The whole "Rorschach Test" thing is getting a lot of press lately. You see in whatever those things you want to see. Britney is Bush, Angelina is Barack Obama, Barack Obama is Jesus Christ, Hillary Clinton is your mom, Hillary Clinton is your menopausal boss from hell. Nomani knows better than most that none of any of this is true, that it's more complicated than that.

I learned a few things I did not know from the Rolling Stone piece. I did not know that Kevin Federline's lawyers is a "former Israeli operative" who "penetrated the inner circles of Hollyood" in a way "not unlike counterterrorism" or that before he met Britney K-Fed's Chevy was repossessed. Or that the paparazzo who usually manages to get up front during her dramatic car chases is a former Death Row records executive. Or that once upon a time Britney Spears was a polite, well-mannered kid who did all her chores but she was driven to madness in part by two pivotal moments in her life: the trauma of the media mockery following her boob job, and cheating on Justin Timberlake with her choreographer. And there but for the grace of Harvey Levin go all of us?

Is any of this true? It is probably an oversimplification. Is the inspiring tale of Angelina's dramatic turnaround, from troubled self-mutilator estranged from her father to World's Best Person, also an oversimplification? No doubt. Do we tell ourselves stories in order to live? Are the stories in Us Weekly more dangerous than those in the Bible and the Koran? Am I really going to spend another hour I could have spent learning about, I dunno, the fallout of the Pakistani election on that question? I guess I just did.

I left the movie depressed. Depressed because I wanted to like Mariane Pearl because she had gone through so much and stands for so much and Angelina Jolie, of whom some of us here are a fan, is such a fan, but I had a feeling that the real life widow was the only thing standing between the world's most famous couple making a serious important film that could do for a mass audience what Control Room did for, you know, the NPR-listening choir. A Mighty Heart, in other words, had to be a bad book.

So I looked it up on the internet. Everybody loved it! She even had a co-author! Maybe I was stupid! (Duh!) Did I just not want to blame Angie?

So I bought it. I started reading it; I did not finish; my suspicions proved correct.

Mariane clearly, clearly, clearly loved loved loved Danny. To read the beginning part where she talks about how proud she is of him and how warm and perfect and wonderful he is is like reading some very precocious teenage girl's diary about how she imagines life with the man of her dreams is going to turn out. And who knows, teenage girls could love this movie. It could be the next The Notebook. But to the adults in the audience it seemed false, and immature, and dishonest. (I cannot speak for Kimora Lee Simmons.)

Like Daniel Pearl I worked for a distant bureau of the WSJ when 9/11 happened. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I was not so much a great reporter.) Also, my distant bureau was Los Angeles. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I mainly wrote about shoes.) My weeks after the towers fell were spent mostly in an eastern shitty suburb of San Diego called Lemon Grove, where two of the 9/11 hijackers had lived and worked and attended the odd strip club. The story was so impossibly big and important and terrifying-to-get-beaten on that they sent two of us down at first, me and an editor about twelve years my senior. I was reminded of this because in the first chapter, Mariane talks about how she went on almost all of her interviews with Danny, and interviewing subjects with a companion is really cool, especially, when they are the sort of people you don't actually relate to much, like this methhead we met whose neighbor followed a very fringe anti-modernity sect of Islam that had inspired him, it was revealed in family court, to skin his daughter's pet rabbit as punishment for playing with "idols" (Barbies).

Point being: people out there = weird. Situation = stressful. This editor = the only sane person with whom I communicated for weeks after this cataclysmic event.

"So did you ever think about, like, just giving your editor a blowjob in the car? Just to like ease the tension?"

That was the first question my friend Evan had when I returned. Evan used to work in porn, which might be why he's such a great reporter, because people don't get as creeped out when he asks shit like that. Some even answer honestly. I did not.

"He's married!"

But yeah, of course I had. We were all in this weird place with all these strange poor people (Muslims in America: not so affluent, a lot!) and all their weird skepticism and racist neighbors and meth fiend advocates and everything was really really really tense and all the editors back in New York were falling to pieces because their offices had been totally destroyed in the attack, and yes, for being with me through all of that I wanted to hump my editor, very much yes. He was the only remotely doable person I was going to happen upon.

It was not so easy to reconcile that with the righteous humanism with which I wanted to view the world, especially in the wake of 9/11, when suddenly my own country had experienced a tragedy on the scale of other countries and I wanted to believe that the world would share in our grief, that we were all grieving together, that out of tragedy ought to come some better understanding between us and our neighbors.

Also: The world was collapsing. Why all the thinking about fucking? Because I was human and horny and all this chatting up of poor crazy religious people was starting to feel really fake? Because I was human and I DON'T love everyone else in the universe equally, especially the ones who seem so unlike us? Or because in the movie version, there would be romance; in the movie version, there would be a Great Affair?

To read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane Pearl is kinda in the latter camp without ever really have considered the question. In fact, to read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane was actually writing the movie before her husband was even beheaded. I'm not saying she didn't love him sufficiently, but there's a scene in the movie in which someone wonders why she's not more weepy about things and it's because she can't help it, she's thinking ahead, about what it will mean, what sort of statement she can make out if it, how she can narrativize it. That's a common thing in a journalist, something she's so aware of she cops to it on the very first page:

It is the curse of all journalists, I suppose, to be writing a story even as you are living it.

That said, if anyone loves Mariane, Angelina Jolie seems to, because she manages to portray her in a way that is both accurate and gentle. We've all read about how they're friends. It makes me glad for Brad and the family that she spent all that time being crazy and fucked up. We bet she's a good mom. We hope she rubs off on Mariane.