Brad Pitt. The haircut (any haircut), the jawline, the body, the effortlessly asseverated charisma, the insistently commanding aura that cemented his being-in-chargeness as the natural order of things. Brad Pitt the brand. Brad Pitt the guy. Brad Pitt, the gold standard of mainstream masculine desirability, is dead. Mortui vivos docent.
I’ve been an attendee at his ongoing ‘funeral’ for years, without even knowing it. It wasn’t until a spontaneous conversation over a panoramic array of social lubricants took a whimsically contemplative turn-the kind that involves your female partners in conversation pondering over which male celebrity slakes their (loudly and willingly articulated) thirst-that I realised how out of favour (dead) Pitt, People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1995 and 2000, was. I couldn’t and can’t believe it. This perverse, sacrilegious revelation was Nietzschean in its levelling, usurping thrust. It wasn’t meant to be, but it felt that way. I imagined being amongst the rabble in the marketplace as his Zarathustra spread his course-altering gospel: “God is dead”.
Blasphemy. Heresy. But there was something in there that lit a fuse to further detonations. I did what I normally tend to do when I
