Brad Pitt and the Stink of Sad Smut

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Brad Pitt at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival (Rocco Spaziani/Archivio Spaziani/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

Content Warning: This piece contains description of domestic/intimate partner abuse.

Back in the early 2010s, when I was finishing my PhD at the University of Austin, I spent a lot of time in the Harry Ransom Center — the renowned archive that houses the papers of Robert De Niro, Gloria Swanson, producer David O. Selznick, and many, many others. I spent hours in those archives trying to figure out the way various star images were manufactured: how Selznick, for example, chose to mold the publicity around Vivian Leigh once she was cast as Scarlett O’Hara, or how Gloria Swanson managed to lightly satirize herself in Sunset Boulevard while studiously preserving her glamour.

Time staring at receipts and photo proofs and correspondence with press agents confirmed what I knew, through my own study of history and theory of celebrity, to be true: that stars were people, but their images — the way they came to mean within a particular societal moment — that was a product, as massaged and manufactured as any film plot. 

I start with this story to give you a sense of the head space I was in when I first heard, from a grad student friend working the front desk, that Brad Pitt had recently been to the archive. He was in the area filming Tree of Life with Terrence Malick, the reclusive director who come out of reclusiveness to spend time with the then-head of the archive, Tom Staley. Pitt, accompanied by Jolie, had apparently asked to view items from some of the archive’s collections, and had been — according to the archive scuttlebutt — attentive and deferential. Stars: they like esoteric archival finds just like us. 

If you would’ve told me that story in, say, the early 2000s — when Pitt, his hair highlighted gold, was still in what seemed to be an ideal marriage with the equally golden Jennifer Aniston — it would’ve seemed weird, off, maybe just untrue. But I believed it, at least in part because it fit with Pitt’s image at the time, which managed to blend the bright light of superstardom with an erudite appreciation and obsession with art and architecture, seeming unlocked through his relationship with Jolie. 

I have studied Angelina Jolie’s publicity maneuvers for nearly two decades. Back in 2014, I wrote about her “Perfect Game” — the way she, seemingly without the assistance of any traditional PR counsel, managed to not just weather but win the gossip cycle surrounding her fledgling relationship with Brad Pitt. At the time, Jolie deflected from her “scandalous” affair not with tell-alls or backhanded allegations, but by engaging in activism, and global philanthropy and disaster work, and allowing the photos of her at those events speak for themselves. 

That strategy of “active passivity” has also characterized Jolie’s approach to the dissolution of her marriage to Pitt, which was sparked by a plane ride from France to Los Angeles in which Pitt, according to initial reports, shook and pushed Jolie, pushed one of their children, and when the plane landed to refuel in Minnesota, attempted to drive off from the plane in a gas truck. Jolie allowed those initial reports to speak for themselves. Until relatively recently, she has largely kept out of the limelight, emerging with her children to publicize her new film, Eternals, and grabbing the news cycle away from any discussion of Pitt by focusing on “recycled” fashion from previous red carpet looks, for her daughters.

But then things got messy around the French winery Jolie co-owned with Pitt. In short: Pitt would only buy out Jolie’s half of the property if she agreed to a non-disclosure agreement; Jolie refused those terms, and went to court to receive approval to sell her stake to a subsidiary of the Stoli Group. Earlier this year, Pitt filed suit against Jolie, alleging a violation of “contractual rights” in the sale. Jolie then filed a counter-complaint, arguing that she sold her stake in the winery because of Pitt’s insistence on a non-disclosure agreement. Her lawyers also included the fact that the FBI, which investigated the incident on the plane involving the physical assault of Jolie and the couple’s children, had “concluded that the government had probable cause to charge Pitt with a federal crime for his conduct that day.” 

In that filing, Jolie also alleges that she had maintained her silence about the event to protect her family from further attention. It was Pitt’s lawsuit, then, that forced the issue. As Jolie’s lawyers account in their filing, “Pitt grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her, and then grabbed her shoulders and shook her again before pushing her into the bathroom wall.” The countersuit also details Pitt choking one of the children who had come to Jolie’s aid, and pouring wine and beer on them. 

These allegations are deeply upsetting. So why haven’t they marred Pitt’s image? It’s not even a matter of whether or not Pitt is “canceled” — even though, as we’ve seen, to be “canceled” is to keep working pretty much as steadily as you once did. But there has been no real scandal. If anything, reading the press around the case, you’d probably get the distinct feeling that Jolie is the villain. How did Pitt wrest control over the narrative not only of his image, but of their marriage and the reasons for its dissolution? 

The answer lies in the make-up of Pitt and Jolie’s individual images — and their strategies towards publicity. Over the course of her career, Jolie has proven herself to be a publicity chameleon, capable of transforming public opinion about her from that of a sex-crazed vixen who wears her husband’s blood in a vial around her neck to that of Saint Angelina, make-up less in a white t-shirt, on the frontlines of aid-work after a natural disaster or advocating for girls’ education.

Watching Jolie’s image transformation as a star scholar back in the late 2000s, I saw what she was doing — but I also bought it. She was very, very good at what she did, and how she steered her success straight through the development of her relationship with Pitt and the end of Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston. In the aftermath, it was Jolie with the hottest star in the world, the power, the money, the ever-expanding family. She (seemingly) got it all, the story of her past neutralized if not altogether sanitized. 

