July 10,
2001
Sex,
Death and the Higher Cause
Angelina
Jolie and
the French Revolution
Since the finely honed intellect, not
to mention exuberant body of Angelina Jolie have become an object
of vulgar interest to many of our associates we turned eagerly
to Britain's News of the World for an update on the star of Tomb
Raider. Sunday's edition of the Murdoch-owned tabloid is full
of ripe detail about Angelina's self-confessed sexual tastes,
plus admiring commentary from her husband, Billy Bob Thornton
and former co-star Elizabeth Mitchell, who starred with her in
a movie about lesbian supermodel Gia Carangi, and who sighed
to the News of the World: "Angelina's got such beautiful
lips and they're all her own. She's all real. She's a work of
nature."
It depends how you define nature.
Perhaps they were still part of the original bodywork when Angelina
and Elizabeth embraced each other, but since then Angelina's
breasts have clearly been into the bodyshop for an upgrade. Part
of our painful duty as investigative journalists has been to
spend wearisome hours on Monday comparing various photographs
of Angelina's breasts, as available for inspection on http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk
As you can see, one set has
the tedious soup-plate symmetry of artificial enhancement, in
contrast to the somewhat less ample, but erotically more pleasing
tits of an earlier era.
It seems that Billy Bob hires
a nurse to extract his blood so he can send droplets to Angelina
when she is away filming. She wears it in an ampule around her
neck. Chic, and reminiscent of the red threads the fast set of
young aristocrats used to wear round their necks in late eighteenth-century
France, in the Directoire period. The threads were an ironic
homage to the guillotine on which many of their relatives had
perished.
The News of the World tells
us that this daughter of Jon Voigt and French actress Marcheline
Bertrand, born in Los Angeles, "spent much of her childhood
living out of suitcases. At 14 she began to rebel and had a live-in
boyfriend at her mother's house. She also began mutilating herself
with knives." Tattooing is another enthusiasm. An inventory:
1 Dragon on left arm
2 Black Cross on inner thigh
3 "H" on left wrist
4 Dragon with tribal design on lower back
5 Japanese symbol for death on shoulder
6 Cross on lower front hip
7 "Quod me nutrit me destruit" Latin on stomach [What
nourishes me destroys me]
8 "Courage" ... was removed
9 Blue box on lower back, center
10 "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages"
Tennessee Williams quote on left inside forearm
11 "Billy Bob" above dragon on left shoulder.
In harmony with her teenage habit, Angelina
and Billy Bob keep a knife under their pillow to slash at each
other  during sex sessions.
They spent last Christmas happily cutting their fingers and daubing
messages in blood on the walls above their bed. "I was looking
at her asleep," Mr Thornton confides to the News of the
World reporters, "and I had to restrain myself from literally
squeezing her to death. Sex for us is almost too much. It's so
intense that sometimes we can look at each other and think, 'We
can't get into this right now or something's going to happen'."
Over the breakfast table, the
News of the World reports, he confessed to her that he had come
close to doing her in the night before. "Angelina added:
'You know when you love someone so much you can almost kill them?
I nearly was killed one night, and it was the nicest thing anyone
has ever said to me!'"
Oh well, knives for some, ear plugs
and eye blinders for others. Angelina and Billy Bob's stated
preferences somehow made us think of Balzac's novella, La Duchesse
de Langeais where a beastly sensualist called Montriveau plots
to turn the duchess into his love slave. Irked by her caprices
Montriveau has her abducted from a ball to his apartment where
he informs her that as a punishment she is to be branded on the
forehead with a red-hot iron (shaped as a cross of Lorraine),
which three masked pals of his are even now heating up in the
next room.
Greatly to Montriveau's mortification
the duchess is thrilled with the plan. "Ah! My Armand, mark,
mark quickly your creature as a poor little possession When you
have thus marked a woman as your own, when you have an enslaved
creature wearing your red cipher, oh, then you can never give
her up, you will be forever mine But the woman who loves always
marks herself. Come gentlemen, come and mark, mark the Duchesse
de Langeais. Come quickly, all of you, my forehead burns hotter
than your red brand."
