Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck Are the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of the 2020s
There’s something particularly painful about the news that — on the exact day of their wedding ceremony in Georgia in 2022 — Jennifer Lopez has filed for divorce from Ben Affleck. Up until now, we were intimately invited to be a part of their love story.
Lopez, as documented in Stephen Rodrick’s profile for this magazine, took the risk of her career with the album and feature film “This Is Me… Now.” The record is end-to-end love songs about a journey of discovery that led Lopez to forgive herself, and made her ready to accept Affleck’s love once again. (The pair had been together from 2002 to 2004, and even got engaged; reunited, they first wed in a Nevada chapel in July 2022, an event chronicled in Lopez’s song “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” followed by a private ceremony at Affleck’s Georgia compound the next month.) And the film, into which Lopez sunk $20 million of her own fortune, brings Lopez still further — she finds Affleck, making a cameo as her onscreen lover, in its final moments. The film came with a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary called “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” in which Lopez and Affleck discuss the inspiration behind her opus. In all, that’s three distinct creative projects dedicated to the love these two have shared.
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“This Is Me… Now,” in all three of its forms, was rejected by the public. Lopez’s tour in support of the album was rebranded to be a greatest-hits set — “Let’s Get Loud,” but let’s not get personal — before being scrapped entirely. That cancellation fueled the rumor mill that Lopez needed space to cope with developments in her marriage — and a steady drip of ominous news, from the pair’s physical separation to the sale of their shared home, seemed relentless.
In light of what came after, the whole “This Is Me… Now” endeavor has a certain doomed quality. One can sense, in the documentary, Affleck pushing himself to be supportive — he notably finds joy in looking over the equipment Lopez’s production is using. That’s a bright spot. But he offers an observation, speaking to the camera, that haunts the entire enterprise: He makes the obvious point there’s a certain irony in taking “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” a title he had given to the letters the pair sent back and forth as they were reconnecting, and then, well, telling it.
History has had a way of repeating with this duo. In their first go-round as a couple, during the glossy-tabloid cultural moment they had a hand in inventing, the showiness of their love — on red carpets, on the streets, on film — had a dazzle that ended up blinding even them. They were two young, glamorous celebrities with a certain taste for making the private public; their engagement was announced in a Diane Sawyer interview, and they canoodled in Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block” music video. (That video was shot to mimic paparazzi footage — in what was a savvy way of seizing the means of gossip-industry production, or a concession that invasive as it is, it can still feel really good to have your picture taken when you’re with the one you love.)
This was the era of the supercouple: “Bennifer” preceded, by a couple of years, both “Brangelina” and “TomKat” — pairings that came together in the wild summer of 2005. These couples were made of sterner stuff than Affleck and Lopez, and their use of the media felt more mercenary. One could sense, in Brad Pitt and Angelina’s W magazine photoshoot debuting their coupling or in Tom Cruise’s jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s couch to declare his love for Katie Holmes, a steely-eyed understanding that what was transpiring was good for the brand. (Pitt and Jolie, perceived as ultra-fab global humanitarians, tended to gain points as they flaunted their love; Cruise and Holmes, perceived as a madman and his captive, tended to lose. Either way, both of those couples are divorced now, too.)
Affleck and Lopez were and remain fairly gaudy figures who live out loud, and even their breakup played out like a soap opera, with a slow drip of news about real estate and art sales making clear what the former couple was withholding. And only months prior, “This Is Me… Now” film in particular, with its depiction of the Zodiac signs as gods in the heavens, focused solely on guiding Lopez toward self-love, is profoundly misjudged. It places Lopez’s personal life at the very literal center of the universe, as well as the center of her art. But there was something winsome and poignant about the couple, a quality that, say, Pitt and Jolie even at their peak lacked. Both Affleck and Lopez were willing to humiliate themselves for their love.
Affleck, who in the years since winning his second Oscar (for “Argo”) has completed two stays in rehab for alcohol addiction, has lately seemed like a person uneasy with his own fame. And yet he has been willing to place himself in settings in which he’s clearly uncomfortable. And Lopez — not five years removed from the absolute peak of her career, as her career-spanning 2020 Super Bowl set followed on the stilettoed heels of her onscreen triumph in “Hustlers” — effectively tanked her career in order to convey to the world just how much she loved her husband. For certain structural reasons pertaining to how our society treats women, the pair’s first breakup set Lopez’s career, in particular, back years. With rancor against her as vivid as it’s ever been, it’s wince-inducingly unclear how she’ll find her way back this time.
But don’t count her out, perhaps: Lopez, as a celebrity, is about as canny as they come, with a quality that sets her apart from her peers. Watching “This Is Me… Then,” one is struck by how completely devoid of irony it is — it’s a study in vicarious embarrassment in part because of how open Lopez allows herself to be, in service of a project that doesn’t work. She herself concedes that there’s no market desire for the project — her recent successes have been in film acting and live performance of catalog hits. “It’s not like anyone is clamoring for the next J.Lo record,” she tells the camera. But she couldn’t not do it, just as Affleck can’t not appear as her date at random awards shows he clearly doesn’t want to attend. They need to be together in public, but the publicity, in the end, is the reason why they cannot.
Their leveraging their relationship wasn’t image management (in that it’s now destroyed their respective images on two different occasions). It was simply the way they had to live. They weren’t peak Brangelina, either time they were together. In the magnitude of their love and in the welcoming of the media to turn their coupling into a throuple, they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — the superstars who married and divorced twice, bringing the world along for the ride as their work together intermingled with their complicated, painful, deep love. And now, like Liz and Dick, Bennifer belongs to another era, more earnest than our own.
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