James' World 2

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In 1939, Herman J. Mankiewicz was a forty-two-year-old screenwriter, acclaimed in Hollywood not only for the lines of dialogue he wrote for movies but for the ones he delivered in life. In nearly a decade and a half in the business, he’d found success at Paramount working with Josef von Sternberg and with his friends the Marx Brothers, and at M-G-M writing on “Dinner at Eight” and, briefly, “The Wizard of Oz,” where he had the idea of filming Kansas in bleak black-and-white and Oz in Technicolor. But he was best known as one of the great personalities in the film business. He’d migrated to Hollywood from New York City, where he’d been The New Yorker’s first theatre critic and a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, and he carried that group’s spirit of cynical candor and acerbic bravado to the movie community. In commissaries and at cocktail parties, he was known for his learned insights and his unpredictable politics (he wrote, at great risk, an anti-Hitler script in 1933, yet he was opposed to American involvement in the Second World War, and even called himself an “ultra-Lindbergh”) as well as for the style with which he delivered them. He was also habitually drunk and wildly impolitic, known for the scenes that he made and the insults that he flung. His work habits were notoriously dubious: a compulsive gambler, he spent ample studio time placing bets and listening to horse races; a social whirlwind, he talked the day away in person and by phone. He lampooned and defied his bosses, and got fired from every job he didn’t quit. By the summer of 1939, he was unemployed, which is how he found himself desperately available when a twenty-four-year-old newcomer to Hollywood by the name of Orson Welles offered him a job.

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Whereas Herman Mankiewicz (right) was a Hollywood insider, Orson Welles was despised by the movie industry in advance.Photograph from Everett

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DespiteDespite being an Oscar winner, the costar of an iconic J.Lo video, and also Batman, Ben Affleck is arguably most famous for his frequent displays of facial anguish. Not since Michael Jordan—who produced The Last Dance so people would stop posting memes of him crying (my story and I’m sticking to it)—has a celebrity with a thriving career become so thoroughly identified with their own emotional distress. Affleck’s various real-life winces, grimaces, and thousand-yard stares have become as familiar to us as his on-screen exploits thanks to paparazzi photographers; his on-screen performances have been eclipsed by the moments in which his real human feelings are impossible to disguise. He is equally recognizable for acting and doing the literal opposite of acting.

Since his messy and public divorce from Jennifer Garner, Affleck has been something of a tabloid Prometheus, seeming to exist in a state of constant psychic torment as penance for his sins. Naomi Fry wrote about his well-chronicled sadness for The New Yorker nearly three years ago, and the phenomenon has not abated. Last year, he was photographed smoking a cigarette while “wearing” a protective face covering across his nose, like the Lone Ranger taking a 15-minute cowboy-union-mandated break. You can almost hear him calling out to anyone present: “I’ll be back in a second. I’m going outside to rip a butt real quick.” With actual sincere apologies to Pete Davidson’s bleary, heartbroken eyes and Jon Hamm’s linen-pants-clad penis, Ben Affleck is the reigning king of male discomfort captured without the subject’s consent.

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Ringer illustration

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