(This review of “Air” extends my brief letterboxd writeup, in case some of you saw it there.)
My first pair of Air Jordans were these bad boys, pictured below. The year was 1989. I asked for these, I think, for birthday or Christmas. They were at least $100, which is something like $236 today.
Why my parents allowed this, I don’t know.
They are my only pair of Air Jordans ever, and my only pair of chic athletic shoes ever.
The new movie “Air,” helmed by Ben Affleck and starring he and his friend Matt Damon, is a worshipful work by people who believe these Air Jordans are a great art-object, worthy of critical awe.
A scene midway through the movie has the Damon character, a Nike rep named Sonny Vaccaro, request the greatest basketball shoes ever by Monday. The designer has no time therefore.
In one of those movie-reveal moments, the scene gets silent, the lights turn illuminatingly holy, and the onlookers stare at a creation we are led to believe that DaVinci and Michelangelo would admire. Their reaction is supposed to be our, the audience’s, reaction.
We are to be in awe of this product.
“Air,” therefore, is made by people believe this is a nearly unassailably awesome creation worthy of great attention 39 years later.
It is the latest in a recent string of Product Movies, aka movies that feature the origin or distribution-problem of a famous commercial product. Among those movies are Ford v. Ferrari, Tetris, Blackberry, Gucci, Christian Dior, Super Mario Brothers, Barbie, and any of the Steve Jobs movies.
There is a great aesthetic-philosophical problem with these movies. Because their intense focus is on a well-known commercial product that anyone can still buy or buy stock in today, they are inescapably advertisements and branding opportunities. The filmmaking threat is that, the brand attention itself, becomes their leading aspect.
The only movie I think escaped that vortex of commercialism is Ford v. Ferrari. (Something like The Social Network is so far from a product promotion that I don’t count it or those like it in this list.)
Looked at this way, Air is a strange and unfortunate commercial for Nike, a mega-corporation with decades of harsh accusations about its international business practices. The movie is undoubtedly aware of contemporary 2023 Nike, just as it plays up 1984 Nike as some kind of all-American heroic underdog, a corporation that the movie says loves rural blacks and negotiates with those who pursue this movie’s ultimate dream for corporations: which is revenue-sharing.
The result is a rhetorical and didactic mess for Air, intellectually delightful for an analyst like me because of its chaotic rhetorical messages about who Nike is and what it stands for. I am endlessly fascinated by the movie’s possibilities for critical analysis, as much as I notice that it’s a trainwreck of conflicting moralistic points-of-view.
For starters, the movie begins with song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, and it ends with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” The primary reason for including these is likely nostalgia, which the movie is awash in, 1980s pop-culture nostalgia specifically. All of the ‘80s hit songs, the oddball clothing, the cars and sunglasses — all of these create an atmosphere in which the 1984 Air Jordans can be designed, introduced, and worshipped.
(I do not use “worship” lightly. The movie uses religious-movie cues throughout, such as never show Michael Jordan’s character except from the backside. This technique was used to show but mask Jesus Christ in older religious films such as Ben-Hur. In all seriousness, signing Jordan to Nike in the movie is the salvific move that saves the company and creates the opportunity, still present, for revenue-sharing. The use of the word “icon” and “iconic” around sports shoes is rather telling.)
If you listen to Springsteen’s song, it’s about the horrible cultural aftermath of Vietnam. This is what I mean by rhetorical chaos: as the movie plays that song with its downbeat messages, it shows on screen who at Nike succeeded and how much they have given to charity. Just as Bruce sings “I’m ten years burnin’ down the road / Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go,” the movie blithely shows you that Nike CEO Phil Knight has donated over $2 billion dollars to charity.
It’s an extra-bizarre choice when you think about that song’s associations with Vietnam, and the accusations of how Nike has treated Southeast Asians.
Either the people working on the movie were being subversive or stupid about this song choice, I can’t tell which.
Similarly, “Money for Nothing” appears to be critical of MTV’s commercialization of music. That would be like this movie’s commercialization of a shoe via movie-art, except this movie isn’t asking you to think about those philosophical conflicts.
That is about how it goes throughout Air, a movie with a great basic business example of risktaking, coupled with celebrating the tentacled envelopment of corporate America around anything it can grab, including rural black North Carolina, home of the Jordans.
The movie does play up Michael Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, as a heroine, a savvy business negotiator who gets the movie’s featured speech about how corporations should allow revenue-sharing. I take this to be an oblique reference to Damon and Affleck’s newer production company, Artists’ Equity, whose mission is precisely the movie’s moral message: creators should be paid profits by corporations employing them.
And yet no one could escape the easiest viewing of all: Air says Nike is a great company, so buy its stuff. It uses 1984 Nike as a proxy for the identity and brand of Nike the brand, which no viewer can separate from today’s mega-corporation. The greatness is all one. As the movie says, the man becomes the shoe. Jordan is Nike is the shoe. They are all beautiful.
Don’t get me wrong: I see a fine management movie in here, a more entertaining business example than most motivational business books could muster. Vaccaro takes a risk to sign Jordan; it pays back 10,000 fold. That’s basic entrepreneurial spirit.
(Shame on the movie, though, for equating Vaccaro’s gambling in Vegas with his risktaking on signing Jordan. Gambling is not entrepreneurship, although the movie conflates the two. It’s as if betting on the Lakers to win a third-quarter spread is the same as putting money in a calculatable business venture. Here’s yet another contemporary example of the rather stupid promotion of gambling as “investing.”)
The context for the entrepreneurial spirit the movie depicts, though, is that Vaccaro works for a mega-corporation that already owned 17% of the market share in shoes in 1984, and today is #1 in sports apparel in the world.
The movie’s trick — and this is deceptive through and through — is to claim that Nike is an underdog, like Jordan in the 1984 draft, who cares about little people such as Jordan’s rural black parents.
We’re a long way from the class-based concerns of mid-20th century drama: directors Visconti, Kazan, Capra, and so on. For them, Nike would’ve been an enemy to warn people about. That concern is shared by socialists, paleoconservatives, and anarchists: don’t trust the mega international corporation.
Certainly the moviemakers of Air believe Nike are the good guys. The movie tries to tie the heart of Capra to a mega-corporation.
Next thing you know, we’ll be getting a movie about the banker Potter as a great guy!
For me, filmmakers need to return to last century’s humanism to get past the commercialist focus of their films. By “humanism,” I just mean treating people, the characters in the movies, as complex beings who are irreducible and not just one thing. They should not be just types, servants of a corporation, or mouthpieces for one idea, as they are in Air.
The star of Air, in the end, is a shoe, an ugly expensive shoe that grown men still think is a fantastic cultural product, as testified to by this film.
I cannot worship at Air’s altar, and I’ll never pay the tithe it asks: $200 to Nike and a couple of shoes in return.
Sorry, I will never try to be like Mike.