celebrity gossip, academic style

Biggest post-Oscar celebrity news: the long-anticipated Jen/Gerry W Cover. Here’s the sneak preview that went viral earlier today, prompting blog posts from both Lainey Gossip (here) and Jezebel (there). And while Lainey did a nice job of pointing out how posed and awkward Gerald Butler looks, she failed to touch on the real juice of the story, passed along by Jezebel — the entire thing was shot by Steven Klein, the man responsible for the (in)famous W Magazine shoot for Brad Pitt and Angelina, pictured (in part) in all its ridiculous glory below.

Recall, please, that this particular spread was published when Aniston and Pitt were still together, way back in 2005. Jolie and Pitt were purportedly posing in simple publicity for the forthcoming Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (It’s widely believed that this particular photo shoot was part of what prompted Jennifer Aniston, in her post-break-up interview with Vanity Fair, to declare that Pitt lacked “a sensitivity chip.” What’s more, as Jezebel points out, Klein is a good friend of Pitt. And so the plot thickens.

So here’s what we know:

1.) Jennifer Aniston is attempting to add much-needed life to her image following the abject failure of Love Happens.

2.) The Bounty Hunter, starring, of course, Aniston and Butler, opens NEXT WEEK. Aniston has been cultivating — but not actually confessing to — the suggestion of a romance for months, through formal appearances (Golden Globes gross-out posing, see below) and ‘gotcha!’ paparazzi photos that effectively suggest that she and Butler have been privately vacationing (read: her publicist and his publicist agreed he should be photographed with her in Mexico).

2.) In that film to succeed, Aniston understands that she needs a viable romance, preferably, but necessarily, with her co-star (See, for example, the hoopla over the ‘supposed engagement’ leading up to the release of The Break-Up). No matter how much John Mayer emphasizes his respect for her, she still doesn’t have a cute relationship to flaunt for the gossip mags and thus keep herself visible. It’s simple old Hollywood logic, and she (and her publicists) knows it well: the more she insinuates the possibility of a relationship with Butler, the more curious people will be to see their chemistry, and more the film will gross.

3.) Aniston is also attempting to diversify her image ever so slightly. To my mind, this is the most transparent attempt to ‘Angelina’ herself that we’ve seen. First off, the film they’re promoting is basically a vanilla version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (just check out the trailer — it’s like Brangelina Lite… far less sexual gravitas and far more stilted attempts at bad humor).

Secondly, there’s the shoot itself. Oh, look, Jen’s such a bad girl! She’s stealing money! Getting arrested! Role playing, how dirty! (Side note: all images below are screen shots from the W website, as images from the actual spread have yet to be put online — thus the blue lines, which allow you to see how and where to buy the clothes she’s wearing).

Even look at the specific articles of clothing depicted below, all of which she’s wearing in the cover shot. We’re used to thinking of Jennifer Aniston naked and wrapped in the American flag, as she appeared last year on the cover of GQ. But Aniston in quasi-burlesque lingerie? What’s going on here?

The most fascinating attempt to associate Aniston with dirt is, well, quite literal. The ‘Behind the Scenes’ tell-all, Chris McMillan, Aniston’s long-time stylist, ‘best friend,’ and the man behind ‘The Rachel,’ highlights the dirty details of the shoot, both figurative and literal:

This is not exactly Jennifer as we know her.
We got there and the storyboards were kind of Kim Basinger in9 1/2 Weeks. Which is even better, because then it started getting good.

How did you arrive at this particular look for Jennifer’s hair?
Well, Steven [Klein] was talking to Jennifer for about an hour and a half while she was doing fittings and her hair dried into this naturally curly head of hair. So we just refined it from there. But it’s not her typical blown-out hairstyle. It’s a little rougher, we liked seeing the flyaways.

What about day two of the shoot?
At the end of the first day Steven came up to me and goes, “Could you please ask her if she could not wash her hair tonight and just show up tomorrow?” I mean, she was rolling in the dirt, it was windy and she had hairspray in her hair.

She said yes to that? Dirty hair?
Yeah, we left her hair dirty. It just created a nice chunky texture. The key to Jennifer’s hair is no matter what you do with it — straight, frizzy, dirty — it looks like it actually grows out of her head. She’s someone for whom her hair doesn’t wearher, she wears it.

This is a rhetorical gold mine. Main points: Jen conflated with sex star; Jen with a ‘new look’; Jen ‘spends all day rolling in the dirt’; Jen ‘game’ for dirty hair. Adds up to: Jen, crazy, dirty, up for anything girl! In other words, not the staid, always-the-same-blown-out-hair, sartorially and stylistically conservative girl, dumped by Brad for exotic sexpot.

I’m also struck by the visual similarities to another Brangelina photoshoot, also in the Arizona desert, only for Vanity Fair, that was published after the pair came out publicly as a couple -

Now, you might sense an abundance of vitriol directed towards Aniston, and you would be correct. Long time readers (read: those who have read for the 9 months that I’ve maintained this blog) will know that I harbor general disdain for her. Part of disaffection is certainly subjective — there’s just something about her, and about the stock character that she plays, that grates against me. (Note, however, that I really love her in both The Good Girl and Friends with Money — in part because those characters are so different from the recurring-Rachelness of her mainstream fare, but also her role in Friends with Money seems so much more honest about what it feels like to be a woman in her late 30s surrounded by other women with marriages, money, and oscillating levels of happiness).

It’s not that I dislike Aniston for playing the publicity game. Obviously, judging from my general admiration and fascination with The Brange, I don’t dislike those who manipulate their images. Rather, it’s that Aniston is so transparent about that manipulation — but not on purpose. She’s not ridiculously bad at it, like, say, Lindsay Lohan, or ridiculously obvious about it, like Heidi and Spencer. She’s trying play at the level of Pitt and Jolie, and she fails. The efforts of her — and her team — are derivative (again, see the photoshoot….five years too late). A for effort, but a solid B overall.

And here’s where I make a big inflammatory claim and piss people off: I think they’re B level because she’s actually a B level star posing as A-level. Once a television star, always a television star. Not only has her beginning on Friends limited the extent to which she can successfully stretch her star persona (Rachel-like character = success; un-Rachel-like; no-go), but also the limits to which she can successfully manipulate her image. She’s beautiful, yes; she has an incredible body, of course. But is she special? Can she use specialness — that uniqueness that distinguishes the most enduring of movie stars- to elevate her above and help us forget the way she plays the game? I don’t think so. In the end, we see her manipulations so vividly because her star shines so dimly. She’s not a bad star, or an unsuccessful one. But she’s not one for the ages, no matter how dirty she gets her hair.