Are Brangelina The Smooching Ideal?

While doing my usual perusal of celebrity news websites today (these things are important, people!) I couldn’t help but notice how big and yet equally mundane one particular recurring headline was: “Brad and Angelina Make Out on Movie Set”. The pictures accompanying the headline show the impossibly beautiful couple kissing, and the text describes them sharing what seems to be a fairly innocent smooch. This is hardly the hot, tawdry news item I was expecting, but whatever. I know headlines are mostly designed to draw readers in anyway, and may be just a tad more sensational than the actual content of the article. But the whole thing gets me thinking: what is it about these two that is so compelling? I mean, why did I even click on this headline in the first place? For other couples, this wouldn’t even necessarily be news, it would be an every day, run-of-the-mill occurrence. But for Brangelina, this kiss is a phenomenon.

Both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have had long strings of romances played out in the public eye; who doesn’t remember the days of Brad and Gwyneth? Angelina and Billy Bob? Brad and Jennifer? To be honest, I don’t think we could forget those days if we tried. I know I can’t, anyway, because almost any coverage of Brad and Angelina is, by default, coverage of their past relationships as well—ultimately, the present makes no sense without the past so we can’t really situate Brangelina on our celebrity timeline without first looking at what predates it. It seems that every other day, a story pops up about Angelina’s jealousy toward Jennifer Aniston because Jennifer and Brad are “getting close” again. Whatever that means. And we aren’t allowed to forget that charity-minded, good-willed mother Angelina used to wear a vial of her then-husband’s blood around her neck and have sex with him in cars on the way to awards shows. And share sort of weirdly intimate kisses with her brother. All this so that we (and perhaps Brad and Angelina themselves) don’t forget where the two stars came from: when you start out under scrutiny, you will remain under scrutiny.

So Brad and Angelina have been on our minds for a long time, and not just as actors, but as real people whose lives interest us for reasons we might not even fully understand. What’s important is that we’ve been able to track their romantic history, essentially everything that brought them to this movie set in Venice, everything that led up to this one special kiss. Had they been in relationships that were less kooky (in Angelina’s case) or less A-list (in Brad’s), we might not care so much about what they do now that they’ve found each other. But the reality is that their love lives have played as big a role in making them famous and keeping them famous as their movies have.

In a way, though, Brad and Angelina’s previous relationships have only been a warm-up for the media sensation that they are now. And I think, really, that what they are now is a weird kind of normalcy, blown up to huge proportions. Maybe even the fantasy of what normal is: America’s most aspirational couple. What else explains the make out headline? I mean, yes, there’s the obvious, which is that the press loves to play this on-again/off-again game with the two mega-celebrities, so this is one way to establish that they are very much on, but I think there’s more to it than that.

So let’s get down to brass tacks here, folks. On one hand, a kiss is just a kiss—everyone knows that and it must be true because a well-known song says so. On the other hand, this is a kiss for the ages, a kiss that must inevitably take up a special place in the Brad and Angelina legacy. Coverage of this kiss drives home the fact that these are two people with whom we are obsessed, but that they are also two people who do normal things, like make out with each other. But! When they kiss, it’s on a movie set. They are both uber-glamorous and good-looking. No kiss that we ever have will be like this, no matter whom we are kissing or how much we love them. We, too, can be just like Brad and Angie, but at the same time we will never ever be like Brad and Angie. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should give up on trying. After all, what is life if we’re not all striving to reach some sort of smooching ideal?