Ben Affleck and the female gaze

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A question nobody necessarily needs the answer to: is Ben Affleck the world’s most famous male muse? Last week, Jennifer Lopez released an entire album, This is Me Now, devoted to her husband. It is her second to do so: This is Me Then, released in 2002, the year they got engaged, included the dedication: ‘"You are my life ... my sole inspiration for every lyric, every emotion, every bit of feeling on this record". That first album also featured an ode to Ben: ‘Dear Ben’. There is now a follow up: ‘Dear Ben, Pt II’, which includes the lyrics: “Sitting here alone, staring at my ring ring, feeling overwhelmed, makes me wanna sing sing.”

Lopez’s adoration for her husband has often been met with derision – perhaps the curse of their worldwide turkey Gigli, on the set of which they fell in love, will never quite lift – but I have to admire Lopez’s single-handed though perhaps incidental effort to dilute a sexist trope. Throughout history muses have always been associated with a certain kind of pliant and silent female beauty that is given form and meaning through a male artist’s ‘vision’ – from Lee Miller and Kiki de Montparnasse to Edie Sedgwick, Dora Maar, and even Kate Moss. 

Affleck, it would seem, has understood the parameters of the muse well. Mute, present and correct at J Lo’s side, he is these days as much red carpet accessory as husband. While his wife shines, Affleck’s expression remains impenetrable: his body is there, his spirit is not. One picture is reminiscent of Picasso and Dora Maar: he, a sharp, wary look into the barrel of the camera, she, her chin in her hands, bored and deflated. Is Ben Jen’s Weeping Woman? 

There has been concern: ‘Sad Affleck’ the meme perhaps peaked last year after lip-readers decoded J Lo potentially telling him to “look more friendly…more motivated…sit up straight” at the Grammys. An interviewer even asked Lopez whether her husband was OK. She laughed: ‘You don’t need to worry about Ben!’. (Yet I couldn’t help but worry, later that evening, imagining Ben sitting silently atop a pedestal, while Lopez gazed at him from her piano, singing.)

Lopez has even mined Affleck’s most private thoughts for her art: at last week’s premiere, she revealed she had given some of his love letters to her album’s songwriters. One such love letter even inspired the title for the documentary that accompanied the film that accompanied the album: The Greatest Love Story Never Told. And, more troubling still, Affleck’s reported writing credit for This is Me Now (the film) appears to have disappeared. A true muse, indeed.

This week in links

I’ve been reading The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, which got five-star reviews when it came out in January, and, despite it being set in lockdown (which must surely put many prospective readers off) I was drawn in by the parrot on the front cover. The parrot is left alone in a big house, where he has his own enormous room, walls painted with bright flowers, scuttling insects and monkeys, a giant cage in the centre. Its wealthy owner is stuck elsewhere, about to give birth, and so she enlists our unnamed narrator, a writer, to parrot-sit.

The parrot becomes a much-needed friend during a year of uncomfortable solitude, and I loved the amusing descriptions of this intelligent, vain and haughty bird demanding to be admired, from playing with its 10-pin bowling toy to watching it push a mini shopping trolley with its beak. Moving, too, are the narrator’s interactions with another stranger she has to share the house with. And anyone currently struggling to write their first novel will feel reassured/inspired/scared by the book’s smattering of quotes from great authors about beginnings, endings, and memory. I liked this one, from Joan Didion: “What is so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence.” And if you’re stuck, try starting every sentence with ‘I remember’, like in Joe Brainard’s experimental memoir, I Remember.

I’ve also recently discovered the GIRLS Substack by 24-year-old British writer Freya India, tackling somewhat taboo topics centring Gen Z women, from why not everyone needs therapy to why opening up about your mental health on social media isn’t always a good idea. Her recent piece on the possible correlation between antidepressants and asexuality looks at the problem with normalising every label under the sun without any permission to question it. 

I’ve been watching The Vince Staples Show on Netflix. A funny, clever parody of Staples’s semi-fictionalised life in Long Beach California, in which we see the rapper navigate daily hurdles, from attempting to get a business loan or taking a group of kids to a theme park, to spending a night in prison or surviving a bank robbery. Each short episode is coated in a layer of surrealism that nods to Atlanta, which allows it to tackle heavy themes such as race and violence with daring levity. That said, Staples may not want you to laugh so easily: in this 2022 interview with the Guardian, he called out white audience’s propensity for voyeurism: “I feel like a lot of the time we get this voyeurism: ‘Ah man, it must be so hard,’ or, ‘I can’t imagine growing up where you grew up, experiencing what you did.’ People look at us like we’re entertainment and not people. That’s how we look at rap music. That’s how we look at Black people.”

Which is exactly the kind of white liberal discomfort Cord Jefferson plays with in his excellent, Oscar-nominated film American Fiction, in cinemas now, which I reviewed on my podcast here.

Also, for lovers of Book Smart and Theatre Camp, watch Bottoms on Amazon Prime, a wonderfully silly film about two ostracised lesbians who start a fight club to sleep with the school’s hottest cheerleaders. (And try to forget that its co-writer and star Rachel Sennott was in HBO crime The Idol).

I’ve been listening to the gorgeously modern disco/RnB/soul of Fabiana Palladino, daughter of legendary session bassist Pino (D’Angelo, The Who). A must-listen for fans of Jai Paul (she’s signed to The Paul Institute and collaborated with him on I Care) – try her new song Stay With Me Through the Night.

I can’t stop thinking about the soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest. I went to watch it in a tiny cinema in Chipping Norton on Sunday night, and made the mistake of buying popcorn. You could hear a pin drop in much of this horrifying look at Nazi complicity, in which the suburban housewife of a Nazi commander lives in total serenity, despite sharing her garden wall with Auschwitz. As she bustles about her perfect, peaceful garden, she can clearly hear the unrelenting sound of muffled horror: screams, dogs, gunshots. In one grim scene, she tends lovingly to her flowers as the chimneys funnel black smoke into the sky. I recommend reading an interview with the Oscar-nominated sound designer Johnnie Burn, who compiled a 600-word research document and travelled across the world to recreate the specific sounds from the camp.

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