MILLIONS OF AMERICANS along the eastern seaboard are hunkered down in fear, weathering the effects and aftermath of Hurricane Isabel. Millions more are rending their garments, collapsing in sustained crying jags, and cursing their Maker over the untimely demises of John Ritter, Johnny Cash, and the Women’s United Soccer Association. Still, amidst so much devastation, the fates have kindly given us a ray of hope, a candle in the darkness, a chocolate on our pillow. They have brought an end to the world’s single most annoying couple: Jen and Ben. It seems like more than a fair trade. For the last year, even casual television-watchers and newspaper-readers have been afflicted by Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, the PDA-committing beast with two backs and one very prodigious behind, that gossip wags simply shorthand as “Bennifer.” Apart, they were merely two over-hyped and overexposed mediocrities. Together, they resembled a blight, or even an unnatural disaster, two insatiable termites eating their way through the cultural rot of front-porch America.
Among other crimes against humanity, Bennifer has, in the parlance of Page Six, committed oodles of canoodles, and subjected us to constant public declarations of eternal devotion. In 2002, while J. Lo was still saddled with her back-up dancer/second husband Chris Judd, Affleck, seemed almost feverish to get in her knickers, taking out a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on Lopez, he extolled her “graciousness of spirit, beauty in courage, great empathy, astonishing talent, real poise and true grace.” By this point, Affleck, a self-admitted alcoholic, was supposed to have won his battle with the booze. He’d obviously suffered a relapse.
Shortly thereafter, J. Ho ditched Judd after less than a year of marriage. Bennifer made their couplehood official, then got down to the serious business of compounding their annoyingness. First, there was their bad music: Jen’s Ben-influenced “This is Me, Then” album. Since Jen was still in her she-thug phase, having recently emerged from a relationship with former Svengali P. Diddy, her first video was “Jenny from the Block.” The song was an amorality tale and declaration of principles in which Lopez seemed to be insisting, “Just because I’m a climber, a spoiled brat, and a materialistic bitch doesn’t mean that I’m not originally from the Bronx.”
Most of us, it was alleged, had been “fooled by the rocks that [she] got.” But Ben seemed to realize that she was “still Jenny, still Jenny from the block”–a simple gal with a simple heart, albeit, one with a very complex contract rider. It mandated that concert promoters provide her with everything from a “white room / white flowers / white tables / white drapes / white candles / white couches” to “room temperature Evian Water” to “Pear Guava” beverages to “apple pie a la mode.” But Ben and Jen aren’t ironists, they’re entertainers. So Ben appeared in her video as the Toolish Boyfriend, a believable performance in a career that hasn’t seen many.
The bad video, of course, was just an advertisement for the bad J. Lo CD that spawned it. Many of the Ben-inspired lyrics make for pretty affecting poetry–if you’re a second-grade girl. For instance, there’s this, from “I’m Glad”: I dig the way that you get down / And you still know how to hold me / Perfect blend, masculine / I think I’m in love, damn, finally. My personal favorite, however, is the imaginatively titled “Dear Ben”: I love you / You’re perfect / A manifestation of my dreams / You made my body feel / About a million different things. In a Diane Sawyer interview, Jen, after describing Ben as “brilliantly smart, loving, charming, and affectionate,” also said “I feel like he teaches me things.” One of the things he probably taught her was the word “manifestation.”
WHEN BENNIFER MET on common ground, in feature films, the results haven’t been much better. It’s not encouraging that their forthcoming “Jersey Girl” was directed by Ben’s frequent collaborator, Kevin Smith, who in interviews, sounds as smitten with Ben as Jen did: “The word on the street is that he’s the ideal man, chatty, gorgeous, generous, and intelligent,” Smith salivated to People. Then of course, there’s “Gigli,” the “Heaven’s Gate”-meets-“Ishtar” disaster film that the Los Angeles Times said was “nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.” The Rotten Tomatoes website went even further, deeming it the worst-reviewed movie of 2003. Critics lined up around the block to scoff at “Gigli,” responsible for the most laughable line since Patrick Swayze declared “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” in “Dirty Dancing.”
The scene in question perfectly encapsulates the Bennifer alliance: unsavory, base, and too much of a not-very-good thing. In it, J. Lo’s character seductively spreads her legs, informing Affleck’s character that “It’s turkey time. Gobble, gobble.” (“Just stop,” you want to tell her. “You had me at ‘gobble.'”)
