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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
The Unbearable Heaviness of Jolie
Once upon a time, “Angelina Jolie”, like “Pamela Anderson” before it, was a word in itself in English.
You remember: Back when Baywatch was still on, Pamela Anderson was so universally adored that her name had become a common byword for “hot”, as in “So-and-so is hot. Not Pamela-Anderson-hot, but still pretty hot”. Since then, of course, age and her Brazil-like addiction to surgery have all but erased her name from the world’s lexicon of beauty.
And for a very brief time nearly a decade later, Angelina Jolie’s name had also become a byword for “hot” — or, more specifically, “crazy/hot”, which for many was an even more appealing species of “hot”.
But now, six years after she first became a household word, Angelina Jolie, while definitely still hot, is no longer “Angelina-Jolie-hot”.
What happened?
The answer, I realized tonight while catching a snippet of an Angelina special on E!, is Tomb Raider. Ever since that crappy, video-game-inspired flick came out, Angelina has become a lot less interesting to the public — or rather, the public has become a lot less interesting to Angelina.
The trouble is that Tomb Raider exposed Angelina to the poverty and misery of The Outside World — and if there’s one thing a celebrity should never have any prolonged exposure to, it’s The Outside World. For it was this eye-opening experience for the sake of a mediocre film that led to her enduring mission as Earth’s Ambassador to the Universe and Mother to the World’s Children — all well and good in and of itself, but like so many initially edgy and/or visionary artists, from Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams to George Lucas and Reese Witherspoon, Angelina traded in the sexy, unfettered lightness that so captivated the mostly heavy, fettered world for the unsexy, heavy Es muß sein of parental (and ambassadorial) duty that the fettered world has no interest in.
Still, though she’s now more Bono than Bardot, the world will have to make do — after all, for better or for worse, no new crazy/sexy, brother-macking, blood-vial-carrying femme fatale has stepped forward to take the old Angelina’s place.
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