, for all the rampant sex scenes on prime time and in the movies, you rarely see a scene of someone fumbling with a box of prophylactics. A condom is life’s way of saying, “Please don’t give me the clap,” and that’s not an easy statement to make with someone whose pants you’re trying to get into.

Yet admitting you bail on protection doesn’t make a person seem sexy or spontaneous. It just makes her sound reckless and dumb. And Leal might now have a harder time finding anybody else who wants to go where she claims Kutcher has boldly gone. Because though she, like the increasing number of teens gambling with their bodies, doesn’t seem to mind that one Americans in six has herpes or that nearly 3 million cases of chlamydia are reported annually, there are still plenty of sexually active adults out there who accept the stark reality that the pleasures of sex have to go hand in hand with the responsibilities of it.

Even a faux breakup can drive Web traffic and sell tabloids. And what with Will and Jada totally refusing to get divorced after all the hype last month, seriously, what choice do the gossip police have?

But the couple themselves has so far remained tight-lipped, refusing to comment on the rumors. And that’s where the Twitter analysis comes in. Because as anyone who’s ever endured — or posted — one of those cryptic, “Sigh. Relationships are so hard,” or “Learning to let go of the pain,” status updates knows, surely all the details of anyone’s private life are encoded within those 140-character bursts.

And so, in this corner, we have Ms. Moore, who, if things go as Us magazine seems to believe they will, may soon have to change her Twitter name from @mrskutcher. Last week, one day before her anniversary, she tweeted a quote from the Greek philosopher Epictetus: “When we are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself; study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.” A man’s fault — that’s clearly Ashton, right? Anger, yes. Over some sort of sexual betrayal, no doubt! As Entertainment Weekly noted , the message was obviously “especially revealing.”

Three days later, she tweeted, “I see through you ….” and a photo of herself with closed eyes. What does Demi see through? Her eyelids? Or Ashton Kutcher’s web of lies? It didn’t take long for Starpulse to describe the image of Moore as “distraught,” while Hollywood News reported that the image proves “that Demi is on to Ashton’s crap.”

Kutcher, meanwhile, who debuted in his new “Two and a Half Men” shoes just this past Monday, has been relatively silent on the rumors. OR HAS HE? On Thursday, he just happened to tweet what was playing on his Spotify account: Public Enemy’s classic “Don’t Believe the Hype.” And right on cue, ABC news was quick to report that “The ‘hype,’ presumably, refers to the reports that his marriage to Demi Moore is on the rocks” and the L.A. Times called it a likely “nod to new rumors of infidelity.” Even more tellingly, Kutcher posted later that “When you ASSUME to know that which you know nothing of you make an ASS out of U and ME.” Also, “Ashton Kutcher” is an anagram for “Cheater hunk rots.” Think about it, America.

Now, maybe Ashton and Demi really are heading to Splitsville. Maybe he really has been doing the do with other chicks. Fortunately for those who care, there’s probably a video or voice mail somewhere that can clear this all up until there’s some official announcement on the subject. (Those “Two and a Half Men” stars, they’re such scamps!) But that’ll be a sad moment for all the rest of us — the ones who get a kick out of watching the likes of ABC News trying to interpret the hidden messages within the Twitter stream of the guy who starred in “Dude, Where’s My Car” and the woman who gave us “Striptease.” I haven’t seen that kind of analysis of subtext since my junior year Irish literature class. Or the last time I got an email from an ex. But in the midst of rumors, innuendo and mysterious messages, just remember one thing that’s certain. The walrus was Paul.

I spent most of that time thinking about Ashton Kutcher, who has a few genuinely sparkling screwball-style scenes with Heigl (who plays his sweetie-pie wife) after she finds out he’s actually a CIA assassin, and quite a few others where he seems barely present. I was wondering about why Kutcher isn’t an enormous movie star, and whose fault that might be. It might well be his fault; celebrities write their own ticket to an unprecedented degree these days, and any claim from me or Kutcher or anybody else that he’s been misused or exploited would be laughable. He produced “Killers,” which is no better than a mismanaged early-summer time waster, and he produced his best film, “Spread,” an L.A. gigolo black comedy that didn’t much interest critics or the general public or anybody but me.

Indeed, I’ve been pondering the Kutch-nundrum since before his non-breakthrough with “Spread,” and I’m not getting anywhere with it. I’ve always found Kutcher a tremendously likable, funny and magnetic screen presence. He’s a born movie actor, not a master thespian; I have no desire to see him in “Macbeth” or “Uncle Vanya.” (He might be good in “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) But when Kutcher’s not on autopilot — the way he was the whole way through “Valentine’s Day,” for instance — he’s capable of wily, lively performances that work on various levels and exhibit a ferocious animal intelligence.

