in 'the greatest love story never told' jennifer lopez & ben affleck are not ok
what jlo's documentary tells us about love and the price of fame
The Bennifer divorce watch started early in May when JLo attended the Met Gala <gasp> alone.
Since then, the world’s been watching. Did Ben really abandon their “marital home” for a rental while he films The Accountant 2?1 Amid the “strain,” would JLo attend Ben’s daughter’s high school graduation??? Are Ben and Jen actually still “friendly,” if they only see each other “every few days”?2
Most recently, TMZ broke the news that Bennifer put their $61 million dollar mansion on the market, and, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire — all signs point to Bennifer (Part 2) being over. Again.
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Bennifer (Part 1) began in 2001 when Jen and Ben met on the set of the film Gigli. I was in college and a devoted UsWeekly and People subscriber. Before social media, before Perez Hilton and TMZ, a bitch had to get a tabloid delivered to her apartment so she could pour over all the hot goss before turning on MTV to watch JLo’s new music video where Ben and his jawline showed up to RUB HER FAMOUS ASS ON A BOAT and we all collectively died.
The early aughts were, in many ways, a fucking mess. We terrorized Britney, we called Jessica Simpson fat,
and the pathway to fame was typically a sex tape. We were truly awful to women. The paparazzi would lie down on the sidewalks to shoot photos up Paris and Lindsay’s skirts and when the starlets got DUIs, the whole world cheered. It was awful. But there was a symbiosis between how the tabloids and PR teams worked together to promote an album or a movie and the storylines were a lot of fun to follow, Bennifer included. And it sorta felt like no one was getting hurt because the celebs signed up for this.
(Obviously, twenty years later it’s like, perhaps we shouldn’t have been driving pop stars to shave their heads in public or force Bennifer to call off their wedding three days before the event due to relentless scrutiny.)
Currently I’m working on a romcom that’s about fame and celebrity and the early aughts. I’ve been doing a lot of research — Jessica’s memoir, Britney’s memoir, Mel B’s memoir, this great collection of essays on the toxic media of the time3 — and as the current Bennifer rumors heated up, I got more interested in watching JLo’s documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told (Amazon Prime), which is part of a lineup of somewhat confusing content that Jen’s created about her rekindled romance with Ben.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that JLo’s plan was this:
write an album about their reunion called This is Me…Now to celebrate the twenty year anniversary of her album This is Me…Then
self finance a $20 million dollar movie mess called This is Me…Now: A Love Story that exists somewhere between a music video, a therapy session, and a low budget, green screen science fiction flick that includes metaphors like mechanical hearts kept alive by a factory of downtrodden women feeding the mechanical heart rose petals, an idea that feels ripped straight from an eighth grader’s poetry notebook
document the movie making process and release it as an accompanying behind the scenes film called The Greatest Love Story Never Told
Sadly, no one cared about watching This is Me…Now: A Love Story. I haven’t heard one single song from the album on the radio and then the supporting tour was canceled. Likewise, no one tuned in to The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which is honestly too bad because the documentary has a lot to say about the state of Bennifer and why celebrities act against their own interests in order to stay famous.
To say that Ben Affleck is deeply uncomfortable appearing in this documentary is an understatement.
JLo opens the film with a story about how This is Me…Now was created. See, the first Christmas that Ben and Jen were back together, he gave her a book with every single email and letter and correspondence that the two had shared for over twenty years. He called the homemade book, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. Sweet, right? But then Ms Jennifer Lopez brought that book TO A RECORDING STUDIO and gave it to ONE MILLION PEOPLE — A&R reps, music producers, lyricists — who read through all of Ben and Jen’s private love stuffs to write songs. And she didn’t even ask him if it was okay!
“It became our Bible and we left it there in the studio and people would thumb through it,” she says.
Ben’s reaction? Not too pleased, honestly.
