The Heel Heat of Ben Affleck
+ Deep Water is the Ma of erotic thrillers
My friend Andy, a professional wrestling fanatic, recently taught me about the concept of “heat. “ One of the pleasures of watching wrestling is in the villains (also known as “heels”). A good heel is said to have “heel heat” — they emit an energy that it is palpably enjoyable to hate. The audience will pay to see them so that they can boo them. But the opposite of heel heat is “go-away heat”: a villain has go-away heat when you simply cannot bear to see that fuckin’ guy any more. You don’t even want to root against them, you just want to never, ever see their face again.
Gwyneth Paltrow has heel heat. Jared Leto has go-away heat. Tyra Banks saying "get the f** off the TV, I’m not watching that" is a reaction to go-away heat. "Blank Space" Taylor Swift has heel heat, but "Look What You Made Me Do" Taylor has go-away heat. Ralphie Cifaretto: heel, Richie Aprille: go-away.
Adrian Lyne's latest feature is a litmus test of an individual's opinion of Ben Affleck’s heat. Deep Water, which is based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, was meant to be released in November 2020 before being bounced around and then shunted to online-only release this spring.
Both critics and audiences will tell you that Deep Water is bad. It's sitting at 37% at Rotten Tomatoes, and while I know this is not how RT scores technically work, I believe they should be an indicator of what percentage of the movie is good. And I think it's fair to say that more than 37% of Deep Water is good, because Ben Affleck is definitely on screen for more than 37% of the runtime. Affleck delivers an absolutely miserable performance, simmering with resentment and silver-spoon greed. He slinks from scene to scene, glaring at his wife and petting his snails, keeping his jaw firmly clenched as he finds new ways to make everyone unhappy.
Affleck has been a tabloid heel for a while—the back tattoo, the Weinstein connections, the Justice League/Joss Whedon stuff. None of this a) matters or b) should have anything to do with his art, but Affleck has consistently leaned into his public messiness in his acting choices. He did this most notably in 2014's Gone Girl, but again in The Way Back (2020), where he delivers a surprisingly fantastic performance in an otherwise paint-by-numbers melodrama. Unlike his frequent collaborator Matt Damon, who has made bland acting choices into a somehow still offensive art form, Affleck loves to play a publicly downtrodden man, one who seems worn out from life without anyone but himself to blame.
Deep Water is just the latest iteration of Affleck expressing his heeldom. As Vic Van Allen (yes this is the character’s real name) he is a young retiree, having made a fortune inventing combat drone technology, with a gorgeous and visibly much younger wife played by Ana de Armas. Vic allows his wife, Melinda, to have lovers but he privately fumes about and plots against them as he tends to his pet snails — the only thing he seems to care for. Vic and Melinda’s relationship is not merely open: it is public. Everyone seems eager to share with Vic their thoughts on how Melinda flaunts her boyfriends, and rather than tell people to mind their business, he responds. Their marriage is an email chain that everyone keeps replying-all to.
The real-life Ana de Armas/Affleck relationship of 2021 never inspired go-away heat in me, as ridiculous as it was. Affleck's ability to grease the publicity machine remains untouched. Who else could seamlessly transition into a public redemption arc the way he has with J.Lo? But Affleck is never going to come out and admit any artifice in his antics, the way Julia Fox did, and say, Yeah, these are strange times and I want to give people something to talk about. The Dunkin' Donuts, the exaggerated laughing, the cut-out — it's all self-referential ephemera in a career built on clinical self-awareness.
Where you stand on Deep Water is probably a reflection on whether you think Affleck’s persona emits go-away or heel heat. Frankly, I find Affleck a deeply compelling actor, even in lesser movies. I think he's one of the few solid performances in last year’s The Last Duel, a movie completely reliant on the audience's heel heat for the characters played by him and Adam Driver.
The real problem with Deep Water is the lack of heat from the underwritten and inconsistent Melinda, played by de Armas. Vic is so clearly the center of the movie and Melinda only exists in reaction to him. Had the movie committed to making Melinda as perverse as her husband, we might've ended up with something closer to the all-time great movie relationship of Alma and Reynolds in Phantom Thread. Instead, she drifts aimlessly into choices the movie needs her to make for the plot to advance, neither victim nor instigator.
Deep Water is not sexy or romantic. It's the Ma of erotic thrillers, a stunt queen of a movie that is obsessed with itself and its genre, despite never fully engaging with either. Without the specter of the de Armas/Affleck spectacle, it probably wouldn't have made it onto the relatively prime real estate of the Hulu front page.
I still don’t know if de Armas is a good actress — none of the movies I’ve seen her in (Knock Knock, Blade Runner 2049, Knives Out, No Time to Die) have asked much of her or given her anything in return. They’ve also all been bad but that’s not her fault. Too often, de Armas plays characters whose primary character trait is their desirability. De Armas’s next major project is the adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Marilyn Monroe novel, Blonde, and the hype for that seems truly stupid and absurd, but at least we’ll have the chance to see what de Armas can actually do as an actress.
I still think Deep Water is worth seeing if you like Affleck. In an era where celebrity is primarily shaped by choice of superhero franchises and banal talk show appearances, it’s nice to engage with an entirely different type of heel.
I am unfortunately a big believer in audience participation, so please reply to this email if you have thoughts about Ben Affleck (and I know you do). And if you don’t already subscribe to Ann Friedman, who is generously supporting me both as a mentor and an editor, please check out her work!
"THE MA OF EROTIC THRILLERS" -- I'M