By Scott Dickensheets  

    In this cynical, over-mediated age, when celebrities spin their dysfunctions into subtle image enhancements -- see, I'm human, too! -- it's nice to see someone like Jennifer Aniston sharing a genuine moment of thrilling triumph with the readers of Vanity Fair.
    "Today," intones writer Leslie Bennetts, "she isn't wearing any [makeup] at all, a freedom from artifice that represents a significant personal victory."
    Way to go, Jen! Just when we thought a weekly paycheck of $750,000 and marriage to Brad Pitt might have made our favorite Friend a little, you know, less like us, along comes the May VF to assure us she's just an insecure, pizza-eating homebody like we are.
     OK, let's check the sarcasm. No, wait, why should we? 
   Aniston, with Bennetts as dutiful transcriptionist, serves up such a concentration of treacly faux sincerity that a good, mocking snigger is a necessary countermeasure. 
   The story reads as though a tanker of chicken soup for the soul has run disastrously aground:  "I think I'm just starting to feel I can stop apologizing -- to myself, to my family, to my friends, to the world -- and live in my body and be OK with that," Aniston says.
      Of Brad Pitt, she declares, "We've had this healing process with each other, of deconstructing these ideals of ourselves, to get rid of that piece-of-shit feeling we carry in ourselves."
      And perhaps the most poignant moment in the piece comes when Aniston recalls chopping off her famous hair after her famous wedding. "I did it mainly to relieve me of the bondage of self."
     Note to Media Life readers: Insert your own crack about $750,000 a week and the adulation of millions loosening that bondage of self. (Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the conditions under which happiness will flourish.)
     Curiously, all of this confessional blurt seems distinctly unfocused. Yes, Bennetts mentions Jennifer's estrangement from her mom and her bummed-out childhood as the kid of divorced parents. But Aniston's damp-eyed therapy McNuggets float free of those facts. They read like a script, in which the voiceover doesn't follow the plot. 
   One wonders if her rep, while negotiating how much of Aniston's left breast would swell on VF's cover, also brokered the level of emotional disclosure the actress would provide.
    That sense of frictionless engagement pervades the May issue. Despite a few points of interest --Christopher Hitchens' bracing harangue against nonsmoking fascism, Nina Munk's mildly approving profile of Maxim publisher Felix Dennis -- this issue feels like a contractual obligation. (Well, we are a monthly; might as well throw something together for May …) 
    Not one but two pieces attempt to give us that you-are-there feeling about places we probably can't visit: Davos, Switzerland, site of the annual World Economic Forum; and Capri, island playground of the rich and famous. 
   There's an excerpt from an upcoming book about Bob Dylan, which has the misfortune to appear a few weeks after Rolling Stone's vastly more entertaining piece on Dylanology.
     Even the usually reliable James Wolcott plays catch-up with an admiring, if late, critique of "The Daily Show."
     Leafing through this lackluster issue, I couldn't help wondering if, for editor Graydon Carter, the thrill is gone. Putting out the magazine can't be much of a challenge anymore. Judging from the populous masthead, there are plenty of helping hands. The editorial mix is practically a recipe. The magazine has its pick of stories and cover subjects, not to mention a mobile strike force of America's top magazine writers. Tina's lipstick traces have long been scrubbed away. The undisputed master of his domain, could Carter be bored on his throne?
    Admittedly, my evidence is thin: In the last several months, VF's cover lines have loosened up, bordering occasionally on the absurdly playful. The goofiest example appeared on February's cover, which featured Keanu Reeves. 
     Of Lara Flynn Boyle, a blurb woofed, "Why isn't she on the cover? Her publicist is on the phone. And it's not like Keanu is Jack Nicholson's girlfriend."
    There's a what-the-hell whimsy to such lines, the mark of a guy trying to relieve his apathy. Obviously I'm spit-balling here, but it does jibe with the surprising melancholy that Carter displayed in a recent New York magazine profile.
     In his May editor's note, Carter admits, "I wish I had Maxim Publisher Felix Dennis' way with a magazine."
    I can't think of a clearer cry from the deep doldrums.
    I mean, you can admire Dennis' profits and the inexplicable popularity of his products. But he puts out terrible, brainless, faux-naughty magazines. ("They're all about teasing cleavage," one perceptive writer told me. "They don't have the guts to go for the whole tit.")
    For Carter to admire Dennis (and there's no indication that he's joshing) is worrisome if you think, as I do, that when VF is cooking, it's a very good publication indeed.
    In her piece on Dennis, Munk contrasts the bawdy Brit with "U.S. publishers, who tend to think their magazines matter." 
    One hopes that's not the attitude Carter admires. 
   Will he ever learn to live in his body and be OK with that?
    Will a good haircut help him relieve his bondage of self?

April 11, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Scott Dickensheets is the magazine critic for Media Life.

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