Does the collapse of the Jolie-Pitt marriage have any significance for the rest of us? Yes. It is a time to call a halt to the business of welding celebrity couples’ first names together and then – in the same spirit of smirking irony – inventing a new version that commemorates their parting. #Brangelina has become #Brexelina. #Hiddleswift became #Hiddlesplit. (It’s like the word “underwhelming”, which can never be spoken without the self-conscious and self-congratulatory implication: see what I did? I took the word “overwhelming” and wittily turned it on its head!)
The first-name fusion has become smug shorthand for stating that you have complete ironic awareness of a gossiped-about relationship, that you are entirely conscious of it as an exploitable brand identity in the celebrity marketplace. Brad and Angelina were not the pioneers of this. That honour surely belongs to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez who were Bennifer: they split in 2004, two years before Twitter was invented, and so were spared its really widespread use, or an ironic split version (Gonnifer?). Shakespeare’s lovers on the Nile would be #Antopatra, and then #Aspoatra. Or in Verona it would be #Ruliet and then possibly #Ruliex.
It is a mark of the respect in which the US president and first lady are held that they did not become #Barelle. Let it die with #Brangelina.
Crash course
Jeremy Corbyn was mocked for suggesting that Trident submarines should roam the seas without nuclear warheads, like a box in which Schrödinger’s cat, you are quite certain, is dead. But now the capital’s transport authorities are indulging in Corbyn-Trident-ism with a scheme in Commercial Street, east London, designed to keep drivers at 20mph or below: painting phoney or optical-illusion speed bumps, clever perspective lines that trick drivers into thinking the surface is bulging upwards — much as sponsors’ logos are often etched into sports pitches at an angle so that TV audiences can see them at the right shape.
Of course, optical speed bumps are cheaper than the real thing. But you drive up, decelerate and, as you smoothly sail over the optical speed bump, realise that you have been tricked. So the danger is surely that enraged drivers will come to assume all speed bumps are phoney, and will smash their cars and possibly themselves. Is Transport for London engaged in a worryingly Ballardian experiment in group psychology?
Laugh? I almost lifted a car
I am a sucker for very sad films: I always cry at E.T., at The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and at the scene in The Cruel Sea where Jack Hawkins says: “It’s the war, it’s the whole bloody war.” And , like my colleague Catherine Shoard, I found myself choking up at the forthcoming outrageous weepie The Light Between Oceans, starring Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender.
But now researchers at Oxford have revealed that the endorphins released by sad films are not merely perversely enjoyable – they can actually increase your pain thresholds. Test subjects were asked to hold the fiendishly painful “wall-sit” test: holding an unsupported seated position against a wall using your tensed thigh muscles. The scientists found that after watching a sad film, the subjects could hold the position for 13% longer.
That would not work with me. Watching Bambi’s mother get killed does not cause my physical fitness to spike. I have to lie down on the sofa, staring lip-tremblingly at the ceiling.
But comedies are different. After watching the “desk pop” scene in the Will Ferrell comedy The Other Guys – where the hapless police officer is persuaded it’s traditional to fire a gun into the air at his desk – I have so many endorphins I can lift a car above my head.
