As for Jolie, her difficult relationship with her father (and no doubt other factors as well) drew her to The Dark Side of the Force; she used to have pet snakes, supposedly collects knives, and is interested in, of all things, mortuary science. She is, or was—before she fell in love with Brad—bisexual. These factors seemed to be leading her to a life of public controversy like Fonda’s, and constituted the first of the public roles, or faces, that she presented to the world.
Like Fonda, she too went to Asia—to Cambodia, where part of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was shot. What Jolie found in Cambodia, and how she reacted to it, began to differentiate her from Fonda; without a conscious plan or intention, she began developing, and integrating, her second and third faces. We might call them the Private Earth Mother and the Public Earth Mother.
When Jolie appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, she told James Lipton that the horrors of the refugee camps in Cambodia made her realize that she hadn’t had it so bad after all. Apparently, something in her responded so deeply to the suffering she saw in Cambodia that her newfound compassion for the poor in Third World countries had a healing effect on her psyche. (Compassion is one of the most important virtues in Buddhism, so perhaps the fact that Cambodia is a Buddhist country had something to do with this.) While in Cambodia, Jolie became the Private Earth Mother by adopting a three-year-old Cambodian boy, to whom she gave the very un-Cambodian name of Maddox. She later adopted a child from Africa, and now has children of her own with Pitt, of course.
Like Fonda, Jolie became a social activist; unlike Fonda, she did so in a way that was beyond criticism. She wasn’t content to give her children a life in the lap of luxury; she publicly took up the cause of the refugees, and in August of 2001 was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Since the suffering of the refugees was truly horrible, and not directly the fault of the United States, no one could criticize her for her third face as Public Earth Mother.
Article comments