“I did really find irony in the fact that it's ‘the greatest love story never told’ and if you're making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”
But JLo doesn’t just want to just make an album. This album, this reunion, it’s too special for business as usual. So JLo’s gonna write a script and make some sort of music video / movie mash up, an “abstract biography,” and really capitalize on the moment.
(Instantly it seems telling that this film project is not a collaboration with her award winning director husband.)
The writing’s on the wall about JLo’s movie project from the jump. Her husband’s uncomfortable, the studio that was set to produce it drops the deal, her bff is worried JLo shouldn’t reveal all this, and no one wants to make a special appearance in this film. Every celeb she asks says no. Jason Mamoa. Snoop. Ariana Grande. Derek Hough. Even Jane Fonda tells Jen,
“It feels too much like you're trying to prove something instead of just living it.”
And as JLo’s team shops the project around for the second time, the studios unanimously tell her, projects like this flop. No one wants them.4 But JLo’s got something to say about love, and she’s gonna say it, dammit. So she invests $20 million of her own American dollars to make her art.
(In voiceover Ben says making a movie with your own money is the biggest cardinal sin in Hollywood.)
Perhaps one of the bleakest things about The Greatest Love Story Never Told is Jen’s insistence that she’s making this film so people around the world can believe in love. But Ben and Jen’s love story remains uncomfortably opaque, even as the documentary showcases their “real” lives. Never in the ninety minute run time do Ben or Jen tell us what they like about each other or what they connect over. We don’t hear any sweet anecdotes, we hear nothing from the book of letters, or even see any family photos with them and their children.
What they do reveal is what seems to be fundamental and impossible differences between them.
Ben tells us,
“When we got back together I said, listen one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media. And then I realized that’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s like marrying a boat captain and saying I don’t like the water.”
JLo’s aware of his discomfort and tells us directly that he does not like being a “muse.”
“I don’t think he’s very comfortable with me doing this,” JLo says about putting their life on camera. “But he loves me, he knows I’m an artist, so he’s going to support me. He can’t stop me from making the music I made or writing the words that I wrote.”
Look, I’m all about female empowerment and artistic freedom, but for someone who’s insistent that the most important thing to her is love and being in love, ignoring Affleck’s very clear feelings seems shortsighted.
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Throughout the documentary, JLo reminds us that This is Me…Now: A Love Story is innovative, compelling content. She insists, this has never been done before! And then shows up for a scene in this dress—
—and the entire time I’m left wondering, why doesn’t any of this work? Why does the Bennifer reunion feel doomed and bleak rather than triumphant and exciting? Why can’t we reclaim those UsWeekly glory days with Ben and Jen riding around Los Angeles in a Bentley? But, truly, Jen seems more determined to make content around this relationship, and make this $20 million dollar film, rather than care for her actual relationship at all and both of them seem, well, sad.
Listen, there’s nothing I like less than feeling sorry for a man, especially one like Ben Affleck who you’d be hard pressed to convince me is not a narcissist, but when he says,
“There’s not enough followers or movies or records to still that wounded part of her. Ultimately that’s the work that you gotta do on your own.”
—you gotta wonder, was she listening?
What the hell is The Accountant 1? I follow movies and literally have no idea.
https://people.com/jennifer-lopez-ben-affleck-remain-friendly-see-each-other-every-few-days-amid-marital-strain-exclusive-8661477
I’m also currently rewatching The Hills — are we interested in a post on that???
I think this is because we have no way of mediating what we’re seeing. When JLo is on a billboard for a movie we understand we’re gonna see JLo as a character. When JLo is in a music video, we understand we’re seeing JLo as a recording artist. Her social posts give us JLo the celebrity. But what is This is Me Now…A Love Story? Is it fiction? Is it her life? What the fuck is an “abstract biography”??? It’s both too revealing and not revealing at all.
I have always been sort of perplexed by her total delusion—I’m not surprised she made this, but I have such deep secondhand embarrassment about the fact that she did
A++ to Ben’s therapist