Politics & Power Quote by Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve’s line lands like an elegant slap: not a grand thesis about America, but a chic, suspicious glance at a country where public life feels permanently on edge. Coming from an actress whose fame was forged in the European tradition of distance and discretion, it’s less “anti-American” than it is a critique of American exposure. In the U.S., celebrity is treated as both product and prey. You’re marketed as intimate, approachable, endlessly available, then punished for the very accessibility the system demands.

The subtext is about scale and volatility. America’s myth of openness (everyone can walk right up to you; everyone has a shot) collides with a culture of grievance, weaponization, and surveillance. A bodyguard becomes the absurd symbol of that collision: the price of being visible in a place that turns visibility into a contact sport. It’s also a subtle indictment of American gun culture and the casualness of threat, the way danger is normalized until security becomes wardrobe.

Deneuve’s phrasing is key: “need” implies a baseline requirement, not a special precaution for the unusually famous. That exaggeration is the point. It compresses a tangle of anxieties - stalking, paparazzi, random violence, political hostility - into a single prop. The line reads as a European star registering culture shock, but it also works as a broader comment on how American freedom is increasingly experienced through managed risk: you can go out, sure, as long as you bring protection.