Ben Affleck Was Hated, Feels Much Better Now

I saw Argo a few weeks ago, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I usually go to historical flicks because I like being angry. Christ, you should've heard me holler like a maniac at the inaccuracies in Olver Stone's Nixon when I saw that in a crowded theatre.

But Argo was not just pretty awesome, it was more of less true to the history. Sure, a bunch of Canadians got pissy about how the movie underplayed the contribution of our ambassador, but Canadians don't have much of an idea about Hollywood works, which is weird when you consider how Canadians actually dominate Hollywood. The fact is that there isn't going to be a long line of investors saying "You only want $30 million to make a movie about a Canadian diplomat? But we wanted to give you $60 million!"

I'd recommend it heartily to you, in large part because I wasn't really aware that Ben Affleck could actually do something before. That, in and of itself, was pretty compelling. Sure, I'd seen him in a bunch of Kevin Smith vehicles, but I thought that I only like him because I dig Smith so much.

Turns out that I was wrong. He can act and direct and all kinds of neat shit. And now Young Ben has returned to being the Toast of Tinseltown! Lookie, he's even one of GQ's Men of the Year!

This is ideal for Mr. Affleck, in so far as it allows him to publicly ruminate about the years - and, as I remember it, there were a lot of them - when shitting on Ben Affleck was the national past time. I think it may have been bigger than baseball, but there could have been a baseball strike during that era. Not being gay, I don't follow baseball.

I remember the years that everyone hated Ben Affleck as something of a personal Golden Age. If, I reckoned, you can't look down upon someone who's handsome, rich and successful - being paid beyond the limits of human imagination for projects that go right in the toilet - exactly who are you supposed to look down on? That's an especially important question when, like me, you've generally failed at life and look forward only to the auto-erotic asphyxiation mishap that finally puts you out of your endless misery.

What happens when looking down on Ben Affleck is all you've got?

Well, for one thing, it brings you the closest thing to joy that you're likely ever going to find. So that's something.

But F.Scott Fitzgerald proved what a drunkard and an all around fool he was when he said that "There are no second acts in American lives." Richard Nixon died a respected statesman and Affleck just made a movie that could very well win an Oscar. America is all about second acts and always has been, which leads me to believe that Fitzgerald was a pickled foreigner, likely smuggled in directly from Ireland and never given the opportunity to sober the fuck up.

Verily, this is the Age of Affleck. And Affleck wants to use his time to bitch about my Golden Age, when everybody properly hated him.

I read two particularly blunt examples out loud to Affleck. One is: At the risk of generalizing, there may not be a person on the planet who is more socially acceptable to hate. The other: It is fashionable at the moment to loathe Ben Affleck. To be honest, the guy makes it easy.
 

"It's as mean-spirited a thing as it is kind of permissible to say in an editorial capacity," Affleck says in response to the second. That one comes from The Boston Globe. "My hometown paper."

Looking back, whatever Affleck's real or perceived shortcomings, the viciousness of what was said about him now looks like a kind of collective lunacy. "At the time, I knew on some level, 'This is insane,' " he says. No one on the planet was more socially acceptable to hate? Really? "What was that guy's name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat?" He supplies the answer himself. "Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press. At least they had to say 'alleged killer.' Unfortunately there's an aspect of that that's like one of those fights you see on YouTube where one of them falls down and then a bunch of people who were standing around come over and kick the person. They don't know them, they have no involvement in the fight, but they recognize a moment that they can get a free shot in, and for some people it's just too much to resist. And that was definitely me at that point. I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe."

I don't want to piss on guy's perfectly well-deserved parade - and Argo really is a fantastic movie - but there are a few things I'd like to point out regarding Affleck's comparison of himself to Scott Peterson.

1. The Constitution demanded that Scott Perterson be given the presumption of innocence for his crimes. That's not true of whether Ben Affleck made nearly a dozen shitty movies in a row.
2. Peterson's crimes and subsequent trial didn't waste as much time, money and public attention as Affleck's career did at that point.
3. Peterson's murder of his wife and unborn child were horrific, but still sexier than Gigli.
4. Everybody knew Peterson did it, but even that was more suspenseful than Daredevil.
5. Peterson's TV trial was a single static shot, yet still provided more compelling visuals that Pearl Harbor.
6. If nothing else, Scott Peterson is still paying for his crimes.