Jennifer Lopez dissed it, Jennifer Garner said, “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart,’†but it seems that Ben Affleck’s giant back tattoo of a phoenix isn’t real after all. In an interview with Mario Lopez, Affleck confirmed that the tattoo is “fake for a movie†— presumably Live by Night, as he was spotted with the phoenix on the set of that film, though he did not specify. “I actually do have a number of tattoos,†Affleck added. “But I try to have them in places where you don’t have to do a lot of cover up … they get sort of addictive, tattoos, after a while.â€
Then again, what does it mean for something to be real? Ben Affleck’s back tattoo brought America together, like the myth of upward mobility, or the idea that a walk button at a stoplight does something. The ink may wash away, but the promise of the silliest ever mid-life crisis remains; the phoenix of collective perception rises from the ashes of empirical fact, cawing “this still looks stupid, even for a character in a movie†into the night.