Hmmmmm

Make-up commercial starring Angelina Jolie
Doing some research on youtube, some kind of wormhole led me to this video. Clearly someone has a bit of a thing for her; taken their favourite shots from the original ad, and simply repeated them over an over again in a different order with no words and some inoffensive music. It's just an unexplained homage to how physically attractive the author finds the star.

The result is interesting. It's like the bones of an advert revealing itself over and over like a less-than-timid lover dropping their clothes. No product shot. No description of what is going on. Nothing giving any kind of context. Just Angelina; tilting her head back, raising one eyebrow, stroking her jaw; her brow, gazing at herself; at us; at off-screen camera; at us again, swimming into focus; swimming out, rolling her head, swiping her lips; and again; in close up, then doing it all over again. For a moment, without a reason for her actions (the product), every meaningful glance, every sideways look, loses all possible intended meaning and is meaningless.

However, a second later and all that she does is suddenly filled with ten times the narrative and importance. What is she doing? How long was she doing it for? Why? Without the excuse of the commercial context, all these questions are suddenly activated. Mainly, what the hell is she doing?

She is so brightly lit as to be unrecognisable. But she is her own currency. Every single thing Angelina Jolie does is added to her public image and perceived persona so it is important to her career and by extension her life. It is how she earns her living and a lot in her life depends on a public perception of her, whether she likes it or not. So in this, if we can still it as an advert, she looks very little like what we have come to expect from her. She has not been allowed any personal expression or personality. She is simply a representation of a very desired way to look, using a lip product on famously huge lips.

Why has she done this? Surely she is depleting her cultural capital. Here she could be any other model, she is almost unrecognisable. She is completely negating the rebellious 'bad girl' image, or even humanitarian 'extreme mother' image she has built for herself. She appears vacuous, unprincipled and boringly beautiful- this impression is definitely not helped by the 'new edit'. It reminds us of the truth of how fake the whole scenario is and how many shots it must actually have taken to gain those perfect few. It's interesting how I might have unquestioningly accepted her poses had they been safely within a cultural context i recognised and was very familiar with. And the author had no intention I'm sure of exposing the inherent falsity, he or she just wanted to gaze longer at Jolie turning her head this way and that. I'm not quite sure what point i'm trying to make here, whether it's at all original or not, but something about this struck me as, i suppose, at odds with itself, and I thought it worth sharing.