The trendy L.A. store Kitson capitalized on the conflict, selling “Team Aniston” and “Team Jolie” T-shirts. “Team Aniston” outsold 25-to-one in the beginning, reports owner Fraser Ross. Elaine Lui, founder of the popular celebrity gossip blog Laineygossip.com and an eTalk reporter, believes Aniston’s plight taps into female anxiety. “There’s a fear among many women that their husband is going to work one day and hook up with the hot colleague,” she says. “So every time they see Jennifer Aniston’s face they can’t help but feel for her or support her, not because they like her but because they feel a vote for her is a vote for themselves.”
As part of the most mused-upon triangle since Euclid, Aniston’s now intractably tethered to Pitt and Jolie in a perverse geometry: for every “Brangelina’s Baby Joy” headline, there’s the inevitable “Jen Alone in Malibu!” sidebar. In the gravitas sweepstakes, she’s the lesser, a sun lamp eclipsed by a supernova. As Pitt and Jolie tour refugee camps and rebuild New Orleans, she’s photographed bagging rays in Cabo and dating a series of child-men, most lately the singer John Mayer, which sparked the recent Life & Style cover line: “Having More Surgery for John?”
Aniston’s post-Pitt hookups, which include Vince Vaughn, her co-star in The Break-Up, have the whiff of publicity stunt. Lui views Aniston’s relationship with Mayer, whose conquests include Jessica Simpson and who’s nine years her junior, as an attempted “Screw you” to Jolie: “She’s saying, ‘I’m 40 but I can still bag a younger man and change him.’ I almost feel sorry for her talking about her like this, it’s so misguided.”
Aniston’s uterine status is the subject of constant speculation as she approaches the big 4-0. “She’s Having John’s Babies,” announced Star magazine in mid-November, which claimed Aniston was undergoing “secret fertility treatments” to have twins. That same week, In Touch falsely reported it was a fait accompli: “Jen’s Bump Gets Bigger.”
Of course, obsession with celebrity baby bumps drive newsstand sales. “Her fans are interested in her having a traditional husband and house,” says Sansing. “They’re very eager for her to have this life that we all think she’s wanted for some time.”
Aniston’s inability—or unwillingness—to fulfill her perceived maternal destiny is magnified exponentially by Jolie’s and Pitt’s relentless child acquisition; they’ve added an average of 1.6 children per year to their family. Yet Jolie’s Earth Mother status hasn’t interfered with her stellar career. Since 2005, she has made nine movies, two of which generated Oscar buzz.
Aniston has made seven, two with cringe-inducing, too-close-to-life titles. As Fug Girls, New York magazine’s fashion blog, observed: “The Break-Up was bad enough, but He’s Just Not That Into You? Honey, no. There’s self-awareness, and then there’s masochism.”
It’s as if the lens trained on Aniston is fated to dredge up the past. She’s photographed often with former Friends co-star Courteney Cox, reminding the public of Rachel; in a Smart Water ad, she’s surrounded by children of various ethnicities, summoning inevitable comparison to Jolie; her recent guest appearance on 30 Rock as a stalker sent up her real-life victim persona.
Lui believes the focus on Aniston as victim is misbegotten. “I think we need to examine ourselves as a society,” she says. “For some reason we love the soap opera aspect of a weak victim like Jennifer Aniston and the mobilization to rally around her.” She sees Aniston as hostage to her own publicity: “She sold this image of herself and now she can’t shake it. She has become the poster girl for crying yourself to sleep at night.”
It’s a label Aniston tries to shake: “This whole ‘Poor lonely Jen’ thing, this idea that I’m so unlucky in love? I actually feel I’ve been unbelievably lucky in love,” she told Vogue. “Just because at this stage my life doesn’t have the traditional framework to it—the husband and the two kids and the house in Connecticut—it’s mine. It’s my experience. And if you don’t like the way it looks, then stop looking at it!”
That’s not going to happen, especially now that Pitt’s promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which also opens on Dec. 25. Brangelina domestic bliss will be displayed large, as in the “private” photographs Pitt took of Jolie displayed in the November issue of W.
Appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show in mid-November, Aniston tried to distance herself from the breakup: “I don’t go there,” she said. “It’s a hundred years old for Chrissakes.” Still, Winfrey stoked the embers, asking Aniston if she wanted to beat Pitt at the box office. “What am I going to say?” she replied, “Can we do a tie?” No chance of that. The next week, she was “Devastated Jen” once again on the cover of Star, once again the proxy for the real world of broken dreams.
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