Air (Ben Affleck, 2023) (Patreon)

Let's get this out of the way first. Ben Affleck is a good director. While The Town and Gone Baby Gone weren't perfect, they built on Affleck's firm understanding of Boston life and class politics, making those simmering tensions accessible without dumbing them down. And for what it is, Air is a well-directed film. It focuses its attention of Nike as a workplace and as a set of ideals that Phil Knight (Affleck) doesn't always know quite how to achieve. Set just before and during the invention and rollout of the Air Jordan shoe, Air captures the perennial pull between continued innovation and staying the course to keep shareholders happy.

What's galling about Air is the fact that it banks its entire aesthetic program on nostalgia. Hey! Remember the Rubik's Cube? What about Jazzercise? Look at how well we spent our budget to reconstruct an old-style 7-Eleven! How about a montage of pop-culture signposts to kick off every calendar year depicted in the film? Oh wow, those clunky old green-screen computers look like they're actually powered up. Oh, and music! Remember "Money For Nothing"? What about "Sister Christian"? But hey, it's not all Top 40. Here's a Violent Femmes song! Oh fuck it, here's another one. (I've never watched a film that so absolutely addressed me and my demographic as an old man on a couch, sopping up the memories of my youth.)

To put it another way, Air is about corporate culture as pop culture, a set of signfiers that orient us in a time and place (Reaganite America) and insist upon their primacy. There is nothing outside capitalism. No values, no forms of expression, no new ideas. And this is how you get a biopic about a commodity, a high-ticket shoe. The decision to cloak Michael Jordan (Damian Young) in shadow only emphasizes this worldview, since true greatness cannot be seen or known. Only the business dealings around it, its cash value, can be understood. The actual creation of the shoe, and its designer (Matthew Maher), were relegated to the basement of the building, and the film. (Interested in industrial design? Download a Harun Farocki film.)

Also, apparently the athletic business is color-blind. Even Adidas' Nazi past is just a mordant punchline, certainly nothing to concern ourselves with now. C'mon. Buy the shoe. Everything's fine.