Under this eager torrent of
verbiage Montriveau's ardor wilts and he loses "faith"
in his whole plan. We think there could be the germ of a script
here for Angelina and Billy Bob, though maybe they're more interested
in Geoffrey Wolff's great book Black Sun: The Brief Transit and
Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby about the love-unto-death affair
of Harry Crosby and Josephine Bigelow, in the months after the
stock market went through the cellar in the fall of 1929.
In December, Crosby and Mrs.
Bigelow took a five day trip to Detroit. Wolff writes: "..they
checked into the Book-Cadillac [Hotel] on December 3, registering
as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane in a twelve-dollar-a-day room on
the twentieth floor. Most of their meals they took in bed, where
they also smoked opium, made love and battled."
On December 7 the lovers returned
to New York where they agreed that Mrs. Bigelow should return
to Boston to her husband. But Josephine did not return to Boston
and on December 9 she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby
who was staying with his wife Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel.
The last line of the poem is: "Death is our marriage."
On December 9, Harry Crosby
made the following entries into his notebooks: "One is not
in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is
only one happiness it  is to love and to
be loved." These were Crosby's very last entries into his
journal because on December 10, after shooting Josephine, Harry
Crosby shot himself a few hours later. Wolff sums it up thus:
"He had meant to do it; it was no mistake; it was not a
joke. If anything of Harry Crosby commands respects, perhaps
even awe, it was the unswerving character of his intention."
Crosby always struck us as
a horrible little twerp, but Angelina and Billy Bob could surely
make something of all this.
Returning to that red thread and the
guillotine, the common view is that thousands of French aristos
perished under the blade. Not true. Greer's statistical study
The Incidence of the Terror, published in 1935, shows that 666
nobles got the chop in Paris and another 1,543 in the rest of
France. Compare that to the carnage after the French commune
of 1871 when some 20,000 Communards were executed.
The best defense of the French
revolution and its supposed excesses is surely that of Mark Twain
in "A Connecticut Yankee": "There were two 'Reigns
of Terror' if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought
murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the
one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years;
the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other
upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors'
of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas,
what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong
death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heart-break? What
is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire
at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled
by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught
to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain
the coffins filled by that older and real Terror that unspeakably
bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to
see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
And to think that Lewis Lapham
dared put Tom Wolfe on the cover of Harper's next to the man
who wrote those tremendous lines! Come to think about it, Angelina
and Billy Bob could do a movie about Charlotte Corday's stabbing
of Marat in his bath. Corday was a counter-revolutionary of course.
Despite this the crowd around the guillotine were shocked when
the executioner had fun with her severed head and pulled her
features about. Supposedly, Corday's face blushed, prompting
two centuries worth of debate among physiologists on whether
the guillotine was, in fact, an instrument of quick and painless
death or a gruesome form of vivisection.
The Jacobins were terrified
of female radicals. Olympe de Gouges, author of Les Droits de
la femme et de la citoyenne (1791), perished on the guillotine
not long thereafter, as did Madam Roland. St Just invoked the
"male energie" of the Republic.
In his very interesting 1993
book Bodywork Peter Brooks wrote, "In the cult of Marat
Charlotte Corday is present only in that gash in Marat's breast,
a kind of displaced  representation
of her woman's sex as a wound on the martyred man. David's painting,
Marat Assassine, says it all: the ecstatic face of the martyr,
the drops of blood on the immaculate sheet, the quill pen still
grasped next to the kitchen knife fallen on the floor, the bathwater
become a pool of blood all these elements suggest the intrusion
of ungoverned female sexuality on a life dedicated to the higher
cause."
And now, with Angelina, ungoverned
female sexuality and the higher cause are one! CP
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