A very beautiful woman who sees herself as the underdog becomes very famous. Because of her fame, she suffers. Because of her suffering, she becomes even more famous. Then she becomes virtuous. Very, very virtuous.
This is a 9/11 story. Granted, it's also a celebrity profile — well, a profile of Angelina Jolie — and so calling it a 9/11 story may sound like a stretch. But that's the point. It's a 9/11 story because it's a celebrity profile — because celebrities and their perceived power are a big part of the strange story of how America responded to the attacks upon it. And no celebrity plays a bigger role in that strange story than Angelina Jolie.
September 23, 2001, The New York Times ran a story about one of the unacknowledged victims of 9/11 — celebrity gossip. It started with a scene at a New York restaurant famous for its hospitality to famous people. A few nights before, Harrison Ford had walked into the joint practically unnoticed, but when a fire truck drove by, patrons stood up and cheered. This, the Times averred, was proof that in the parlance of the day, things had changed — that a culture dangerously besotted with celebrity might be on the verge of righting itself. Though written in the wake of fresh horror, the story was guardedly optimistic until the very end, when it quoted a woman named Leslee Dart. The press agent for Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and many others, Dart spoke with the resigned serenity of a rehab counselor listening to yet another junkie vow a fresh start: "We have as a culture gone so far off the deep end, I think we have no choice but to go right back to where we were."
She was right, of course, and she was wrong. She was right because — more than any pundit, and certainly more than any politician — she captured the terminal nature of a culture that couldn't change even if it wanted to, even if it had to. She was wrong because, although many aspects of the culture remained the same, two things changed in ways that no one could have predicted. First of all, the culture's thralldom to celebrity did not remain the same at all; it intensified into a kind of collective lunacy. Second, the celebrities themselves changed: While the culture kept getting worse, its most famous denizens kept getting better and better, until virtue itself began to seem like one of fame's perquisites — a fashionable trapping and also, for some, an obligation.
In other words, instead of the things many predicted for America in the terrifying yet hopeful days after the attack — a moral resurgence, say, or the death of irony — we got a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and we got Angelina Jolie.
Angelina Jolie Dies for Our Sins