A Word on Ben Affleck, Two Decades After Gigli

While the entertainment media's talking up Hollywood celebrities and then turning against them is tiresomely routine, but some examples have been especially striking.

One is the way the media turned hostile to Anne Hathaway circa 2013, because it was so abrupt and forceful and without the usual preparation.

Another is that against Ben Affleck, because of how long it went on--and because of the particular circumstances that provided a convenient point of comparison. The big moment in his case came with 2003's Gigli. It was not a good film by any means--but its badness struck me as banal, the badness of any number of crappy independent films that the critics ordinarily treat far more kindly. After that flop the press came after both Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez--and if the backlash against Lopez proved relatively short-lived, the actress and singer's career going on its way, with 2005's Monster-in-Law already becoming a hit in spite of critics' unkindness toward that movie, the hatred for Affleck endured.

Granted, that hatred did ease, but only late, and slowly. I remember, for example, how Affleck drew some positive notices for Hollywoodland (2006)--but this was only a beginning, and that over three years after the release of Gigli. Affleck's turn behind the camera helped, Affleck landing some positive notices for directing The Town (2010), and Argo (2012), but there were distinct limitations to that--of which it can seem telling that while the Academy gave Argo Best Picture, it did not even bother with a Best Director nomination for Affleck, a reminder that approval of the film translated over to him only so far. It also seemed to me to be there in the hostility to Affleck's being cast as Batman in the DC Extended Universe, and the excessive nastiness toward 2003's Daredevil. And so on and so forth.

Rather than a bump in the road it has been a major drag--one that did not prevent him from having what most would regard as a commercially and critically enviable career as director and actor on the whole, but all the same, significant, longstanding damage from a hostility that, I think, has not been helped but cannot be wholly accounted for by the messiness of his personal life. (Foolish as a good deal of his behavior has been, others are forgiven much worse all the time.) It all leaves the element of sheer media stupidity the more blatant.