Is It Time For The American Movie Star To Die?
In an era of Palestinian genocide funded by the US, ICE raids, and the curdling of celebrity glamour in the face of economic strife, is it time for the world to move beyond the Hollywood movie star?
When Tom Cruise joined Brad Pitt on the London red carpet for the latter’s recent, now highly successful blockbuster F1: The Movie, nostalgia burnished brightly in the eyes of the public and the media apparatus. It was a multifaceted approach. Nostalgia for the kind of powerful, god-like celebrity whose whims shifted culture. Nostalgia for a time when celebrity cool felt aspirational and fascinating rather than calcified within the blithe horrors of hellish late-stage capitalism. Nostalgia for the 1990s, when both men vaulted to a rarefied tier of public-persona power, a time that once was and never will be again. Nostalgia for a version of the United States of America in which many could numb themselves to the soul-deadened devastation this country has always committed. Nostalgia has a political purpose. It is an anesthetic. That this America is plunged in pop cultural nostalgia at the same time it shudders due to the violent cruelty pointed at its own citizens and human beings across the globe isn’t a coincidence. It is easier to subjugate a populace by training them to sweetly obsess over the past and fear the future.
From this vantage point, Brad Pitt’s recent charm offensive as a means of image rehabilitation has both a personal and cultural purpose. On a personal level, with actions like hiring Timothée Chalamet’s stylist Taylor McNeill, Pitt is trying to appeal to younger generations and affirm that he still has a blinding level of charisma, this time with the heft of practiced vulnerability to give it a new sheen. On a cultural level, Pitt’s efforts speak to a desire to rehabilitate the very white, American masculinity he represents. (A masculinity in grave upheaval as embodying it is no longer an automatic guarantee to be handed the world and every desire.) It’s a strengthening of America’s faltering dominance in the cinematic realm. Hollywood today represents the sputtering, tech-industry-fueled dreams of a dying empire. In a time of globally rising femicide rates and misogyny’s entrenchment in all aspects of American culture, what does it mean for a star like Pitt to uphold the kind of masculinity that has gotten us to this place? What does it say that people are so eager to ignore or forget the accusations of domestic violence toward ex-wife Angelina Jolie and toward the children that defended her on the fraught plane ride in 2016 that initiated her desire for divorce? What are the ripple effects, materially, when such a vision of masculinity is enshrined instead of questioned and critiqued?