Danny ChaiAfter reading the Esquire cover story on Angelina Jolie I found myself feeling ashamed. The author makes an insightful point. People thought Angelina Jolie was crazy. And when she started doing all these good things, like becoming a U.N. goodwill ambassador and adopting kids, people saw those good things as confirmation that she was crazy.
I saw myself in that characterization and that shamed me. Not that I think Jolie is some amazing human being, although the article does make me think she does some cool things. It’s more the fact that my default response to hearing about the good things she did was to attribute it to her being crazy. (Perhaps that’s the wrong word to use, but it’s the word the article used, so I’m using the same.)
Why do we do that? (By we, I don’t necessarily mean you, I mean me and other people, notably Us Weekly.) When confronted with someone doing a good thing, we would rather tear them down by attributing their good actions to bad motivations than applaud them, ultimately to make us feel better about ourselves, as if we’re better for doing nothing than they are for doing something good for wrong reasons. It’s not just Jolie, it’s any celebrity. Like when Madonna adopted a child, people got on her case for being a publicity hound, or for supposedly taking the child away from the father. Somehow, people twisted things to make her seem a worse person for doing something good.
So yeah, I did think Jolie’s U.N. stuff showed she was crazy, and realizing that kind of makes me sick. I don’t think she’s perfect; I think she has issues, most troublesome an apparently capacity to hurt other people. But the U.N. and adoption stuff she does is a good and noble thing, for which she should be commended. There is no value in thinking her a worse person for doing something good.
Random.