We have no idea what the marketing budget is for Daredevil, but it must be huge. Probably not as big as the marketing budget for, say, Titanic, but close. The TV spots have been relentless. Its stars have been making the rounds of nearly every talk show in existence. Ebert and Roeper devoted an entire segment -- about twice the length of time they normally spend on any one title -- giving Daredevil a thorough tongue-bath...er, "expanded review." And the studio's publicists got Ben Affleck on the cover of two of the most pivotal magazines on the market: Entertainment Weekly, and Vanity Fair.

The EW coverage may not have been excessive. Perhaps the article only seemed twice the length of the average cover story because I have so little interest in seeing the movie, and had never even heard of the comic book until I started reading about the movie adaptation. However, I was reading the EW cover story in a movie theatre, waiting for Gangs of New York to start, and distractedly skipped an entire page of the article because the pages were stuck together with onion-ring grease...and I didn't even notice I'd missed anything.

The Vanity Fair cover, however, is something else entirely. There aren't some forty of those in a year, as with EW; there are only twelve, and one of them has now been given over to Ben Affleck. Well, and since they've already thrown one Colin Farrell's way, why not? Who's the May cover boy, James Van Der Beek?

Okay, fine. Ben Affleck is famous enough to be on the cover of Vanity Fair. Whether that is just or not is a separate issue. And it's not like it's the first time VF has given its cover to the star of a movie that went on to flop, or at least to be critically reviled. (And indeed, apart from the orgasmic reviews from Ebert and Roeper, Daredevil hasn't been racking up many raves.) And actually, I grudgingly have to confess that I was impressed by the cover profile; ten years from now, when Ben Affleck is looking back on this point in his life and marvelling that he ever even shared a pizza with Jennifer Lopez, much less pledged to marry her, this article will nicely represent this period, and what kind of man he was at age thirty.

(The rest of the issue, incidentally, is pretty boring -- so boring, in fact, that it makes you wonder whether Jennifer Lopez refused to sit for future VF covers unless everything else apart from her man's profile was so dull that it made his profile look scintillating by comparison. As always, I skipped over Dunne and Hitchens, because I hate them. I also skipped the stories on some horse-racing scandal; on rich people in Aspen; and the Miss World pageant. In fact, other than the Affleck profile, I skipped everything except James Wolcott's column on the silencing of opposition to the war in Iraq, and Nancy Jo Sales's story about paparazzi, which led to a funny -- probably unintentional -- contrast. In Wolcott's column, he lauds Sean Penn's trip to Iraq and subsequent letter about it to The Washington Post: "The letter was stilted and ingenuous in parts, but was written in a respectful tone and reflected a serious moral concern; it wasn't a fiery salvo from a Hollywood hothead. Penn's visit to Baghdad demonstrated a similar brooding modesty." Yeah, he's a Gandhi for our times. But then...whoops! Sales comments on Penn, too: "Sean Penn once reportedly fired a gun in the air as [paparazzo Phil] Ramey dangled from a helicopter over Penn's wedding to Madonna in 1985." Hee hee hee.)

The Affleck profile is interesting to me as a reluctant fan of his. Which is to say, I have liked very few of his movies. I think he often comes off in interviews as a pompous ass -- not unlike Alec Baldwin, about whom I have similarly mixed feelings. I think he is pretty smart -- probably smarter than most of the people who generally surround him, and certainly smarter than his fiancée -- but I don't think he's as smart as he thinks he is. Sometimes he seems like he's trying too hard to impress his fans with his wit and erudition; other times -- like in his appearance on The Daily Show last week -- he seems really relaxed and fun and naturally funny. So for me, the conundrum is that I like him, but I don't want to like him. It's like he's always saying or doing some embarrassing thing to make me hate him, and then redeeming himself by impersonating both halves of Martin Bashir's Michael Jackson interview. He's the kind of celebrity of whom I think if he were just a guy I knew, I would really like him a lot, but that the trappings of celebrity -- the access to the media; the attention paid to his every pronouncement; the scrutiny of his relationship with Lopez (hell, the very fact of his relationship with Lopez) -- make him act like an asshole sometimes.

Judging by the profile, I think Leslie Bennetts feels somewhat the same as I do about Affleck. In fact, the conundrum is expressed right there in the dek (though, admittedly, she probably didn't write it): "In private, Ben Affleck is so laid-back -- no hovering publicists, no entourage, no forbidden topics -- it's hard to believe that he's the $15 million star with the screenwriting Oscar, or that he's engaged to the flashiest beauty in America." See what I mean? "He's a cool guy, except for this other annoying shit."

