No matter how woke we become, how ready we supposedly are to eat the rich and smash the patriarchy, it turns out that even the angriest of feminists drop the schtick the moment a hot girl in Dior makes eyes with her cheating ex-husband.
After the uproarious Ricky Gervais-hosted Golden Globes kicked off the new year, Jill Gullowitz at Elle deemed the award-show tradition dead.
“Last night’s show sucked. Actually, the show was probably fine, but we no longer exist in the Brad and Jen-fronted In Touch, Star and OK! era,” Gullowitz wrote. “We are quite literally burning this place (the Earth) to the ground. This is the apocalypse, and the stars are not just like us.”
Gervais’s Golden Globes provoked outsize outrage thanks to his refusal to pretend that we are in what Gullowitz calls “End Times” or that Dom Perignon-drinking debutantes ought to use the ceremony to pontificate about politics. We are now beyond the frivolous, our betters told us.
But just a fortnight following the Globes, the internet came to a standstill after Jennifer Aniston, the girl next door of a generation, and Brad Pitt, the former golden boy who broke her heart in a public breakup, reunited backstage at the SAG Awards.
Yes, “Brad and Jen” exchanged a hug and some small talk for less than a minute, and just like that, every feminist following the awards suddenly rediscovered their fealty to fantasizing about happy endings.
“This is the only good thing about 2020,” wrote Mehera Bonner at Cosmopolitan.
“It’s a picture to launch 10,000 ships,” Slate’s Willa Paskin wrote of the two who “still make a great team.”
Liz Plank took to Twitter, where she goes by “Feministabulous,” to demand “an emergency meeting” about the pictures of the pair.
To recap the history here: Pitt and Aniston married in July 2000. Pitt began filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith, co-starring Angelina Jolie, in January 2004, during which he developed a preference for his co-star over his wife. A year later, Pitt and Aniston separated, and before the divorce was even finalized, “Brangelina” became a tabloid feature. Aniston would then declare that Pitt lacked a “sensitivity chip,” an undeniable observation to anyone following the press lionizing a man who left his wife.
Yet our woke betters are happy to forget Brangelina and instead dream of Brad and Jen back together. The world can’t be too close to End Times if even the most dreary of the commentariat can take a break to obsess over a fake fairy tale between two ultrarich superstars.
