THE BRADANGELINA OBSESSION

As the wronged woman, Jennifer has got the sympathy vote, and tons more work as a consequence. Brad, however, has got Angelina, and Angelina’s notoriety got her top spot in Forbes magazine’s 2009 list of the World’s Most Powerful Celebrities. Up to a point everyone should be happy, but the issues go beyond that. Camille Paglia, the veteran feminist writer, for instance, sees the story of Brangelina as a parable of betrayal – an illustration of the vulnerability and dependent status of women. “You have the good girl,” she says: “who wants to stand by her man, and then loses her man to a vixen with her sorceress allure and molten sexuality. Young women identify with Jennifer’s public humiliation, her romantic martyrdom. She’s been abandoned by a man who looks angelic, but is, in fact, a traitor.”Jane Bruton, the editor of Grazia, a British glossy magazine which devotes much of its news coverage to Brangelina, puts it in mildly less excitable terms: “We are, all of us, a little invested in the narrative arc of this relationship,” she explains. “It’s a classic, and classically messy, love affair. We’ve all had them and we can all relate to it. I think the public was very enamoured of the Pitt-Anniston marriage. We believed in it and we were disappointed when it ended.”

-The National
Feb 10 2010