All of their artistic excesses, however, pale next to their personal ones. As any tabloid reader knows, Bennifer tore through Gucci, Bentley, and mansion-buying sprees, spending money like two Lotto-winners on a crack bender. So excessive was their consumption, that at one point, gossip sheets were abuzz with Affleck’s plans to buy his princess a toilet seat adorned with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and pearls at a cost of $105,000. At first, I thought Affleck, who occasionally displays self-awareness and a sense of humor, was slyly signifying to the world, as if in a hostage video, that he knew he was engaged to a royal pain in the ass. But those hopes were dashed when the National Enquirer reported that Jenny from the Block would not be sitting on abrasion-causing Harry Winston diamonds, but rather, that “the stones are set inside the plastic, so Jennifer’s behind won’t get scratched.”
THE BENNIFER UNION was not without sacrifices. She claimed that she was willing to sacrifice her last name–at least on her driver’s license, if not in public. She also, according to Chris Judd’s father, sacrificed her second husband to hook up with People’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” For his part, Ben–once an overgrown frat boy–sacrificed his cigarettes, his Keg Chic casual-wear, and his dignity, appearing, throughout their relationship, to have become a henpecked nancy boy (At one point, he actually agreed to appear naked in ads for J. Lo’s line of cologne. Instead, he settled on becoming the new face of L’Oreal–a credential that would get him beat up in his old working-class Boston neighborhood).
Though Bennifer have promised/threatened to get married for nearly a year, there were all kinds of signs that the relationship was troubled. Foremost among them was Ben’s impromptu bachelor party at a strip club in Vancouver in July, an evening which the National Enquirer reported ended up with Ben “gobble, gobbling” one of the strippers. Team Bennifer, while admitting he was there, denied the charge, even though one of the strippers passed a polygraph test. Jen claimed it was no big deal, that the wedding was on.
Then, too, there were reports that Jen’s longtime Santeria advisor saw some bad juju coming down on September 14, the date they had marked for the wedding. US Weekly’s house astrologer concurred, saying there was a good chance their special day could end up in “total chaos,” though “the ceremony could be something they’ll laugh about someday.” She was partly right. It turns out it’s something we can all laugh about today.
If the leaked plans were any indication, this ceremony promised to be J. Lo’s best and most extravagant wedding ever (it featured a transparent dance floor built over a pool). Bennifer had already laid out something in the neighborhood of $1 million in deposits to pull off the $2 million-plus wedding. But according to reports, despite the momentum, Ben got cold feet, broke the news to Jen from his publicist’s office (strangely appropriate), and pulled the plug on both their nuptials and their relationship. Before going to dinner at the Ivy to pretend they were still together, Bennifer put out a joint statement, saying they were canceling the ceremony due to excessive media attention. All these two kids ever really wanted it seems, were quiet nights at home, where it would just be Jen, Ben, and a “Dateline” camera crew filming them acting domestic, like normal people.
ALL SORTS of conflicting stories are swirling around about the cause of the break-up. One version has Ben still infatuated with Britney Spears (with whom he was rumored to have carried on an affair behind Justin Timberlake’s back). Another, has Jen making Ben’s life impossible, unable to accept his cheating, even if it looked like she would require medical attention after getting bitten by her karma. The prevailing version seems to be that Ben had a heart-to-heart with his mom, who asked her son if he could see himself raising a family and spending the rest of his life with her. Lopez partisans could fairly argue that if this, her third marriage in six years, held to form, Ben wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life with her, only the next 10 to 13 months.
Post break-up, Bennifer have behaved much as they did pre-breakup–with an oily desperation that suggests they need the public to love them as much as they love themselves–a transaction that can never be fully realized. In mourning, they are as exhibitionistic as they were in the throes of giddy infatuation. She has been spotted changing into her bikini on a public beach in Miami, surrounded by the same photographers purportedly responsible for the wedding being called off. He has shown up in all-night poker sessions in Larry Flynt’s casino, when not squiring young lasses to Baja Fresh, kitted out in his old frat-boy threads. Jen-watchers are already speculating on whether she will end up back in P. Diddy’s arms (he reportedly called to console her, and they ended up speaking for four hours). Ben-watchers are laying wagers on whether he’ll reunite with his one true love, Matt Damon.
Then of course, there is a competing school of thought: that this whole break-up is part publicity stunt, part elaborate ruse–a sophisticated ploy to throw off the paparazzi so Bennifer can go ahead and have their wedding in peace, then sell the exclusive photo rights to offset costs that only they could incur, such as the $40,000 it took to charter a plane to fly in Jen’s wedding dress. Like a bad slasher movie, it’s a horrifying thought, that the Bennifer might not really be dead.
As I worried aloud to my editor, expressing concern that this piece could be overtaken by events, that Bennifer could be back together before they were ever truly apart, he shrugged it off. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If that’s true, they’ll want their reunification to be the center of attention, which can never happen while Isabel’s on the loose.” Pretty sound advice, it would seem. So while the rest of America prays to the weather gods, begging for mercy and a return to tranquility, I remain interested in avoiding a truly long-term disaster, and am left with no choice but to root for the hurricane.
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