After the fight on the plane, Jolie took the initiative to file for divorce — and, at least at that point, owned the news cycle. Pitt was clearly the jerk. But her understandable decision to recede from public publicity — however correct it might have been for her family and herself — created a narrative vacuum that Pitt and his publicity team slowly began to fill. 

Pitt is also a massive star in a world with fewer and fewer of them — and the dynamics of this current moment in star access and media position power over what he talks about, and to whom, firmly on his side. As a result, he and his publicity team (most notably, crisis PR expert Matthew Hiltzik, who also represents Johnny Depp) were able to garner coverage that touched only lightly on what happened on that plane, if at all, while framing his past as a place he had “recovered” from — while also emphasizing both his new-found sobriety and his artistry, both as a producer (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, 12 Years a Slave) and an actor.

A 2019 interview in the Times ahead of the release of Ad Astra mentioned that Pitt and Jolie had “fought about his drinking while aboard a private plane,” but emphasized that “Pitt is committed to his sobriety,” and spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous following the divorce. That time is framed as cathartic, without judgment, valuable: a place where Pitt, who had never, according to this interview, felt comfortable in the spotlight, and had no desire for fame, was able to “expose the ugly sides” of himself — and, we are to believe, move past them. 

Pitt might have messed up — or, as he told the Times, he had “family stuff going on.” But again, he had grown past it, matured, become a new man, a point that was driven home in a truly fawning profile penned by the usually acerbic Ottessa Moshfegh for the cover of the August issue of GQ, shot by experimental art photographer Elizaveta Porodina in a way that screams “I am very serious about art.” 

Ostensibly, the GQ cover and accompanying spread was intended to promote Pitt’s buddy film Bullet Train. But it, too, was readying Pitt’s image to accommodate and absorb any potential shock from a countersuit from Jolie. Not only was he sober, but he was even more committed to his art, to contemplation, than ever. As Hunter Harris put it earlier this month in her newsletter Hung Up, “his playbook is so obvious.” 

Obvious, hackneyed, old school Hollywood style — and effective. Pitt is out there filling the air with the story that he’s changed, while Jolie has stuck with her studied form of active passivity. In April, Politico reported that a woman had filed a freedom of information request to unseal the contents of the FBI investigation of the incident on the plane. That woman, of course, was Jolie. She was showing, not telling. 

But this time, various gossip outlets used the story of the FOIA request to suggest Jolie was engaging in a manipulative smear campaign. Of course she was trying to torpedo Pitt’s image in a lawsuit that had nothing to do with what happened on the plane; of course she was dragging his name through the mud, of course she couldn’t move on. No matter that it was Pitt who had filed the suit about Jolie’s sale of the winery in the first place. 

Elaine Lui has been tracking and analyzing celebrity on her website, Lainey Gossip, for nearly two decades. Over the past few months, she has been meticulously breaking down the gossip press’s defense of Pitt: TMZ, Us Weekly, the Daily Mail, People, all want to play nice with Team Pitt, particularly ahead of a big Oscar campaign for his forthcoming film Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle. TMZ called Jolie’s countersuit a “smear campaign,” claiming she had “poisoned the kids against Brad.” People repeatedly mentioned Jolie going back on an agreement “they’d previously made,” even though there was no evidence of said agreement; the magazine also underlined that, according to a “source close to Pitt,” the actor had dinner with his younger kids whenever they were in Los Angeles; E! reported that he “spends low-key time with his kids at home.”

Pitt’s PR was framing him, in other words, as forgiven. But as Lui explains, “few people are better at playing the game than he is and if he could, we would have seen photos of him with his kids a long time ago. The fact that we haven’t is a major PR issue for him. Which is why he has to go on the attack on Angelina and claim that she’s alienated them from him, so that he can divert attention from the fact that they were on that plane.” 

All of this is deeply sad smut. “Sad smut” has long been Lui’s term to describe situations that are, in some way, scandalous — unsettling not only our understanding of who the star was, but our relationship to them — but in a way that makes it impossible not to see the deep harm that accompanied the scandal. The last fifteen years of Britney Spears’ life: sad smut. Reports of any suicide attempt: sad smut. Shia LaBoeuf’s abuse of ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs: sad smut. 

I think that Jolie always understood Pitt’s abuse on that plane as exactly that: horrific in person, horrific in reports. There was no coming back from it — not for her relationship, and not for their collective public image. And while Jolie might come off as the villain in some of these popular framings, I think she also understood that when you try to spin sad smut, the stink of it, the moral compromise of it, it clings to you. 

Jolie may no longer command the same salary as Pitt; she may be “losing” this moment in the broader publicity war. But she doesn’t walk around the town, or show up on the cover of GQ, with that stench clinging to her. Hollywood’s impulse has always been to forgive its leading men of their gravest sins while damning women for theirs. That tradition, at least with Pitt, continues — but if he is, indeed, the last of the big Hollywood stars, then he, like Depp, might also be one of the last to enjoy its protections. ●

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