Hollywood’s bait-and-switch inclusion myth
The story behind Nike’s Air Jordan brand could have shown how Michael Jordan’s basketball prowess became part of the culture, but the movie Air is about how Jordan’s legend became immortalized in a pair of sneakers that inspired consumerist envy.
It’s fitting that Jordan never appears in Air except when seen in vintage video clips, because the exploitation of his individual phenomenon and its transformation into a product is the film’s real subject — played on Hollywood’s court by Matt Damon as Nike salesman Sonny Vaccaro and Ben Affleck as Nike co-founder Phil Knight.
This bait-and-switch is the newest version of what used to be derided as a “white savior” movie, in which a white moral paragon delivers an “underserved” non-white person into the light of hope and civilization. But white liberalism is no longer what it used to be — reduced to guilt and self-congratulation after Obama and further reduced, after George Floyd, to self-flagellation.
Guilt’s always the sticky part for Hollywood liberals because it stems from narcissism. The egoistic part of Air shows in Damon and Affleck taking on the white-savior roles — the first big-screen reunion of Harvey Weinstein’s Good Will Hunting Bobbsey twins. The fictional Bobbsey twins were known for sharing the same opinions, and Air’s narrative of Vaccaro and Knight working together to license Jordan’s renown in exchange for corporate deification is a Millennial twist on how Good Will Hunting endorsed Howard Zinn’s socialist textbook A People’s History of the United States.
In Air, this indoctrination comes from Alex Convery’s screenplay, blatantly copying the business-origin formula of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and Moneyball. It is a peculiar mixture of admiration and cupidity, sincerity and deviousness, replete with smart-ass dialogue.
Air’s conceit centers on Deloris Jordan, Michael Jordan’s mother as performed by Viola Davis. Being the film’s third (relief) player, Davis delivers a choice chunk of Sorkinism: “Every once in a while someone comes along that’s so extraordinary that it forces change because they are so very special.”
Mother Deloris echoes Obama worship, but she speaks with the foresight of a prophetess who sees future wealth pragmatically, envisioning her son as more than a commercial titan — as a corporate saint. Alfre Woodard originated this homey-yet-worldly mother figure in Blue Chips (1994). It is not a new cliché, but it’s hardened by Davis’s guilt-inducing BLM typecasting, featuring that flat-footed, no-nonsense walk that has become her second-most irritating tic after her trademark snot bubble. Davis outacts Damon and Affleck, and Deloris outmaneuvers their shambling, aw-shucks professionalism — a shameless vaudeville routine by Hollywood sharks.
In retrospect, Blue Chips is a more acceptable version of young athletes’ recruitment and rise; it preceded by only a few months the wretched, overrated documentary Hoop Dreams that instituted social-worker clichés about b-ball and black pathology. Director William Friedkin gave Blue Chips more rhythm and visual variety than director Affleck can muster. And Ron Shelton’s script for Blue Chips, especially as enacted by peak Nick Nolte as the cagey coach, made masculine endeavor in the sports world believable. Air’s milquetoast humility about its corporate-raider subject is post–“toxic masculinity,” unlike the complicated personality issues that Robert Towne explored in Without Limits (1998), about Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine and his coach Bill Bowerman, who designed a shoe for Prefontaine and then co-founded Nike with Knight.
But when, in Air, Vaccaro shills about “the power of a great partnership,” it triggers our awareness of Nike’s contemporary cultural politics. Using Jordan and his mother to consecrate corporate and cultural luck, the movie takes on the air of “massa speaks.”
Hustlers Affleck and Damon control a historical narrative that turns into a white-savior myth. They dominate this story, unlike Jordan’s shallow but affable presence in the very corporate Space Jam and even his extended cameo in Michael Jackson’s “Jam” music video — a cultural summit meeting. Air celebrates an endorsement deal as if it was liberation from slavery, although we now recognize Nike advertising for the ideological enslavement it is. Conservatives should not mistake Air for a celebration or definition of capitalism; it’s a foul.
