This Month's Impossible Embrace: Ben Affleck

Would it be possible for him to leave us alone? For just a minute, maybe?

How can we miss him if he won’t go away?

Have you ever been…handsy? Not Harvey Weinstein handsy. More like Will Smith, believer-in-the-transformative-powers-of-violence, handsy?

Here’s a humblebrag: On occasion and with the proper triggers pulled, this kind of handsy, has been me. I know…surprising. But to paraphrase Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, there are rules. You just can’t go off slapping the crap out of anyone you feel like. No, there’s a proper order and sequence of events.

Flashback to outside a club called The On Broadway in San Francisco. While I’m not especially proud of scuffling with a guy who looked eerily like Barney Rubble, I am glad to have earned a W against a guy who looked eerily like Barney Rubble. Especially as the alternative is…unthinkable. And also doesn’t come close to helping me make my point at all.

In any case, Rubble had come to a hardcore show looking for a friend. Not a real friend, like Fred (Flintstone, if you were curious), but a generic friend. On a night that this Detroit native who looked like Rubble had felt like, after a few drinks, that he needed a gentle face and a willing ear, this is where he had come.

It was cute. At first. And I’ve always been game for a happy line of patter. This one about Detroit’s Purple Gang, a notorious gang of Jewish gangsters from the 1920s. Rubble had wound up his exegesis on the gang and the conversation had wound down to what felt like its totally natural stopping point.

“So you better watch out!” He jabbed the air with his Stone Age finger and I laughed. “The Purple Gang will get you.” He should have stopped here. At the very point most would recognize as “while you were ahead.”

[T]he chronic oversharer, the refuser of repeated requests to be left alone, the consumer of all of the media oxygen in the room…

But he kept going. I tried to walk to his right. He blocked me. With both blather and his body. To his left, the same deal. So for the first time, I looked at him. I mean really looked at him. That Naked Lunch moment where you correctly and without illusion grok what’s on the end of your fork.

“I need you to move,” I said. And then: “Out of my life.”

And in that moment I could see that drink and confusion had heaped upon him an inevitable date with, if not destiny (though I suspect he would spend the rest of his life doing stuff exactly like this), then most certainly cement. As in, very precisely, what we were standing on. He snorted.

So it was a quick one-two, a jab and a right cross, and faster than yabba dabba doo, dude was pavemented and then pulled to the side, to rest against a parked car, by some hardcore angel of mercy. He had come to a hardcore show looking for a kind of love and I guess he found it.

But this is not about Rubble. This is about Affleck.

Not the Major Sexual Harasser Affleck, name of Casey. No. This is about Ben Affleck, the Lesser Sexual Harasser, the chronic oversharer, the refuser of repeated requests to be left alone, the consumer of all of the media oxygen in the room, and finally the guy who in general you kind of like until suddenly you don’t any more and you find yourself face to face with a problem for which the solutions are…limited.

I’m not saying Ben Affleck needs to be knocked out. I am saying that if he were knocked out, maybe for the briefest of interludes, those of us who are interested in thinking about something else…anything else…probably could.

And I’m not writing this because I’m trying to force some sort of confrontation with Affleck, though if it happens, it happens. No, I’m writing it because everywhere I’ve turned this week the algorithm has forced me to consider…Affleck.

The ring he bought. The first engagement. The break up. His ex-wife. His drinking. His gambling. The second engagement. The ring. Gigli, for g-d’sake. This while still living on Planet Earth, where real people are, living very real lives, and lots of other stuff is happening.

Yet Affleck mirthlessly soldiers on, telling stories about Purple Gangs, that we’ve long grown weary of. Now I can’t say it’s totally his fault. There was a point where President Bill Clinton invited him to Camp David to watch Good Will Hunting.

Do you have any idea the kind of stones you’d have to have before you thought, “hey, here’s a GREAT idea: let’s get the President of the United States of America to watch me act like a Southie for over two hours! FUCK the rest of the WORLD!” And then sit there and watch it with him?!?!

Him grimly humping the floor of fame forever and ever. Until we’re all dead. He’s the thespian version of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. He is creeping death. He is Batman.

So he has been enabled. But that’s no excuse in the end or, if it is, he’s got to carry the water for it anyway since the choices for him are simple — shut up or keep talking —and he rarely shuts up.

Which is fine. If you’re Cicero. Or Buckminster Fuller. Or, here’s a blast from the past of people I’d rather hear from than Affleck: Charo.

But the joyless, pain-faced attention whore that Affleck has become (has he always been this way?), the frozen smile straining through yet another interview he never had to do in the first place, is not almost too much to bear. It IS too much to bear.

Him grimly humping the floor of fame forever and ever. Until we’re all dead. He’s the thespian version of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. He is creeping death. He is Batman.

But I mean Jesus…at least Adam West had a sense of humor.

Now I’m sure some will say, the same sort of rebop you always hear when you try to explain why you laid out Barney Rubble: he was a nice guy. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. His father drank. His mother had a gold nipple.

All true I’m sure. But those are reasons. Not excuses.

So here I am, in the middle of April 2022, after 25 years of Mr. Ben Affleck, making the most modest of requests to Mr. Ben Affleck.

I need you to move…out of my life. I guarantee you, it’ll make us both a lot happier.