I ought to be working, but I am going to blog about angelina jolie. if you live in a country like ours long enough you can easily tell that being a celebrity takes a healthy amount of ego and self-interest; it almost goes beyond that, into a kind of imperialism of personality. these people - oprah winfrey, george clooney, whatever, joe the plumber - clearly have a different sense of self than the rest of us. this is obvious, I am not "exposing" anything here.
angelina jolie seems to have this kind of perspective embedded in every cell of her body. I have never seen anyone so intensely self-interested; it is as though she is wholly composed of the hollywood myth. I don't mean this in the way that her life follows some kind of hollywood narrative arc; I mean she clearly believes her actions belong to some sphere of behavior that is super-human, or worthy of watching. people who believe they deserve to be watched interest me, because I am always thinking "why am I drawing attention to myself like that, I am so lame".
I never see or hear anything about angelina jolie that makes me think "hey, that's sort of similar to my life." I don't see any human vulnerability in her, even her phase when she was "acting out" by doing weird things like carrying billy bob's blood around and talking about sex with women seemed totally out of a movie universe. she is her own movie. I have never seen a human being like this before.
sometimes I try to figure out why I, like the rest of the world, can't help but pay attention to her, at least once in a while. I think for me it has to do with her version of femininity (I feel like I put too many letter 'i's in that word). she seems to have totally bypassed the cute, romantic-comedy girl and gone onto something far more aggressive and swaggering. I think that is a good word for what she does in movies like tomb raider (which I think I might have seen ten minutes of on a plane once) - she swaggers. I like this about her. I hate the version of women that you see on shows like gilmore girls - I mean I pretty much hate everything about that show, but especially that the women seemed stuck in this kind of trivial universe and only the men were allowed to be kind of mysterious and romantic.
the articles that are written about angelina jolie - I read one in esquire a while ago that was absolutely ridiculous - tend to be so overblown and full of pomp and ballast, analyzing her, in the way I am tempted to, as a mythical figure instead of a person. they know, they can sense that she is not like other people in that she is her movies. trying to decide whether she's being "fake" in the above video is totally beside the point; there is no "real" version of her. I think she has been totally overcome by the personality empire that she's built, which I partly admire and partly abhor. it seems to define american culture in some basic way, that our need to influence has more to do with personality than with money. we use money to throw our influence as wide and far as we can, because fame gives the illusion of happiness, and best of all, of something happening.
I've been reading this fantastic book by lydia davis lately and this might be my favorite opening ever in fiction:
We have all these favorite shows coming on every evening. They say it will be exciting and it always is.
we are angelina jolie's totally captive audience.
1 comments:
Four things come immediately to mind.
[FIRST] Bret Easton Ellis, specifically "Glamorama": This novel is why Ellis has signed copies of his second most recent novel with the inscription to the effect of "FUCK YOU BEN STILLER". That said, the wikipedia page doesn't do it justice. But at almost six hundred pages, the thing is a Trollope-ian doorstop. It's complex and it's a novel you read for texture and ideas. However, all the ideas could be found in his previous books (not to this extent, for he fires it up here and makes important links to capital and terrorism) in varying degrees, and if not there surely in the Situationalist movement of Debord in the 60-70s. So ... for instance, for Ellis' "Let's slide down the surface of things" and "Disappear here," there's [SECOND] Debord's SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE and, or [THIRD] Baudrillard (to a more extreme degree) and earlier, [FOURTH] Thorstein Veblen (THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS) useful here for symbolic notions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glamorama
"Oh god, come off it, Victor." She keeps walking.
I dart in and out of people's way to keep up with her.
"What? What is it?" I'm asking.
"I'm not really part of that scene."
"What scene, baby?"
"The one where all anyone is interested in is who's fucking who, who has the biggest dick, the biggest tits, who's more famous than whoever."
Confused, I keep following. "And you're, um, not like into this?" I ask, watching her wave down a taxi. "You've got like a problem?"
99
I wash my hands and stare at myself in the mirror above the sink before I remember time is fleeting, madness takes its toll and all that and in the main room the director, assistant director, lighting cameraman, gaffer, chief electrician, two more assistants, Scot Benoit, Jason Vorhees' sister, Bruce Hulce, Gerlinda Kostiff, scenic ops and a Stedicam operator stand around a very large white egg, mute, video cameras circling, filming a video of the making of this commercial, photographers taking pictures of the video team.
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also then Debord:
60
Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.
61
The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption. The stars of decisionmaking must possess the full range of admired human qualities: official differences between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity implied by their supposed excellence in every field of endeavor. As head of state, Khrushchev retrospectively became a general so as to take credit for the victory of the battle of Kursk twenty years after it happened. And Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man’s public persona. The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.
This book rocks. And isn't as impossible as Baudrillard becomes when he pushes it over the edge.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm
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