‘By the Sea’ and the Death of the Celebrity Vanity Project
Angelina Jolie-Pitt wants you to look at her breasts.
They’re a major character in By the Sea, Jolie-Pitt’s third film as director (and the first in which she’s done double-duty as a star). They lurk beneath her blouse like thinly veiled subtext and jut above the surface of her bathwater like two theater actors slightly visible in front of the stage curtain. The actress hasn’t shied away from nudity in the past, but she’s never been as genuinely naked as she is here.
One of the most looked-upon people in the history of the world, Jolie-Pitt hasn’t been easy to see during recent years — By the Sea is only the second film in which she’s appeared since The Tourist in 2010 (she only lent her voice to Kung Fu Panda 2, and even in Maleficent her iconic jawline was disfigured by prosthetics). In fact, the sex symbol’s image was entirely absent from her most visible moment in recent memory, when Jolie-Pitt published an op-ed in the New York Times in May 2013 that announced — and candidly detailed — her preventive double mastectomy. “I do not feel any less of a woman,” she wrote. “I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.” It was as bold and intimate a confession as any celebrity of her wattage has made, until — two years later — she wrote a follow-up piece about her decision to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as well.
So while it’s speculative to draw specific connections between Jolie-Pitt’s personal life and certain plot points in her latest film, By the Sea knowingly invites them all the same — an inevitability when you’re a hyphenate acting against your real-life husband Brad Pitt. At one point during this tale of an impossibly chic couple whose marriage is unraveling, her depressed character, having just jumped into the ocean fully clothed, declares: “Now my outside matches my inside.” It’s a clumsy moment, but a reminder that Jolie-Pitt is nothing if not self-aware. If her labor-of-love project asks people to admire her immaculately re-sculpted breasts or to gawk at her glamorous life, it requires that they do so reflectively.