This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
Yes, I obviously—and immediately—signed up for the bizarre Jennifer Lopez fansite newsletter she forced people to subscribe to in order to see a photo of her engagement ring from Ben Affleck.
The whole engagement news is so surreal. I’m only mostly—not all the way—embarrassed to admit that it’s exciting, too—so exciting that I willingly requested for more email to be sent to my inbox.
It was 20 years ago that the couple first got engaged and, depending on how you look at it, ushered in a singular moment of celebrity obsession or opened up the next circle of cultural hell.
It was a moment in time in which everyone lost their minds, in ways that, two decades later, we’re only just starting to heal from.
“Bennifer” wasn’t just a cute portmanteau memorializing the unlikely union of the world’s biggest famouses, at a time when reality TV was—critics feared—threatening the moral fiber of society and we needed our classic, glamorous famouses the most. “Bennifer” was our lifeboat. It was also our curse.
When “Bennifer” was being splashed across magazine covers and dominated 95 percent of an episode of Access Hollywood, we were a destabilized, confused post-9/11 society. Some of us were just coming of age, and some of us were having to come of age again in a world we didn’t recognize. We didn’t know what we wanted or needed from culture or entertainment anymore, but we at least knew how this worked.
The impossibly attractive major star who we took grotesque delight in objectifying and the chiseled-jaw actor representing the Everyman got together. They were ours to adulate. They were ours to dissect. They were ours to criticize, to photograph, to chase, to place our hopes and dreams on, and to make demands of. They were ours.
Now that Ben and Jen are back together, we reminisce about their romance. But we forget what we’ve learned over these last years—that the cravenness with which we seized their engagement for ourselves, stripping them of privacy and dignity, is what ruined things. “Bennifer” was the horrifying turning point of a vulture-like, rapacious hunt for celebrity scandal and the willful complicity in causing tragedy and trauma that would define much of these last 20 years, until a reckoning that has only been very recent.
So it’s been interesting to see the warm smile the engagement news has been met with. Not that I’m not happy for them. Congrats to these two Hot as Hell people whom I’ve never met. It’s that it’s bizarre to see it accompanied by a yearning for a return to those early-millennium, Y2K years—years that, nostalgia be damned, were rather terrible!
The return of the early aughts seems to be everywhere. Britney Spears is pregnant again. Lindsay Lohan is working with Vogue and being incredibly charming—and just signed a two-picture deal. A new Legally Blonde movie is coming. Sandra Bullock and J.Lo brought back the studio rom-com. Everyone is talking about Shrek. The cultural landscape is eerily familiar. And that’s not to mention the clothes. People are having fun with it!
I am, too. It can be a hoot to be reminded of the pop culture that was formative at a certain point in your past.
Tiffany “New York” Pollard, reality TV’s Molotov cocktail of looney genius, currently has a fabulous fashion spread in Interview magazine. A cherished moment in queerbaiting TV history—Jake Gyllenhaal performing a song from Dreamgirls while dressed in drag on SNL—was revisited as Gyllenhaal sang a Céline Dion ballad, a phrase I might have previously typed in the search bar of a porn site, on the sketch show last weekend.
And so much of this centers around redemption for mistreated public figures who fell victim to our misogyny, racism, or lack of empathy. Not just Bennifer, Britney or Lindsay. There’s finally #JusticeForJanet. Amanda Bynes’ conservatorship ended. Paris Hilton is being taken seriously.
These are obviously things to champion. But shouldn’t these comebacks actually underline how much those years were so very, truly not a good time?
It’s not just that I shudder at the thought of wide-leg jeans and frosted tips making a return to fashion. (We’ve been through enough these last months. Must we also weather that, too?) It’s that these comeback stories have been such a stark reminder of the cultural ugliness of 20 years ago.
Whatever you have to say about the bombshell news that Britney Spears is pregnant again months after her conservatorship ended—and the best thing to say about it, for the love of God, is absolutely nothing—the reaction to it is inextricable from the medium on which she chose to reveal it.
Spears’ Instagram has, at times, made people uncomfortable for its candor. But for all the unease over how unhinged her captions can be, they’ve been remarkable diaries about how the horrific way she was treated by a Hollywood system, a lecherous family, and a villainizing press continues to affect her and her life decisions. What’s struck me about the news in her personal life is how great of an opportunity this is not to revisit, but to restart.
I thought about this recently when the trailer for the new season of The Real World Homecoming, the series that reunites former casts of the MTV show to continue the conversations they started all those years ago, was released featuring the cast of The Real World: New Orleans.
Every millennial and member of Gen Z has *their* Real World season, the one that mattered the most to them and changed how they thought about TV and pop culture. New Orleans was that for me. I’ve never stopped thinking about Julie and Melissa. My first AOL IM screen name was woowoo1987, in honor of David’s signature catchphrase.
And then there was Danny.
I was in love with Danny without knowing that I was in love with Danny. It’s only looking back now as an adult that I realize just how absolutely, hopelessly infatuated with him I was. Danny was openly gay. He was lovely, kind, cute, and generous in talking about that with his housemates. Famously, his boyfriend, who was in the military, came to visit, and had to have his face blurred the entire time he was on screen because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
That has stayed with me, even though I didn’t always know why.
I obviously can’t wait to devour the Homecoming reunion and hear more about what that time was like and how he feels about it now. And even just now typing about my Dear Sweet Pretend Husband Danny—not to mention the show—I’m smiling ear to ear remembering what fun it was to watch it for the first time. While those are nice memories, I’d in no way want to return to that time or have to revisit what it felt like to feel so conflicted and tortured because of that era’s cultural mores and attitudes.
Maybe all of this Y2K nostalgia is because of a nationwide guilt complex, especially as we watch in horror while similar mistakes made out of moral panic, privilege, entitlement, and fear are beginning to happen again. We want to embrace the return of these cultural touchstones from 20 years ago because we can maybe do better this time.
But if I see one person in a puka shell necklace and popped-collar polo, that’s it.