Why You're Still Looking At That Photo Of Brad And Jen
Sometime after Brad Pitt took to the stage at the 26th Screen Actors Guild Awards this Sunday in Los Angeles, and some time after Jennifer Aniston collected her award at the same ceremony, the pair collided in the dark warren of the backstage area.
The photographs that resulted – of them laughing, exchanging kisses, and Pitt grabbing Aniston's hand – have exploded over every corner of the internet like horny confetti. On Getty, one of the photo agency websites where news imagery of these kind is available, clicking the 'most popular' filter from the SAG Awards turns the page into a comic book strip of Pitt and Aniston's encounter.
By Monday morning, my Instagram Stories was nothing but screenshots of their meeting, posted even by people normally immune to celebrity gossip. By the afternoon, close-ups of his hand wrapped around her wrist were circulating. Come the evening, a video was doing the rounds of Pitt, rapt, in front of the backstage feed of Aniston's acceptance speech (yes, that's right, she won Best Female Actor in a Drama Series, not that anyone can remember that detail).
The wrist grab photograph in particularly seems to have ignited some chaotic and lustful energy in the world of celebrity news. His laser focus on her; her determined stare ahead; the security guard's fixation on their meeting of limbs. You can almost hear Robyn's Dancing on My Own thundering overhead. Surely, surely, there is something still there?
This meeting was always inevitable. He's starring in a big, award-nominated film; she's starring in a big, award-nominated TV show. Like some kind of SAG Awards foreplay, the not-a-couple's first encounter was at the Golden Globes, where a photograph of Aniston watching Pitt's acceptance speech became an instant meme: 'get you a girl who looks at you the way Jennifer Aniston looks at Brad Pitt'. Presumably they didn't mean the way someone looks at their ex-husband, who left them for another woman, but whom you now have to clap at an award show. No, the internet romantics mean they way they hope Jennifer Aniston looks at Brad Pitt: with a fire that never burnt out.
Our 'shipping' of Brad and Jen could be about our desire to return to a simpler time, when you could wear a Matrix-style leather coat on the red carpet without being dragged on Twitter. But it's more likely a collective desperation to believe it's never too late. The couple called it quits in 2005, and have since been married, had children and enjoyed several other relationships. Yet he we are, in 2020, still blindly hopeful that a Hollywood movie ending is possible for people who've made more than their share.
"It’s not about them so as much as it is about the fantasy that no door is ever closed," tweeted New Yorker contributor Rachel Syme. But as the old joke doesn't quite go, when is a door not a door? When it's a trap. Divorce isn't fun, infidelity leaves lasting scars, and those wounds are deepened when you have to read about them every day on front pages.
On Instagram the next day, Aniston pointedly didn't mention that she'd bumped into her ex. But you could forgive Jen if she had appended some glib caption to the photograph of her being desperately tugged back by the man who left her. Instead, she shared a pair of images: one of her laid flat in her car to prevent wrinkling her dress, and another of that shiny dress draped over the bath, with her shiny SAG Award stood next to it. It's a much more important trophy.
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