I love Lynn Crosbie's mythopoetic pop culture studies
Bored with Brangie
LYNN CROSBIE
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
June 16, 2008 at 10:15 PM EDT
‘I happen to be with someone who finds pregnancy very sexy, so that makes me feel very sexy.”
A banal enough statement, yet this quote from the cover of the new Vanity Fair, purred by Angelina Jolie, has ricocheted through virtually every other entertainment magazine and tabloid, as if the actress had just revised the Avogadro constant.
In an infamous Saturday Night Live sketch, John Belushi played The Guest Who Wouldn't Leave, a mock-horror role in which he remained at a party well after its conclusion, loafing on the couch, asking for more drinks, picking up the phone and asking, “Mind if I make a long-distance call?” as they screamed in fear.
Jolie reminds me of this Belushi character, if only because of her inexplicable persistence and imperviousness to how tiresome and often maddening her constant presence can be.
Or maybe she is more like Elizabeth Taylor, a somewhat respected actress, more famous for her love life and various personal tragedies, her incomparable violet eyes and smouldering sexuality.
Taylor is so famous, in fact, that she is still often shot by ancient paparazzi, as she is being wheeled in and out of various medical facilities, in a white fright wig, clutching a small, shivering dog.
Or maybe Jolie is what Rich Cohen, the propulsive writer of the Vanity Fair story, calls “an emissary of secret order, a messenger from a lost kingdom … a princess, an aristocrat.”
Such dull mysteries are better solved by the terrifying members of Soulie.Jolie.com, a cult fan website that would be harder to hack than the Federal Bureau of Investigation database.
After reading the new Vanity Fair feature, her first since she pretended not to be sleeping with Brad Pitt several years ago, it is hard, beyond her obvious and mesmerizing beauty, to understand why she, Pitt and their children now completely dominate the entertainment media (and the new Forbes Celebrity 100 editorial package).
Her dream relationship – which many now refer to as a high-school quarterback and prom queen scenario – is not reason enough; nor are her charity work, adoptions or carefully calculated wild-child-with-soul persona.
Even her spectacular looks are not enough, given the ascendance of Megan Fox ( Transformers, Hope & Faith), a much younger, dead ringer for Jolie, who has lately been swaggering around bars yelling of her imagined rival, “She's ancient! I'm, like, 21!”
Her ex, Billy Bob Thornton, commented recently that Jolie was going through “a phase” and will “come to her senses” and return to him. While he was mocked for saying so, he may be the only person who seems to understand the Arctic nature of the actress's transformation from Goth Psycho to Mia Farrow's far-better-looking sister.
And, as a man who abandoned his common-law wife for the brattish Jolie, who checked into a mental institution when she couldn't get him to leave Laura Dern quickly enough, he also understands that her biggest sell is her sexual volatility, still being measured, exponentially, against the loss of sexual (and star) power of her last victim, Jennifer Aniston.
What began, three years ago, as a non-equilateral love triangle with classic components (the tormented husband! the pretty, suffering wife! the siren!) continues to shape our interest in both Jolie and Pitt (I read a new disgusting appellation today – “Brangie”) and the tirelessly wounded Aniston.
Had Pitt divorced Aniston then and, long after that, met and fell in love with Jolie, their fame would scarcely register in comparison to the business they are doing today.
The Mr. And Mrs. Smith fiasco was, in Hollywood terms, long, long ago, but because the players are still so marked by the scandal, whatever they do also involves revealing their vampire bites.
Cohen asks Jolie (who like Aniston has been dramatically estranged from a parent) about her father Jon Voight's films. She responds that she has never seen Coming Home, “because that was when my father cheated on my mom, and the woman he cheated with is in the film.”
This statement goes unchallenged by yet another of the zombie army, in spite of Jolie's predilection for chasing married men; in spite of what it must be like for the cowed Aniston to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a film that might as well contain such subtitles as “Meet me under the craft services table, and bring the salami” and “Tell my wife I'm busy with Angelina Jolie … no, make that, busy making art.”
This, too, is old news, but it is all that justifies our obsession with a mediocre actress and her tedious boyfriend; all that keeps the film jinx and faded sweetheart Aniston in play.
Why can't we let go of this one, admittedly explosive, instance of infidelity?
Because it gives so many people the sweet confirmation that, as dull as their lives are and as painful, the simple matter of heartbreak and cruelty affects us all.
One may side with the victors or the victims, as the old Team Jolie and Team Aniston T-shirts showed, depending on how prideful or injured one is.
The mighty hearts in all of us quaver at such an enormous illumination of our greatest fears.
Jolie once remarked, with equal parts empathy and condescension, “If you ask people what they've always wanted to do, most people haven't done it. That breaks my heart.”
Here we stand, pitied and pathetic, mere splinters of ice in the glass heart of our Snow Queen.
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