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.
