Ahhhh Brangelina, how do you do it?
They’ve got a hold of me, I’ll admit it. I love going to the grocery store, as I know when I get to the chekout, the tabloid covers will catch my attention and I can get an update on the state of Brangelina. Last time if I recall they were getting a trial separation or has that passed and now they’re adopting again?
There are plenty of reasons to love ‘em. They're hot, they're in a few quality flicks, they're saving the world... But the main reason I love em is that they’ve re-invented the concept of celebrity for the 21st century.
The archetypal celebrity has shifted a number of times since the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, when the studios were almost solely responsible for the construction and promotion of their stars. While there are still manufactured stars, as well as anti-stars like those of the new breed, for most contemporary stars the act of celebrity has become an essential labour for their career as performers.
The shift from the traditional celebrity to the contemporary version is often attributed to Madonna’s ascent to stardom. Her relationship with the media involved many concessions of her privacy, causing a shift all the relationship between celebrities and the media going forward.
The blurring of private and public creates the extratextual body of the stars, and the media are integral to this. As a result, most stars work with the media in both their public and ‘private’ lives, establishing and maintaining their celebrity as a full-time job.
It would seem that individually, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had reached the pinnacle of celebrity. They sold out theatres regardless of the film, their characters were never just the characters in the film, they were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing the characters in the film. They were big time, but it wasn’t until they ditched the dead weight and joined forces, that they realized their full potential.
Together, Brangelina have taken stardom to a whole new level, evolving their celebrity to the point that their craft has become supplementary. In order to begin the process they needed an introduction unlike anything ever done before, and they did just that with Mr. & Mrs. Smith
In terms of content, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is pure spectacle. The film provides virtually no opportunity for identification with the narrative or the characters. All major moments in the relationship of Jane and John Smith occur in the midst of extradiagetic distractions, the conversations where they explore the increasing complexity of their relationship occur as bullets whiz by, or in the midst of explosions. This works to prevent identification between the characters and the audience, but also works to build identification between the audience and the stars. Since we cannot identify with John and Jane Smith, we instead identify with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
During promotion of the film, stories began to leak about the burgeoning romance between the two stars. Mr. & Mrs. Smith took a traditional Hollywood promotional tool, the use of romantic rumour and innuendo, and developed it a step further by building the entire film around these rumours and innuendo. Pitt and Jolie invite the audience in through the spectacle of their characters and the spectacle of the film itself, and they frame the promotion of the film so that it appears as though they also invited the audience to watch their ‘real’ lives. The Smiths find out in the film’s narrative that their whole lives had been faked, this manufactures authenticity around their relationship as they fall in love all over again, and given the extratextual framing of the film, it also manufactures authenticity around the idea that the audience is actually seeing Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie falling in love at the same time. In this sense the film is not text, it is an extratextual account of the Brangelina love story. And in using film text to further their extratextual personas, Pitt and Jolie changed the relationship between stars and their labour.
The use of media for celebrity enhancement is commonplace, but the use of Mr. & Mrs. Smith to develop the textual, identity of Brangelina marks a new direction in the evolution of celebrity. If contemporary celebrities treat the development and maintenance of celebrity as an integral part of their work as actors, Brangelina are the exact opposite. They used Mr. & Mrs. Smith as a vehicle to promote their celebrity, instead of using their celebrity as a vehicle to promote the film. In this sense they are positioning celebrity as the priority, and acting in films as the requisite labour of their trade.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith began the process of a complete redefinition of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s extratextual personas. Since the film they have repositioned themselves as the fore bearers of the responsible, conscious and altruistic celebrity, one who uses their power to improve the world instead of their own careers. But in doing so they have redefined themselves almost solely as celebrities, at the expense of their reputations as fairly acclaimed actors. Mr. & Mrs. Smith assists in this redefinition by providing us a spectacular extratextual love story that doesn’t allow for any acknowledgement of their acting ability, instead focusing on the grandeur of their position as celebrities.
Note: This argument is mostly taken from an essay I wrote in November 2008 on Mr. & Mrs. Smith for a class on Celebrity Theory
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