A BRENNIFER BUZZ
Brad and Jennifer shared a moment, and (half) the world jumped with joy
When Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were pictured holding hands (or rather grabbing wrists) at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night, half the world erupted in unfettered glee, while the other half rolled their eyes.
The eye-rollers dismiss our excitement as a sad indictment of today’s vacuous, celebrity-obsessed culture, mobilized only by prurient interest in the lives of well-dressed strangers. But they’re wrong.
The “Jen, Brad and Ang triangle” is a years-long epic that taps into more dramatic conventions and romantic tropes than Game of Thrones. It’s a modern-day parable about love and loss — a power struggle played out in the pages of Us Weekly, People and TMZ.
Ten years ago, I was a junior reporter at U.K. fashion magazine Grazia, and I thoroughly picked apart our fascination with this rolling melodrama — because it was a rare week in the Grazia office when the Brangelina/poor Jen narrative sunk out of our “10 Hot” news stories.
We all knew that having Aniston on the cover sold magazines. And having Angelina Jolie on the cover sold magazines. Having
Pitt on the cover — well, sorry, Brad, but that didn’t really matter. So, for the eye-rollers in our midst, here’s why people still care about the repercussions of a celebrity marriage that happened two decades ago:
When Pitt and Aniston married in a lavish Malibu ceremony in the summer of 2000, he had just been recrowned hot Hollywood property after his turn as hot Tyler Durden in cult film Fight Club. She was the hottest female cast member in the hottest sitcom of the decade, Friends. And what made their relationship so of the moment was the equal partnership of two successful A-listers, apparently unsullied by egos or imbalances.
When Pitt took a cameo in Friends, the behemoth sitcom that by then was paying Aniston US$1 million per episode, working women around the globe swooned. This was the Hollywood equivalent of a boyfriend swinging by our office with a smile and some homemade frittata.
Pitt and Aniston were the first truly successful modern power couple of the early 2000s, so a lot of dreams died when details emerged of his relationship with his co-star in the tepid 2005 romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But our interest only ramped up.
Jolie was the archetypal femme fatale, one of the most unconventional women in Hollywood, who already had two quick-burn marriages behind her: one to fellow ’90s bright young thing Jonny Lee Miller and another to Billy Bob Thornton, 20 years her senior, which ended in 2003.
She’d worn a vial of Thornton’s blood around her neck, she’d adopted a young Cambodian kid on her own, she had cool tattoos and took roles in angsty, artsy movies such as Girl, Interrupted.
I thought she was magnificent, a glorious new dangerous character striding on stage to shake up the slightly saccharine Brad-and-jen narrative.
To some, Jolie was the ultimate villainess — an alluring vamp and stone-cold homewrecker. To others, she represented the triumph of the misfits, living proof that even a prince might prefer a wild-eyed woman to his perfect princess.
Jo Piazza, veteran U.S. showbiz columnist, podcaster and author of Celebrity Inc: How Famous People Make Money, says: “Brad Pitt and Angelina had strong brands already in 2004, but by hooking up in 2005, they combined the two most intriguing narratives in Hollywood.
“Brad was married to America’s sweetheart and abandoned a seemingly perfect marriage for the bad girl. Angelina was a bad girl who was redeemed.”
In true Madonna-whore Dichotomy fashion, Jolie and Aniston appeared like polar opposites.
In reality, they probably had rather a lot in common (same aspirations, same occupation, same taste in men), but on paper, and in the glossy pages of gossip magazines, this looked like Blur vs. Oasis, Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker or Borg vs. Mcenroe all over again.
Readers loudly pronounced themselves “Team Jen” or “Team Ang,” and whose side you took reflected your own position in the homewrecker/goody-goody, iconoclast/paragon of virtue paradigm.
Any news story — Pitt and Jolie adopting another child, Aniston going on to marry Justin Theroux — was a catalyst for us all to talk about what made us tick, and what side of the fence we came down on.
Did we champion the girl-nextdoor narrative and believe in the sanctity of marriage, or did we view Pitt and Jolie’s relationship as a triumph of passion over convention? Whom did we relate to more?
The power of an epic is that the narrative takes place in the wider context of our own evolving lives, with world events providing an even more dramatic backdrop.
Some of us have remained invested in these three familiar characters throughout financial crashes, global warfare, political upheaval and environmental catastrophe. Frankly, we need the stability this gloriously glossy, yet eminently relatable, storyline offers us.
And so this latest development isn’t just the revival of a tired old gossip item. It’s the latest twist in an ongoing epic love saga, and an opportunity to reassess our collective morality, revisit our past selves, and call to mind a — let’s face it, happier — time when our gravest concerns were whether Justin and Jen were happier than Brad and Ang.