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DECONSTRUCTING BRAD PITT Ed. Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 296 pp.
Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett's edited collection Deconstructing Brad Pitt is an extremely remarkable volume and honest to the core. As claimed by Schaberg in the introduction, the book is indeed jargon-free, which makes it such a delightful read. The thirteen essays, plus a coda and a postscript, are short, to the point, and more importantly, extremely well written. The book also includes a visual essay on Pitt by Nancy A. Bernardo composed of images of the star and quotes by the founder of deconstruction theory, Jacques Derrida, which provides an alternative method of reading his image and films.
In the first essay, "Making Montana," Ben Leubner argues that Pitt's acting in Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It (1992) is what makes Pitt synonymous with Montana. It is almost as if they are interchangeable in the audience's eyes. And extra-textually, Leubner states, to many people's chagrin, especially a few of the locals of the state of Montana, Pitt's roles in the two films based on and in Montana-A River Runs Through It and Edward Zwick's The Legends of the Fall (1994)-bring unwelcome tourists who want to savor the "last best place on earth."
The second essay, "Romantic Hero" by Elizabeth Abele, is an academic delineation of the romantic hero and how the concept finds a place in Hollywood. It also examines...