MR. & MRS. SPLITSVILLE
Jolie files to divorce Pitt, putting longtime rumours to rest, writes Sadaf Ahsan.
You usually hear about it first through social media. It comes in the form of a tweet linking to a TMZ article.
This is how we tend to handle news of a celebrity breakup. We do it in an uncomfortable sort of way, making sure to express that we’re above this kind of thing through our sarcasm, our humour. Of course, as the old saying suggests, there’s a little bit of truth behind every joke.
On Tuesday, TMZ (where else?) reported that Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from husband Brad Pitt, citing irreconcilable differences while requesting physical custody of their six children. The documents the media outlet obtained went on to emphasize a difference in “parenting methods” as the reason for the split, while specifically noting “a third person” was not involved in the dissolution of their marriage.
After Pitt and Jolie met in 2004 while filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, rumours began circulating that Pitt was having an affair on then-wife Jennifer Aniston. They had been married since 2000 and, for all intents and purposes, formed the pre-existing power couple to beat.
When Jolie and Pitt eventually confirmed their relationship in January 2006, it was as if a pop culture bomb had gone off. They spent the next several years having and adopting a plethora of children, whom they paraded across continents to the glee of photo editors everywhere, travelling the world together as human rights activists and co-starring in another (very bad) movie. They became international icons — as one.
It’s almost as if their family was designed in a public relations laboratory: bad girl with signature full lips meets all-American guy with iconic blond hair; helps save the world with equally photogenic mini-mes in tow. Brangelina was the power couple of the decade, the one that made portmanteaus a sign of true romantic achievement.
The Jolie-Pitt union may also represent the last couple to hang on to a squeaky-clean prestige, seemingly able to erase any scandal that came near them just by existing. And while clutching to that thin layer of privacy — in that we still really know only as much as they want us to — the Jolie-Pitts created a myth not unlike the one small children attach to their own parents. As easy as it was to fall into the illusion of perfection, it was also easy to see how they profited from the image they created.
Even as Aniston filed for divorce from Pitt in 2005, the new couple were adopting a child ( before publicly confirming their relationship) from an orphanage in Ethiopia. When Jolie gave birth to her and Pitt’s daughter Shiloh in Namibia, the couple said in their press statement: “Our other daughter (Zahara) was born in Africa and so this is a special continent for us.”
When the pair had their twins in July 2008, they sold the photos to People and Hello! magazines for a reported total of US$14 million, the most expensive celebrity photos ever taken. Over the years, most interviews with the two would revolve around a love for their children, how they became “homebodies” together, how they didn’t need anything else.
Perhaps the most cementing moment in our relationship to the two came in May 2013 when Jolie revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she had undergone preventive double mastectomy after discovering she was at high risk of both breast and ovarian cancer.
“I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive . ... We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has,” she wrote, while Pitt called her “heroic” in the London Evening Standard. She would again undergo surgery in 2015 to remove her ovaries and Fallopian tubes, a year after their marriage in the summer of 2014. Photos of Jolie’s wedding dress, emblazoned with illustrations by their children, would grace the cover of Hello!
With all of this presence in the pop culture environs, their breakup will have an effect, no matter if we’re above this sort of thing, pretending to be above this sort of thing or actually genuinely vested in the relationships of strangers.
A symbol of flawed perfection is no more.