It takes some time for the author to offer an expanded justification for this insight. First, he must present us with the obligatory gentlemen's-magazine Hot Moment in which the author implies, "She totally woulda done me." In this case, it involves telling us "the main thing" about meeting Angelina Jolie: "What is the main thing?
Well, there was a moment when she unzipped her dress for me. It was sort of a requisite celebrity profile moment." Note extremely sophisticated meta take: He's no ordinary celebrity-profile hack, so he can both say it and not seem to be overimpressed or boastful about it.
The circumstances of the unzipped moment: He had asked to see a tattoo of an endangered species of tiger, "and she obliged, reaching her hands behind her back and pulling down her zipper. The black dress parted and in the conventions of the celebrity profile, I should have been thinking, Hey, sexy. I'll leave the big reveal of the deeply philosophical, nonsexual thoughts about media and reality that he was thinking when "the black dress parted" for those who read the entire profile for themselves.
Instead, let us follow, or attempt to follow, the rationale for Angelina Jolie being "the best woman in the world" and how that relates to 9/11 and celebrity. (The highbrow celebrity profile must always offer a novel theory of Celebrity Itself.) And here it is—he begins with the question: "Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans?
Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie's twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?
" I'm not making this up. I'm copying it right out of the pages of a well-known magazine, which (full disclosure) I've written for in the past. But I will be deeply indebted to any reader who can make the slightest bit of sense of this paragraph about meaninglessness.
Is it an example of what they used to call at Yale "the fallacy of imitative form," in which in order to write about meaninglessness you have to be Actually, I suspect it is the product of someone who has read the late George W. Trow's famous essay, "Within the Context of No Context" and is attempting to ape its convoluted way of saying the obvious without even having something obvious to say. But does anybody ever read this stuff?
Does anybody take it seriously? Does the writer? It's the of prose.
There's a certain sadness to it, as well. To paraphrase that line in "Howl": I saw some of the best writers of my generation destroyed by celebrity profiling And by the way, it's not like I haven't done it myself. * (She was gracious about it.
I don't think, in some puritanical Trowvian way, that there's anything wrong with people being interested in celebrities. There's just something condescending in the way certain magazines think they can put one over on the reader with these transparently insincere intellectual rationales for caring about celebs. A meretriciousness that reaches a peak in the final column of the story, when we finally get the Angelina Jolie-as-victim theory that at last ties together Angelina, 9/11, the suffering of the wretched of the earth, and the analogous suffering of celebrities.
It is a rule of the Celebrity Profile that celebrities Suffer for their Fame because they're always whining on about how difficult it is to go to the supermarket without being recognized and other tragic inconveniences. Or as our profiler puts it in : "She fulfills her vision of herself as the underdog; because she's the underdog she connects to the world's underdogs … and so, in the end, finds meaning and a measure of happiness. It is the kind of conversion encouraged by all of the world's major religions, but because celebrity is the religion in question here, the conversion of Angelina Jolie is regarded as out of reach—the function of fame and privilege.
" But he doesn't stop there with the vision of the Christlike Angelina's suffering and her "conversion" to some vague religion of celebrity. She's not merely a Christ figure: "It's pretty damned clear that the word that best describes her is a word the religion of celebrity has made difficult to say, and more difficult to swallow: God that was brave of him, to call Angelina Jolie "good." One thing that's a little sad about it is that there something he could have talked about other than the meaninglessness of the meaning of celebrity: the meaning of the death of Daniel Pearl.
was a 9/11 story, in that many investigators believe that Pearl was murdered by the suspected 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who confessed, albeit after torture, to killing Pearl). Well, I'll let you be the judge: Read the whole thing. But I feel that in a wasteland of celebrity profiles, this one rises to immortality with its final paragraph.
Because nothing matches the stately assurance of its own self-importance, nothing reaches what I'd call the "existential pompousness" of that final paragraph, with its last sentence devoted to a reprise of the "suffering" that Angelina Jolie undergoes and how she transcends it all in her uniquely saintly, best-woman-in-the-world way: "The people who travel with her are always amazed by how she bears up when she's barraged by photographers." (Statements like this always make you wonder whether she'd suffer if no photographers bothered to badger her.) "The people who travel with her are always blinded by the flashbulbs and wonder if something's wrong with her eyes, for she just stares at the photographers as if she's taking them all in, and then moves forward, as if they mean nothing to her at all.
" End of story. Oh the bleak meaninglessness of fame! She's seen through to its essential nothingness.
She sees through it; her eyes are fixed on a more distant dream. He knows it, our profile writer, not blinded by the lights, the way the lower orders are. He's on a spiritual realm with her, above the foolish fame-blinded masses.
A plane of pure altruism and suffering. Someday we too can aspire to the wisdom to see what they see from the perspective they share together. For this gift of hope, this glimpse of what it is to be so spiritually evolved, we must be grateful.
But meanwhile, I've got a great concept for a profile of Britney: See, in her suffering she's really like Iraq. I mean if you think of K-Fed as Saddam, then the divorce was "regime change" and … to the corrected sentence.) Return to the corrected sentence.
) back to top It takes some time for the author to offer an expanded justification for this insight.
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