 Angelina Jolie: The New, True Woman
by Nicole Patterson
Last weekend I went to see the movie Salt. I'll admit I only went because Angelina Jolie is my favorite actor. There's something magnetic about her. Ever since Gone In 60 Seconds , I followed her career and after seeing Girl, Interrupted, well... I was in love.
A few years ago one of my least favorite feminist authors, Naomi Wolf, published an article about Angelina Jolie in one of my favorite magazines, Harper's Bazaar. She theorized Jolie as the "embodiment of having it all." I believe this is true. And, for once, Wolf wasn't writing terribly trite garbage like Misconceptions or The Beauty Myth.
If you're a good feminist you love Victorian women and the whole era for that matter. It's just a fact. They were, as Coventry Patmore's poem described in the mid-1800s, the "Angel in the house." They were pious, pure, submissive and domestic (see Barbara Welter's "The Cult of True Womanhood"). I mention all of this to make a point: Angelina Jolie is the new, True Woman.
What I find fascinating, and how I expand Wolf's essay, is that Jolie's escape from societal constraint has less to do with her sexuality, and more to do with her outright rejection of societal conventions. Actually, I'd like to talk about post-structural theoretical feminists and the construction of a signifier and the signified. As a lover of theory, I would tell you about Derrida and Lacan and how Wolf gets close by mentioning Jolie's life as a fantasy to most women. Fantasy and images are central to understanding the margins of the Symbolic order. The real question is how do you change the order? The answer is language, but that's rhetorical and literary theory, and that's tough stuff so I'll save that for another blog.
 To be the new, True Woman, you have to reject the rules.
By the rules, I mean societal conventions, traditional values and general accepted norms.
If you're Angelina Jolie, you do things the unconventional way.
- You get married, and divorced, twice.
- You adopt as a single mother without regard to culture, race or sex.
- You fall in love with a married man.
- You have intimate relationships with both men and women.
- You do generally odd things like wear vials of blood and make-out with your brother.
- You get tattoos, and lots of them.
After rejecting the rules, you write your own rules.
- You make millions of dollars. (I mention this first, because I'm a Marxist Feminist.)
- You have a wonderful family full of really messy and unclear boundaries, completely blowing to bits the idea of a nuclear family unit.
- You donate millions of dollars to charity and use money from the media and lawsuits to help fund those charities.
- You are a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. High Comissioner for Refugees.
- You have a pilot's license. (Go where you want, when you want.)
- Your life doesn't revolve around your home, or your many homes. Your home is comprised of a pack of hand-selected individuals, chosen out of want and not need.
- You're beautiful. You have the kind of beauty that stares you right in the face and makes you smile. (For a fun connection, and a more post-modern thought, read Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa".)
Salt was fantastic. And for those of you who like Jennifer Aniston, consider the fact that she's still, after what seems like 25 years, playing the woman desperate to find a man to complete her in those idiotic Hollywood romantic comedies. Does anyone notice "societal norms" pumped into those scripts at alarming doses? Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love. Creates drama. Boy asks girl to marry him. They have children. Oh, and by the way, in case you're wondering how I know about Aniston's newest film -- it was one of the previews.
Notice the binary oppositions. Notice the extremes. Notice the lack of choice and gray area. We're either killing the men or begging them to marry us. But that too is another blog.
I hope one day people will be smart enough to choose for themselves what they want out of life. The minute we stop questioning "the system," is the minute we turn into a preview of how the future will look. Think about it. Thankfully we have new women who are brave enough to live their lives free from the system. But to get there, they had to destroy it. Thankfully we have New, True Women like Angelina Jolie. I can't wait to see what she does next!
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