The photos accompanying the article, by the way, definitely highlight the "asshole" side of the equation; the cover shot has him sitting on the ground, wrapping his left hand around his right fist and furrowing his brow and squinting in that now-familiar "Blue Steel" expression (last seen on the cover of People's "Sexiest Man Alive" issue). Inside, he's sitting on the hood of a GTO; he's sitting on a motorcycle with his arms outstretched, and then making a moronic face with his mouth hanging open, and then with Lopez wrapped around him; he's standing in the desert in a swaybacked Jesus Christ pose, part of his belly exposed.

But in the article itself, he cuts back and forth between cool guy and asshole. Bennetts describes him thus: "Unfailingly good-humored and energetic, he's like a big, friendly dog that never stops wagging its tail." And generally, that's how he comes across, except when he's saying something stupid -- and generally, when he says something stupid, it's about Lopez. For instance, he has an idea why the media is obsessed with his relationship with Lopez: "I think it has to do with race and class, the fact that I'm white and she's Puerto Rican. That's what's underneath, although nobody says it, because it's not politically correct." Aw. See, that's cute in a way, because it's like Affleck never noticed that the media was already obsessed with Lopez well before he ever hooked up with her. Not for nothing was Lopez named Fametracker's "Famous Person of the Year" way back in 2000: it's because she employs a small army of publicists and makes fucking sure everything she does gets covered everywhere. Affleck adds, "There's a kind of language that's used about her -- the spicy Latina, the tempestuous diva. She's characterized as oversexed. I mean, the woman's had five boyfriends in her whole life! She's a deeply understood woman, in my opinion." Okay, but, the thing is, her being a diva and her being promiscuous are two different issues. She's the one who demanded to have flower petals in her toilet bowl or whatever the fuck; that is why she's painted as a diva -- because she is one! And it has nothing to do with how much sex she has. I would argue that she doesn't have a reputation as a bit of a ho -- Winona Ryder, for instance, is much better known for going through escorts like Kleenex, and it certainly isn't because she's a "spicy Latina" -- but if she does, perhaps showing up to various award shows with more than 70% of her flesh exposed has something to do with it.

At least Affleck admits that marrying Lopez is something that few men would want to attempt -- particularly not a man who projects a kind of low-maintenance, guy's guy image: "Why did I fall in love with this person? What does that say about me?" My theories as to the answer are that either he's gay (which he denies in the article, insisting that he's "never even had a gay, you know, thought" -- convincing!), was imminently going to be outed, and needed a beard, pronto; or, that he has deep, psychological problems -- possibly the same ones that led him to alcoholism -- and hates himself so much that he doesn't think he deserves a partner who isn't widely regarded as a horrible person. But he can't stop defending her: "Jennifer is a really wonderful, fabulous woman, smart and interesting. Spending time with her makes me a better person and a happier person. She impresses me every day. It feels better to me to be with her than without her. That's why I made this decision, even if some other things have to be sacrificed." Like, his testicles, freedom, and will to live? Affleck tried this same tack on The Daily Show, promising Jon Stewart that Lopez loves TDS and that they watched it every night. He's like that one friend everyone has, who's dating someone who sucks, and who knows that she sucks, so whenever she isn't around, tells his friends these stories about this sweet thing she did or funny thing she said, and all his friends are like, "That never happened, and you are pathetic, and dump her," but you can't say anything.

Anyway, there's also some stuff in the article that's not about Jennifer Lopez -- stuff about his career, where the asshole comes out again. We learn that he regards Changing Lanes as "basically an art movie." He says that, several years ago, when he declared on Inside the Actors Studio that he wanted to make big commercial movies, "That's an adolescent aspiration, in a way. I'd rather be in movies like Magnolia, which I think is a towering achievement." Oh, and he might run for Congress someday: "I think there's a real nobility to public service. It would be fun to run on a platform I really believed in, without any of the kind of compromises people make -- without being beholden to the win-at-all-costs mentality." I guess that means he wants to run for office in the nineteenth century? We also never find out what would constitute a "platform [he] really believe[s] in." The important thing is that it would be fun.

Ben Affleck is not a bad guy. But he has made some egregiously bad decisions, many of which are discussed at length in this story. This is why I hope that, ten years hence, when he's gotten his shit together and settled down with some nice girl (or boy) who isn't terrifyingly ambitious and relentlessly overexposed, he'll be able to read this little time capsule and see how far he's come.