Donald Trump, the Emmys, the economy — the Brangelina split has wiped them all off the front page.
“BRANGELINA OVER,” blared the Daily Mail, which used a font size normally reserved for world wars.
Within hours of the news that Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, #Brangelina was, globally, the top trending hashtag on Twitter. Celebrity blogs registered thousands of comments in record time.
“Today is just like when JFK was on the Challenger on 9/11 at Pearl Harbor,” said one at Dlisted.
“Yup, we have our first crier in the office,” said another.
What is it about this celebrity divorce that separates it from all others? Why are millions of people having such strange, emotional reactions?
It’s probably as simple as this: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were our last great Hollywood couple. Their lineage was Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, Liz and Dick — golden megastars all, with outsize love stories that dwarfed anything Hollywood itself could conjure in the movies.
Nearly everything about Jolie and Pitt’s romance was old-school: They met on the set of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” in 2004. By 2005, Pitt left his then-wife, Jennifer Aniston — America’s wholesome “Friend” — for Jolie, who had a wild reputation as a bisexual ex-junkie who’d been married twice before, wore one husband’s blood in a vial, and teased an incestuous relationship with her brother.
Jolie and Pitt did everything big, and in our social media era, somehow managed to seem above us: not quite human, not quite mortal. Individually, they were both at the height of their beauty, but together, they were an epic force multiplier.
Not since Ben Affleck bought his then-fiancé Jennifer Lopez a $100,000, jewel-encrusted toilet seat (Bennifer, 2002-2004) has a celebrity couple so avidly and expertly stoked public fascination. Jay Z and Beyoncé might be Brangelina’s closest living relative, but their romance often plays out like an agreed-upon narrative — “Lemonade” was expert marriage-crisis-as-marketing tool — rather than uncontained force.
Not that Jolie and Pitt have been above selling their romance, too. In July 2005, after months of tabloid speculation, they announced their couplehood — not with a press release or red carpet appearance, but with a 60-page spread in W magazine. They posed as parents of beautiful, blond mini-Brads long before he’d divorced Aniston, who’d been pilloried in the press for not having the babies he so publicly longed for.
“There’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing,” Aniston said at the time.
Undaunted, Pitt and Jolie moved to Namibia so Jolie could give birth to their first child, Shiloh, in a rural hospital without an ultrasound machine. It was classic “pay-attention-please-don’t-pay-attention” media-baiting. They then introduced infant Shiloh on the cover of People magazine.
Along the way, Jolie adopted a daughter from Ethiopia and a son from Vietnam before having twins with Pitt in 2008. That same year, Pitt’s photo of Jolie breastfeeding made the cover of W’s “Art” issue. Extravagance seems too small a word for their displays of affection: Jolie bought Pitt a waterfall; Pitt told Parade magazine that they loved to have sex in it.
Jolie bought Pitt a $20 million, heart-shaped island for his 50th birthday.
Also: Their bed was 9 feet wide. Chateau Miraval was the name of their mansion in France and their brand of wine ($21.99 at wine.com). They got matching tattoos, with some of Pitt’s originating as Jolie’s scrawls on his skin. In 2012, Pitt designed Jolie’s $250,000 engagement ring; when they married in August 2014, Jolie wore a white bridal gown festooned with her children’s ink drawings.
“Vivienne, Knox, and indeed, all six of our children are such wonderful artists,” Jolie told People magazine, sounding increasingly arch. “And what better place to reflect their creative talents than my gown?”
As Brangelina, Pitt was no longer the Midwestern boy-turned-movie star, Jolie no longer the Hollywood wild child. They were that rare celebrity couple that could be followed high and low, by readers of the Enquirer and the Economist. They were international humanitarians. They made “By the Sea,” a widely panned vanity project written and directed by Jolie. They visited President Obama in the Oval Office.
These are things of which Kim and Kanye can only dream.
The hysteria over Brangelina’s breakup is a reflection of our arid, plainly manufactured celebrity culture. The most interesting thing about Taylor Swift’s brief “romance” with Tom Hiddleston was the rampant speculation over its realness. The Kardashians ooze dysfunction, greed, plastic surgery and proud idiocy with exponential desperation. The most recent Us Weekly cover was a Real Housewife talking about her divorce.
Really, who cares?
So this is what we’re mourning: the death of the last, grand Hollywood romance, of ridiculous, outsize wealth, love, sex appeal, and scandal. Our screens are shrinking, and so are our celebrities. They want to be just like us — relatable (Jennifer Lawrence), harried (Jennifer Garner), or everyman (Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Chris Pratt).
Maybe we’d rather they not.
Born before the Great Recession, Brangelina was the last real super-couple to double down on wealth, fame and privilege. They epitomized glamour and mystery, old-fashioned movie stardom and myth-making. Their last gift to us, their captive, enraptured audience? An equally spectacular divorce.
