In "This is Me... Now" and "Air," celebrities are gods. It's unsettling.
Fame won’t look fame in the eyes.
Ben Affleck is everywhere and nowhere in This is Me… Now. His two characters in the new Jennifer Lopez movie are disappearing acts. “Biker” is the true love only glimpsed out of focus. “Rex Stone” is a bloviating newscaster played under prosthetic. Lopez and Affleck got married two summers ago, so his visible absence is a key part of Now’s story. He’s the beginning, the ending, the final word.
Michael Jordan is everywhere and nowhere in Air. Affleck directed the 2023 biopic about the basketball legend’s Nike deal. Outside of vintage clips, the rookie baller is a mute body played faceless by Damian Delano Young. Characters talk about him around him. Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro delivers a multi-minute monologue explaining Jordan to Jordan. “You’re gonna be remembered forever,” the talent scout declares, “Because some things are eternal.”
This is Me… Now is a silly trainwreck. Air is bullshit business fanfic. Both are Amazon products, so don’t tell the Lopez-Afflecks the streaming cash dried up. I root for them like I root for any marriage. But this bizarre parallel offends me. Invisible holy Michael, invisible holy Ben. The visual strategy masks an unsettling moral purpose. Unseen uber-fame gets higher plot status than any mere mortals onscreen. (“Everyone at this table will be forgotten when our time is up,” Sonny tells Michael, ”Except you.”) Both projects model awe. Is this how famous people think about fame? Or how they want us to see them?
Important to point out the different relationships among creators, subjects, and audiences. Affleck is a Jordan fan. Lopez is her spouse’s spouse. Affleck is a movie star. Jordan was basketball when basketball was monoculture. Comparable films hide equivalent personalities in plain sight. Think of Jay-Z’s gauzy appearances in Lemonade (a different husband-y visual album) or the dead Kennedys in JFK and Bobby (focal-yet-distant historical figures).
The avert-your-eyes wonder is new, though. Lopez can feel whatever she feels about her guy, of course. It’s weirder how Affleck makes Air so devotional. Sonny tells Jordan: “A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. Then it has meaning. The rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness.” He goes on and on. I really think that speech is the worst thing I saw in a movie last year. Like, dude, it’s a shoe.
Worth pointing out Jordan himself didn’t mind coming off like a hilarious asshole in his nostalgia series The Last Dance. By comparison, Air’s Jordan-shaped void lacks imagination. A better director would supercharge the final act with anyone playing Jordan: a stuntcast young star, an unknown radiating promise, some TV regular projecting confidence, an awkward non-actor jock. Any decision, even a bad one, would reflect the filmmaker’s unique vision.
Keeping his face offscreen is no decision, and an admission that Air is less a story than a self-portrait of clout chased. It reminds me of how biblical epics in the Ben-Hur age would treat Christ as this ambient glory too astounding for a close-up. Recall the film-within-a-film of 2016’s Hail, Caesar!, in which the Messiah is “seen only fleetingly and with extreme taste.” How would a real 21-year-old react to Sonny’s outlandish praise? Air can’t picture the human Jordan. It traps him in symbolism.
Affleck himself represents a similar failure in This is Me…Now. Lopez has created a whole movie about romantic updowns with zero details about her climactic soulmate beyond CGI abstractions. He’s a hummingbird. He’s what resuscitates her industroglam heart factory. Consider what happens to “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” a pleasant track on the accompanying album. The lyrics start with wedding panic, before the singer’s fiancé suggests a possibility:
What about a midnight trip to Vegas
Just me and you, baby
Throw the kids in the back
Of the pink Cadillac
And us in the bathroom changin’.
Great rugpull: Sin City as a quiet place for nice people to have a family wedding. A lovely peak inside lovely love. The movie’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas” performance has no bathroom, no kids, no fiancé, no midnight, no trip, no Vegas. The dance-floor setting is, I don’t know, a wicker shipwreck fossil spiral river. Like someone aimed Avatar and gutterballed into John Carter.
A fun debate: Who’s this marriage’s alpha? Affleck has Oscars. Lopez went platinum. He’s off social media, a power move. She has a quarter-billion Instagram followers, also a power move. She’s more globally transformative, and Out of Sight really is better than any of his movies. Affleck’s mystique is the peaks and valleys, though; he will always be Batman and Daredevil. No question, the public’s view of them has changed. The trailer for March 2004’s Jersey Girl obscures Lopez, and it’s not a worshipful tease. Bennifer exhaustion made her minor role a financial liability. Now Affleck and Lopez cash Dunkin’ checks off their coupledom, which makes it outright malicious that one of them made a movie about the social importance of brand partnerships.
There’s nothing so offensive in the Lopez film. But the celebrity delusion rhymes. Lopez’s character, “Artist,” has multiple entourages who exist to worry about her well-being. One of these supportive ensembles is a cameo coalition playing Zodiac deities. The celebs clearly filmed their parts separately; their banter seems terribly lonely. Meanwhile, “Artist” lives in a hilltop mega-mansion, the kind of CGI-tweaked home most movies use to prove the villain’s loathsome decadence. I worry, on some level, that Lopez just wanted her house to look huge.
Both Air and This is Me… Now treat critical famous personalities as lofty entities too godly to stare upon. Weird way for celebrities to think about celebrity — starfuckery in every sense — but they’re expressing something honest about our time. I’m reminded of the Virgin Voyages commercial where Lopez played her own A.I. self performance-controlled by various people. A depressing vision of modern fame: hyperbolic and inhuman, the commodified techno-eternal. Normals are thrilled to be J.Lo for a few seconds. She is the shoe they step into.