You just can’t escape breakup of Brad and Jen
Some stories just reach out and grab your attention, sucking you in, almost in spite of yourself.
But why this one?
Last Sunday I was minding my own business, watching my Internet browser load for a quick trip online, when up popped the news: The Jennifer Aniston-Brad Pitt breakup was confirmed.
And before I knew it, here I was, a serious-minded professional, following the links — to the New York Daily News, to some wild British tabloid, to God knows where else.
It dawned on me only later that my browser’s standards for journalistic credibility fell well below my own. What was I doing on these sites? And why do I now know more seamy gossip about that cherubic-faced couple than I ever wanted to know?
I started asking around. I talked with my serious, feminist, graduate student daughter. “Mom,” she wailed. “I can’t believe you’re admitting to reading that stuff.”
She wouldn’t dream of admitting such a thing. Reading it, yes. Admitting it, no.
I checked with my colleagues. Well, yes, they’d read the stories. Several told me where they were the moment they heard the news.
One friend, in fact, couldn’t sleep Sunday night. She was up at 3 a.m., heard a tidbit on ESPN-Radio and soon found herself googling “Brad Pitt” online.
For heaven’s sake, what was wrong with us? I decided to go to another serious-minded source, somebody who could help explain this phenomenon. I called up University of Washington sociology professor Pepper Schwartz.
She was sitting in a 6th Avenue salon in Seattle having her hair streaked.
So has this disciplined academic, with a string of book titles on her resume, paid any attention to this tale?
“Yes,” she laughed. “How can you escape it?”
She just happened to be watching “Entertainment Tonight” the other evening when the story appeared. Viewers were shown images of the actors looking happily married on New Year’s weekend.
“The sociologist, the relationship researcher in me, said, ‘What happened between New Year’s and now?’ I became interested about the details, like with a friend.”
So how does she explain it?
“You’re hooked in,” she said. “Is there any one of us who has never picked up a People magazine? We’re all great gossips at heart.”
It seems, well, tacky, to peer into the depths of a celebrity marriage when there are all those horrific stories about the tsunami and Iraq to pay attention to. Not to mention the grocery shopping.
“In the midst of all the tsunami news, one would like to look at anything but the tsunami news; it’s heart-breaking,” Schwartz said. “It’s as sad as anything in the world. You watch young people dying in Iraq, and you’re thrilled to run away to watch Brad and Jennifer’s breakup.”
I called Joshua Gamson, an associate sociology professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.”
Not so fast, he said.
“Not everybody really is following that story,” he said. “It’s inaccurate to say they are.”
While a subset of stereotypical fans took the news personally, Gamson said, many others were simply intrigued by the gap between this couple’s public image and reality. With an industry in this country devoted to manufacturing false images of celebrity, we aren’t sure what we can believe. Hence, the greater the gap, the better the gossip.
He agreed with Schwartz, though. Readers and viewers immersed in the tsunami last weekend needed to turn to something light. “It’s almost comic relief,” he said.
As I puzzled over these questions, I visited one of my favorite authorities on human behavior, my hairdresser, Cyndi Ochsner, at Fifth Avenue Design. Ochsner wrapped her cape around me as I settled into her chair and began to fill me in.
She’d been so engrossed in the tsunami stories she could hardly move away from the television screen last weekend. But as she was flipping between MSNBC and CNN, watching one sorrowful tale unfold after another, a trailer across the bottom of the screen caught her eye.
“I freaked out,” she said. “It was like, all of a sudden, I got slapped back into reality. It was, ‘Oh, no, not Brad and Jen!’ “
She laughed at the irony, but pointed out that the couple seemed like the most normal people in Hollywood.
So should those of us who paid attention feel guilty about being pulled into this story? And are Americans somehow more gossipy than most?
Schwartz gets the last word. “I think they love gossip in the jungles of New Guinea… Americans didn’t invent gossip.”
“It’s a human impulse,” she said, as the streaks in her hair deepened last Tuesday afternoon. “You can call it ‘gossip’ or you can call it ‘sharing information about the human condition.’ “
This week, I’ll choose the latter.