Angelina Jolie: The Biography [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This book was nothing but news clips put together. Obviously, Jolie would not give an interview. So the writer relied on the easy way out: basic research on what's been written before in newspapers, tabloids etc.

Loved this!!! Great pictures and great insight into a wonderful person's world. Being a fan I had heard most of the stories from Angelina interviews in the past, but there were some things that surprised me. It also offered a lot of information on her marriages and why they didn't work out.

After reading this book, Angelina Jolie is not much of a mystery -- at least not in the strictly Freudian sense. Her fears seemed to have two or three primary origins. First, in a kind of reverse Oedipal complex way, she was incestuously in love with her father long before she was old enough to "process" her feelings for him and thus before mature boundaries could be established so that she could imagine him in a mature way. And second, she remained in great pain over his leaving the family, even though she learned about it secondhand through the plaintive angst of her mom. And finally, she had no skills for coping with the anal retentive, extremely oppressive and repressive, and foolish social hierarchy at Hollywood High. It seems clear even now that she has yet to sort this all out?

So, as is true with so many kids who do not know what to do with their fears, "acting out" became Ms. Jolie's preferred mode of coping. In a fairly loose and permissive parental environment, this strategy worked to perfection for her, as it allowed her to gain undeserved and unearned power and entitlements, as she was allowed to walk between the raindrops of life shocking others, as she "played to" her "imaginary untamed" side.

This served a dual psychic purpose: It allowed her to escape the realities she feared (and which in the background were pressing down on her psyche) by wearing a mask of toughness and exotica - as in being an "outsider" (while clearly in reality, very definitely being an insider), and allowed her to further explore the hints of emerging darkness in her own personality, hints that were also generated by the same constellations of fears. This imagined dark side that stalked her (even though she pretended to be unaware of it) was not intrinsic to her being, but was a second-order byproduct of her coping fantasies. [It had to be, because at the time, she of course had no idea who she was?]

now she had created new fears, in addition to the original ones, her choice of coping tools had created new fears of their own. They now joined the others in stalking her very being, and stood in the way of her individual self-development project, i.e., they stood in the way of both her "self-definition" and "self-construction" projects. Well before she understood any of this, she was already living and controlling the world beyond her with her "acting out:" her pouting, fretting, acting out, suicide attempts, manipulating boyfriends with sex, father with everything in her arsenal, and with her wild behavior and fake persona of darkness. In fact, she did all of this well before she was mature enough to understand any of it, or had the ability to "feel," let alone "feel comfortable" in her own emotional skin. This is all very heady stuff for anyone, but especially for a pre-teen, it can be life altering.

As a result, her whole early life was like an "out of body experience." When she pinched herself, nothing happened? None of it felt real because it all was indeed very unreal. It did not feel real because she had learned to "feel" by fiat -- through her fantastic manipulative skills and schemes that gave her undeserved power as they were reflected back to her from those who allowed her to manipulate them. But she was too bright not to discover that this was an emotional black hole, an emotional empty vessel, a being made up completely of fairy dust. The only reality it contained was its manipulative value, an illusion of power, and even a young Angelina knew that, that did not a whole person make?

Her fascination with knives eventually brought all of this to a head. It became her unconsciously "self-designed" litmus test for the conspicuous missing reality -- of the dark matter of the being that she was not yet in touch with. When she cut herself she must have been surprised to see that she did indeed bleed: Ergo, she existed and at least in principle, was a genuine human being, hard empirical evidence that she did have genuine feelings? That is why she cut herself ritualistically and flirted with suicide several times, before she became aware enough to understand what was going on with her emotionally, and then unceremoniously discarded both her "punk rock" persona and her "punk rock" boyfriend. Who on cue, and according to the script her behavior had compelled, cried like a sissy over the breakup.

As she matured, undoubtedly she discovered (or did she?) that her life was all just one "gigantic fraud of a self-made drama:" a transparent cover and mask for a whole constellation of sick pre-teen fears that, due to the freedom of having promiscuous parents, had taken on a life of their own -- within her young, bright but fragile (if not unstable) mind.

Unfortunately, experiences like these at an early age, leave permanent scar tissue and scabs on the psyche that never properly heal, and thus can follow us throughout life. And although at some point Angelina was bright enough to understand this on an intellectual level she certainly did not have the maturity to understand any of it on an emotional level. In fact the black hole in her being was (and may still be) that she did not understand anything at all on a purely emotional level. She had forfeited her right to emotional knowledge and self-awareness, on the seductive altar of power and manipulation, which is strong medicine at any age.

The evidence of her very public present life makes it pretty obvious that the intoxicating power she gained -- unearned and even without having mastery over "her being" -- was a powerful motivator for her to continue her "escape act" from the reality of who she really was? Clearly when we see her with her eight or nine kids all of different races, ordering her meek husband around, and showing leg at the Oscars, she is still "playing to the crowd" and pretending not to be doing so. But, what we see is not what we get, nor what she intends: We do not see a beautiful famous women, struggling to be the best citizen of the world she can be, but another "Octa-mom," or a a smarter but equally sick Sarah Palin: drunk on the fame and power of a life built on years of cheap manipulation. For all her virtues and there are indeed many, it is sad to say that Ms. Jolie's life still remains pretty much as it was when she was a manipulative preteen: a continuing public drama in the theater of the absurd.

But hey, she is rich, admired by the unaware, a descent actor, and has the whole world eating from her manipulative hand, so who is to say that this "reality in the blind," is not for her, the only reality?

Anyway, this is a profoundly honest book about a very complicated woman who keeps on getting more and more complicated, but who will not do like Andre Agassi did: slow down just enough to understand who she really is. Five Stars