Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand emails.
On Thursday, T Magazine published the email correspondence between actress Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated. The story is theoretically a profile of Portman, timed to the premiere of her directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, but it reads as something much, much weirder.
Twitter was quick to weigh in on the piece, with commenters having a field day skewering the pretentious goofiness of their back-and-forth. A few users, though, zeroed in on a different facet of the feature: Portman’s lack of pants.
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Indeed, the online version of the story features six photos--plus a cover image--of the actress and director, who is not wearing pants in a single shot. While the photographs probably wouldn’t have gotten much attention if they’d run as a stand-alone fashion spread, juxtaposing them with an email conversation that touches on philosophy, religion, and art (“Don’t forget about art!,” wrote Portman in one email), struck some readers as ridiculous--and sexist. After all, it was hard to miss that Safran Foer got the byline, while Portman provided the window dressing. When does Safran Foer doff his slacks?