Christian Bale shouts at a guy

Christian Bale’s recent blow-up on the set of Terminator IV (which I’m not going to post or link to because I adore inconvenience) seems to have scandalised a few people, but I actually found it quite endearing; it’s the first time I’ve heard the taciturn actor communicate with such emotion. (Psyche!)

But there’s something suspicious about it: why does he deliver the whole tirade in an American(ish) accent? Could it be that it’s a ruse? Possibilities are spawning in my head like the eggs of a particularly fertile spider, ready to hatch and devour my brain matter at any moment. Two of them (the possibilities) stand out in particular:

1) Bale, tired of being seen as a cold fish, manufactured the incident to make himself seem more "human". He will soon follow up with a full-on emotional breakdown, a brief period of convalescence and a tastefully low-key return to public life, after which he will create a charitable foundation to support sufferers of mental illness. Everyone will love and cherish him, and he will win an Oscar a year for the rest of his life, occasionally turning it down for reasons of modesty or to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans.

2) The widely disseminated recording of Bale’s outburst is actually a promotional tool for Terminator IV. The film is secretly an ambitious post-modern masterwork, whose creators aim to use it as a vehicle for examining contemporary attitudes to technology and its place in society. Bale, who is credited as John Connor, will actually play himself playing John Connor; the "story" will focus on his experience of the production process, drawing parallels between the Terminator universe and 21st-century western society. Its premier screening will coincide with the release of a computer virus that projects onto the monitor of every Internet-enabled computer in the world live footage of Bale being skinned alive, revealing that he was a robot all along. This will prevent people from accessing Facebook for half an hour, with cataclysmic results.