Particularly painful is the news that Jennifer Lopez has filed for divorce from Ben Affleck – exactly on the day of their wedding ceremony in Georgia in 2022. Until now, we were only invited to be part of their love story.
As documented in Stephen Rodrick’s profile for this magazine, Lopez took a career-long risk with the album and feature film “This Is Me… Now.” The album consists of love songs about a journey of discovery that led Lopez to forgive herself and made her ready to accept Affleck’s love again. (The couple dated from 2002 to 2004 and even got engaged; reunited, they first married in a Nevada chapel in July 2022, an event captured in Lopez’s song “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” followed by a private ceremony at Affleck’s Georgia estate the following month.) And the film, into which Lopez poured $20 million of her own fortune, takes Lopez even further — she finds Affleck, who makes a cameo appearance as her on-screen lover, in his final moments. The film was accompanied by a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary called “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” in which Lopez and Affleck discuss the inspiration behind their work. In total, there are three different creative projects dedicated to the love these two share.
“This Is Me… Now” was rejected by audiences in all three versions. Lopez’s tour in support of the album was renamed a greatest hits set — “Let’s Get Loud,” but let’s not get personal — before being canceled altogether. That cancellation fueled rumors that Lopez needed space to deal with developments in her marriage — and a steady stream of ominous news, from the couple’s physical separation to the sale of their shared home, seemed incessant.
Given what came after, the whole This Is Me… Now project has a certain portentous quality. In the documentary, you can sense Affleck forcing himself to be supportive—he especially takes pleasure in looking at the equipment Lopez’s production uses. That’s a silver lining. But he makes an observation to the camera that haunts the entire enterprise: He makes the obvious point that there’s a certain irony in writing “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” a title he’d given to the letters the couple sent back and forth as they reconnected, and then, well, telling that story.
History repeats itself over and over again with this duo. When they first appeared as a couple, during the glossy tabloid culture moment they helped create, the display of their love—on red carpets, on the street, on film—had a radiance that ended up blinding even themselves. They were two young, glamorous celebrities with a certain penchant for making the private public; their engagement was announced in an interview with Diane Sawyer, and they smooched in Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block” music video. (The video was shot to mimic paparazzi shots—a clever way of taking advantage of the gossip industry’s tools, or an admission, however invasive, it can still feel really good to be photographed with the person you love.)
This was the era of supercouples: “Bennifer” preceded “Brangelina” and “TomKat” by a few years—couples who got together in the wild summer of 2005. These couples were made of tougher stuff than Affleck and Lopez, and their media interactions seemed more mercenary. You could sense the way Brad Pitt and Angelina showed off their relationship for the first time at the W magazine photo shoot, or the way Tom Cruise jumped onto Oprah Winfrey’s couch to confess his love to Katie Holmes, that they knew with a steely gaze that what was going on was good for the brand. (Pitt and Jolie, perceived as ultra-awesome global humanitarians, tended to score points by flaunting their love; Cruise and Holmes, perceived as madmen and their captives, tended to lose. Be that as it may, both couples are now divorced, too.)
Affleck and Lopez were, and still are, pretty flamboyant personalities who live their lives loud and clear, and even their breakup played out like a soap opera, with news of real estate and art sales slowly trickling in and making clear what the former couple was hiding. And just months earlier, the film This Is Me… Now in particular was deeply misjudged for its portrayal of the zodiac signs as gods in the sky focused solely on guiding Lopez to self-love. It literally puts Lopez’s personal life at the center of the universe, and also at the center of her art. But there was something winning and poignant about the couple, a quality that, say, Pitt and Jolie lacked even at their peak. Both Affleck and Lopez were willing to humble themselves for their love.
Affleck, who has completed two stints in rehab for alcohol addiction in the years since winning his second Oscar (for “Argo”), has lately seemed like a person uncomfortable with his own fame. And yet he has been willing to put himself in situations that clearly make him uncomfortable. And Lopez — who is less than five years removed from the absolute peak of her career, as her career-spanning 2020 Super Bowl performance followed the stiletto heels of her big-screen triumph in “Hustlers” — effectively ruined her career to show the world how much she loved her husband. For certain structural reasons related to the way our society treats women, the couple’s first breakup set Lopez’s career back years in particular. With resentment against her as alive as ever, it’s scarily unclear how she’ll find her way back this time.
But still, don’t write her off: Lopez is as smart as a celebrity can be, and has one quality that sets her apart from her peers. Watching This Is Me… Then, it’s striking how completely irony-free the film is – it’s a study in vicarious embarrassment, in part because Lopez is so candid, in service of a project that’s not working. She herself acknowledges there’s no market interest in the project – her most recent successes have been as a film actress and live performances 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 show up as her date at random awards shows he clearly doesn’t want to attend. They have to be together in public, but the public is ultimately the reason they can’t.
Their exploitation of their relationship was not image management (in the sense that it has now destroyed their respective images on two separate occasions). It was simply the way they had to live. They were not Brangelina at their best, either when they were together or when they weren’t together. In the magnitude of their love and in the media’s willingness to turn their relationship into a threesome, they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – the superstars who married and divorced twice and took the world with them as their work together mixed with their complicated, painful, deep love. And now Bennifer, like Liz and Dick, belongs to another era, more serious than our own.
