Paul Thomas: Rebranding time comes along for Brad and Jen

The media are often accused of accentuating the negative. One response to this charge is that if no news is good news, it follows that good news is no news.

News in this context is drama and disaster; someone, somewhere, needs to be suffering or in jeopardy. No news is the reassuring stasis of life as normal, the polar opposite of the tsunami horror.

But news comes in many forms and the news machine is as relentless and indiscriminate as its market. The public want a daily fix of information, entertainment and titillation.

Those who write cross letters to the editor deploring sensationalism should bear in mind that the law of supply and demand is at work here: for sensationalism to sell, consumers have to buy.

Which brings us to the second-biggest story of the week: the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston split.

It's hard to know whether this qualifies as good news or bad news. Good, bad or in-between, it's big news and has, accordingly, been subjected to feverish analysis and interpretation. Four distinct and competing explanations emerge.

Physical separation. This is the default spin when movie star marriages founder. "Their filming schedules meant they were often in different cities, if not countries, for weeks, if not months, at a time" ... and so on. One would be tempted to suggest that Hollywood couples should endeavour to be in the same films if it wasn't for the fact that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tried that and ended up divorcing each other twice.

Kids. According to this version, Brad craves a family but Jen wants to be remembered as a serious actor, not as the airhead from Friends. In keeping with this yearning for artistic credibility and the respect of her peers, she baulked at the disfigurement that often attends childbirth.

Brad, it seems, would give anything, including Jen, to hear the patter of tiny feet. His claim that "Little girls crush me - they break my heart" was trotted out as evidence of a paternal instinct that cannot and should not be denied. Veterans of the parenting caper might wonder if he's too fragile and susceptible to emotional manipulation for this gig while pointing out that raising children doesn't always follow the script, especially not of a Disney movie.

Sex. The News of the World didn't buy either story. "Cherchez la femme," say the French, and no one does that with such drooling zeal as The News of the Screws as it's not-so-fondly known.

Not that much zeal was required given that Brad's most recent leading lady was notorious man-eater Angelina Jolie. Proponents of the kids theory would have us believe that Brad spent all those hours in Ange's trailer clucking over her 3-year-old adopted son. Ho ho, sniggered NOW, wrong biological urge.

Ange, who was briefly and loopily (they wore vials of each other's blood around their necks) married to Ninja Turtle-lookalike Billy Bob Thornton, is apparently every Hollywood wife's worst nightmare. She also champions various worthy causes and, according to her actor father Jon Voight, is a clinical fruitcake. One can see how even as experienced a campaigner as the sexiest man on the planet might find this package intriguing.

There's no business like show business. There is a view that movie star marriages are publicity cum marketing exercises first and love matches second, if at all. It's certainly true that these unions - think of Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman - generate a truly staggering amount of media coverage which invariably seems to spike whenever the parties have a new film out.

They are, however, subject to the law of diminishing returns. Any celebrity relationship will eventually pall and in an age when the lights are on 24 hours a day, the window of fascination is steadily shrinking. No news is good news and good news is no news. But there's always one last headline-grabber - the break-up.

If that seems unduly cynical, consider the long list of gay movie stars stretching all the way back to Rudolph Valentino who married for appearance's sake, often at the behest of the studios which had a vested interest in stilling wagging tongues and protecting their hot properties box office appeal.

Maybe the whole Brad-Jen thing had outlived its usefulness. Maybe they felt it was time to rebrand.

AS A footnote to last week's column on the Rolling Stones, this perspective from Kenneth Anger, the legendary underground film-maker and spiller of Hollywood's most putrid beans: In an impressively splenetic interview with the Observer, Anger recalled the Stones' ill-fated concert in Hyde Park in July 1969, two days after the death of guitarist Brian Jones who had been dumped from the group for drug-induced flakiness. The plan was to release thousands of white butterflies during the concert but many of them died from the heat beforehand.

Anger said to Mick Jagger: "They're not just cheap props, you know."

"I know," replied Jagger. "They cost a thousand dollars."

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington author.