We already know that Kutcher has tremendous appeal to the ladies (and to quite a few gentlemen, I would imagine), but you can go to your average Hollywood casting call and find two dozen guys who are that good-looking. Thing is, most of them are going to be assholes. Kutcher’s secret ingredient is his good-humored charm, the sense that he’s not taking the whole game all that seriously — and most of all, the fact that he’s obviously having fun. There’s a definite void in the male-star market, with George Clooney and Tom Cruise getting older and Leonardo DiCaprio playing only tortured Scorsese roles, and Kutcher’s upside as a leading man whom women long to, um, know better and men long to emulate is very, very high. The closest parallel I can find — I’m ready for the screaming! — is Clark Gable.

Before you explode, let me explain that I mean the closest possible 21st-century cognate or equivalent to Gable, since the roles Gable played, and the kind of public figure he was, are not available today. Like Gable, Kutcher’s always going to play the same debonair, good-humored guy who thinks of himself as in on the grand joke of life, but who allows himself to get pulled through the mill of love by some broad anyway. If anything, Kutcher’s a lot less of a blasé sophisticate than Gable was; Kutcher’s attempt to play a sharp-dressed, French-speaking, soulless spook in the early scenes of “Killers” are particularly flat. (In fairness, that’s a fake Cary Grant role, not a fake Gable role.)

Kutcher seems to revel in the inherent duplicity of acting, of pretending to be somebody he’s not. No doubt that’s what drew him to “Killers,” which in its better patches is the story of an ordinary suburban husband with a secret identity. It doesn’t have that many better patches. Director Robert Luketic (who also directed Heigl, to unfortunate effect, in “The Ugly Truth”) tries at various moments to emulate “North by Northwest” and “Meet the Parents” and some bits of Noel Coward, but the resemblance is pale indeed. Somehow Kutcher and Heigl and Tom Selleck and Catherine O’Hara (as her parents) are all fun to watch a fair amount of the time, without the movie they’re in being any good at all.

Pretending to be somebody else can be an innocent, prankish game, like the frat-boy stunts Kutcher pulled as the impresario of “Punk’d,” or it can be the deadly serious psychological business we all engage in, wearing various masks in an effort to hide what we think is our real identity. Let’s return to my obsessive interest in “Spread,” in which Kutcher plays a one-time Midwestern innocent named Nikki who’s playing a complicated game with himself and the world: He’s pretending to be a user so cynical and calculating that he pretends to fall in love with rich women, based on the quality of their digs and the availability of their money.

As an archetypal example of a celebrity who rose from obscurity — Kutcher was literally an Iowa farm boy and was an engineering student when a talent agent first noticed him — he probably feels as if he’s involved in a masquerade every day when he wakes up famous. Unlike so many other celebrities, he seems to be having fun; you never hear about him throwing Russell Crowe hissy fits or punching out photographers, and as he demonstrated on a recent “Letterman” appearance, he tweets back to some of his 5 million-plus Twitter followers personally.

On his Friday afternoon feed, Kutcher argued with somebody about whether deregulation had helped cause the Gulf oil spill, re-tweeted favorable comments about “Killers,” and hit a few people back with thank-you notes. No publicist or personal assistant wrote “@delanaay glad u liked it” or “@FionaChan thanx 4 checking itbout” [sic]. Apparently there’s a biodiesel truck on his parents’ farm! The guy just makes it hard to dislike him.

Which brings me back to the question of whether Kutcher really wants to be the Gable of the ‘teens, or whether appearing in sub-mediocre fare like “Killers” — which is bungled rather than flat-out terrible — is all the movie-stardom he wants and needs. One Hollywood studio executive suggested to me that lowered expectations might be part of the Kutcher master plan: People think of him as the “That ’70s Show” goofball and the prankster from “Punk’d” and a dim-bulb celebrity trophy husband, and they don’t notice that he’s becoming the Ruler of All Entertainment Media.

Well, maybe. That’s a better theory than anything I’ve got to offer, and Kutcher has all those tweetees to go with his good looks, beautiful wife, piles of money and general affect of being totally not bothered by anything. But “Killers” is a dead end — it’s doesn’t have half enough sizzle to turn Kutcher into a money-making leading man, and it definitely won’t encourage critics and other industry observers to treat him with respect.

It’s movies like “Spread,” where Kutcher worked with talented British filmmaker David Mackenzie, or the straight-to-DVD “Personal Effects,” a downbeat indie drama adapted from a Rick Moody story in which Kutcher played a grief-stricken young man who begins a relationship with an older widow played by Michelle Pfeiffer, that suggest there’s some genuine hunger and dramatic ambition beneath the buff physique and the bonhomie. (Mind you, neither of those films made a nickel.)

Like many actors and performers who become their own bosses too early in the entrepreneurial entertainment economy, Kutcher evidently can’t be trusted to make the right decisions on his own behalf. Maybe it’s useless to imagine that he can find his version of Frank Capra or George Cukor or David O. Selznick — the director or producer or executive who sees his potential, gains his trust and channels him correctly. Maybe the goofballing, self-effacing, multitasking half-assed-acting dude of today is all we get, and all we deserve. But I can’t help it: There’s a major movie star inside you, Ashton, but only you can let him out.