For the first time in more than six years, movie audiences can see Angelina Jolie naked. In the animated epic Beowulf, the full-frontal simulation of the actress is so “real,” Jolie told People magazine she felt “exposed” after viewing it for the first time. Given that the movie presents her as a golden-skinned beauty who resembles an Oscar statue with a boob job and a tail, this was quite a revelation and no doubt catnip to the paparazzi. The first candid photos that clearly reveal her previously undocumented appendage should spark seven-figure bidding wars amongst the tabloids.
Meanwhile, if Jolie was startled by the PG-13 exploits of her Beowulf persona, imagine how she’ll react if she ever discovers what her likeness is up to at SinfulComics.com. There, she engages in acts of hardcore cartoon nookie that could make even Billy Bob Thornton blush. She has plenty of company, too. While a disclaimer on the website insists its content is “not intended as a true representation of actual events but fantasy and parody” that doesn’t represent “real persons,” practically every female star on Hollywood’s A-list appears here.
Some of the cartoons are pin-up-style nude portraits that depict the faces of stars like Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston with photorealistic exactitude. Others are cruder, in both aesthetic terms and the action depicted. Natalie Portman engages in a vigorous interspecies tryst with Yoda. Scarlett Johansson fares better, hooking up with Justin Timberlake on a yacht. The Olsen twins display a surprisingly hardy appetite for giant sex toys.
That such cartoons exist is completely predictable but nonetheless befuddling. The world is filled with live women—many of them as beautiful as any Hollywood star—who are more than willing to perpetrate whatever carnal indecencies the nation’s porn directors can imagine, including, no doubt, having sex with a midget in a Yoda costume. And yet there are people paying $39.95 a month to look at web-based comic-book porn of Maggie Q cartoon-boinking her Live Free or Die Hard co-star Bruce Willis. Such is the overwhelming allure of celebrity!
And things are only going to get weirder. Ten years from now, digital porn stars will outnumber the human ones, but hijacked personas of mainstream celebrities will still be a part of the equation. After all, when every private act is made public, only privacy, or rather the violation of privacy, can help porn retain its sense of taboo, its tradition of depicting things that aren’t supposed to be seen. And the privacy of public figures packs a more potent charge than the privacy of anonymous nobodies.
So forget snuff films—the ultimate endpoint of porn is an animated, super-realistic 3D orgy starring Brangelina and TomKat, with the entire front row of this year’s Oscars thrown in for good measure. Sinful Comics has yet to depict that scenario, but just wait. In a dingy production studio somewhere, anonymous illustrators are toiling away to make such visions a reality.
As they appropriate the flesh of our favorite celebrities, a different kind of fan seeks merely to colonize their souls. Last week, nearly 1,000 hungry members of the Hollywood Prayer Network travelled to Beverly Hills in search of scrambled eggs and troubled celebrities. “The prayer network is the equivalent, and perhaps more important, than praying for our president,” one group member explained to the Associated Press on the day before its annual prayer breakfast. “Just as churches have traditionally prayed for leaders, now we recognize that one of our primary sources of leadership is the entertainment industry.”
Finally, an explanation for why President Bush has an approval ratings in the low 30s, and why Paris Hilton is getting paid a million bucks to host a New Year’s Eve party! Amping up its recruitment efforts, the group recently presented Hilton with a Bible, and hopes to give one to Britney Spears as well.
Offering the Good Book to those who consider clothing labels a daunting read is a quixotic quest—but suppose, through some miracle, Paris forsakes dancing in loud, trendy nightclubs for dancing in loud, trendy mega-churches. Suppose Britney starts running over photographers in a Godly, purpose-driven way. Won’t such lifestyle changes simply make the exploits of their dirty digital doppelgangers all the more alluring? The only ones praying harder than the Hollywood Prayer Network for the salvation of Hollywood’s spiritual anorexics, one imagines, are the pixel-merchants at Sinful Comics.