A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages

Few among us would describe Angelina Jolie as a saintly figure. But her famously telegenic flesh plays canvas to tattooed prayers from religions as varied as her children's birth countries. In his weekly look at the sound bites of our times, Stephen Marche deconstructs a tattooed verse from the nape of her angelic neck There are several prayers tattooed on Angelina Jolie's body. In four long strands along her back runs a Buddhist incantation in Pali, written in Khmer script, whose effectiveness cannot be doubted: "Wherever you may go, many will attend, serve and protect you." Over her abdomen runs the trite Latin saw, "Quod me nutrit me destruit," which translates roughly as "what nourishes me destroys me." On the bump of spine below her neck, the title of a Clash album in a rather tacky Gothic font intones "Know Your Rights." "A Prayer for the Wild at Heart, Kept in Cages," the quotation on her left arm, is the subtitle of a little known and hugely overearnest young play by Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof. The latest additions to Jolie's skin text are tributes to Winston Churchill, one on each arm: Toil and Tears. Blood and Sweat apparently didn't make the cut. And soon enough Jolie will have the numbers 43.41.21N 7.14.29E added to the repertoire. Those are the co-ordinates of the Lenval hospital in Nice, where she gave birth last week to her almost appropriately named twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline. Jolie has tattoos of the longitude and latitude of her other four children's birthplaces over the spot where a dragon was once dedicated to Billy Bob Thornton, but twins pose a complicated problem: Should she have the co-ordinates tattooed once or twice?

Tattoos might once have been considered wild but they're now the kind of physical decoration you wouldn't be surprised to find on the neck of your bank manager. Tattooing cannot be defined (and hence dismissed) as a trend because it is both so ancient and so modern--predating cities and starring on the bodies of the world's most of-the-moment celebrities. Readable text on bodies, however, is a break both from tattooing ancient forms and from its modern purposes: Text written on bodies has historically been a tool for marking fugitives, the sign of the criminal or the slave, the opposite of self-definition or personal expression.

Meaning itself becomes image on Jolie's body. The heart of sense is sacrificed for the shapeliness of sentiment. The power of the words is drained by their placement on her body, evidence of their own ability to be replaced. The aura of profundity devolves into a radioactive superficiality. Jolie kept her tattoos for Wanted, maybe the stupidest film ever made about assassins and the other major Jolie release of the summer. The filmmakers even added a few temporary tattoos to aid her pouty killer aesthetic. The movie unfortunately means the trend of tattoo text will soon spread even more deeply into the mainstream. I'm tempted simply to call Wanted a pile of crap, but, when you think about it, a pile of crap is evidence of the proper digestion of wholesome substance from which good things can grow, none of which is true of Wanted. Wanted is debased enough to treat a story about the transformation of a gentle accountant into a ruthless assassin as a triumph of the possibilities of humanity; ordinary existence can only be a horrifying waste of time is its basic theme. Angelina Jolie is the perfect embodiment of this rejection of the quotidian. She is the celebrity as cartoon character, closer to Bugs Bunny than Grace Kelly. The archetypes in her affair with Brad Pitt, stealing Mr. America from The Girl Next Door, were only prologue to the unreality of her current family, a multicultural brood of stylish kids straight out of X-men or Josephine Baker. The twins no doubt will only contribute to the otherworldly effect. As will the tattoos yet to come.

news source : http://www.nationalpost.com/