Camille Paglia Speaks Out about Brangelina
On history repeating itself:
“I think the whole thing between Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie is a replay of the iconomical face-off of my adolescence between Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. You have the good girl who wants to stand by her man and then loses her man (in that case Eddie Fisher) to the brunette vixen, the peripatetic world traveler with her sorceress allure and her borderline molten sexuality.”
On playing the good girl:
“Jennifer Aniston has been reticent through it all. She hasn’t had a fit or said anything rude in public to demean her rival. She is basically playing the good girl. She has kind of a quirky, neurotic urban humor about her — a kind of whimsy.”
On how it’s affecting Jen:
“You always feel like she is telegraphing deep inner pain that she’s not always able to express — or doesn’t want to express — because she is a prisoner of her decorous persona. There is the pressure and she is almost emotionally constipated in a way, and that has affected her performances on film.”
On why we care:
“I think a lot of white, middle-class American young women identify with Jennifer Aniston’s public humiliation, her romantic martyrdom. She has been abandoned by the highly attractive, boyish young man (who now is not so young) who is checkless, looks angelic but is in fact a traitor.”
I don’t know why we have to have an academic study of Brangelina…but here it is. An academic’s take on the whole Brad/Angie/Jen debacle. Really, what is the big deal here? In all honesty, Jen isn’t the only woman who’s ever been hurt. And Brad isn’t the only man who’s ever fallen in love while he was commited to someone else. And Ange isn’t the first home-wrecker. The fact that they’re famous really blew this whole story up by a lot I think. And although I idntify more with Jen than say…Ange…I really don’t think I have too much in common with movie stars anyway.
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