Nostalgia and Corporate Identity in Air

There is an early note that Nike had a relatively small percentage of the shoe market compared to Converse, which dominated, and Adidas, which was a not-close second-place. That the international market for basketball shoes could be split between three companies, whatever the relative gap between them, is not questioned or critiqued in the picture. (I’ll ask now: Why should anyone be comfortable with the market for basketball shoes being majority owned by three companies?) Nike begins an underdog; at the end, we’re supposed to clap when we learn that Nike bought Converse in the 1990s. Nike’s underdog story is, textually, limited to the fact that the basketball division is on their last legs; Nike as a whole is already a billion-dollar publicly-traded company by the film’s start.

The pathos draws on centering Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) as a schlubby also-ran on his last corporate legs working under Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) to revive the ailing basketball division. It highlights his relationship with U.S. Olympic basketball coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans), advertising Tony Roma’s restaurant chain in the scene and in no way hinting at later fissures in their relationship. Chris Tucker’s Howard White feels like a wizened version of the characters of the actor’s younger years with an affected accent—though age and writing give his performance more subtlety than Ruby Rhod or Detective James Carter, his charisma and exuberance remains; the folksiness makes Nike seem like a family company.

Perhaps unwittingly, Air helps perpetuate the lie as to what creates a capitalist success story, or rather underlines how big a role luck plays. Nike is successful because they signed Michael Jordan, but if any of the other companies signed Jordan, those companies would have been successful. Nike had a good pitch, and his mother (Viola Davis, superbly outperforming her own movie) forced royalties into the contract, but she would have made that stipulation with Converse or Adidas as well. The Air Jordan shoe—the Jordan brand—succeeded because Michael Jordan succeeded. 

This is of course noted in Vaccaro’s stirring climactic speech to cap the pitch meeting. There’s more interspersed documentary footage here, its most structurally wobbly use in the movie, but one which sells the drama of the moment: A flash-forward for the characters in-scene but a flashback for us, punctuating certain words in Damon’s monologue with iconic scenes of Jordan’s ‘90s domination (as well as the adversity of his father’s death and his flirtation with professional baseball). But the point is that, for all Vaccaro’s derring-do, professional basketball’s cultural prominence from the 1980s until today wasn’t because of Nike or any other shoe company–it happened because of basketball players and coaches, augmented by broader cultural and demographic changes in how sports as entertainment are consumed.

Air acknowledges this–again, we are supposed to clap when we learn Jordan makes $400,000,000 of “passive income” each year. This is reflective of the sort of magical thinking that sometimes overtakes any value to arguments about representation in media, government or business (which may be aspirational for children but are at best a placebo for adults): The reality that a few people of similar ascribed cultural background succeeding does not, in material ways, change reality for the majority of similar people because the majority of people across most ascriptive identities (racial, sexual, gender, religious, etc.) are workers. It ties into the idea core to the American social ethos that so many of us are not truly working class, much less poor or commoners, we’re just on our way to becoming rich. John Steinbeck wrote that each American of his generation believed themselves to be a “temporarily embarrassed capitalist,” which Ronald Wright paraphrased (or misquoted) as “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” While it is unlikely this is entirely ubiquitous, the myth of meritocracy didn’t evaporate with Steinbeck’s death in 1968. In seeing how great someone like Michael Jordan is and how well he has done, we can imagine that is possible for ourselves, even while simultaneously acknowledging the extraordinary nature of his talent and circumstances. Many of us frequently bristle at the idea that anyone’s ability to profit should be limited because of a belief that we’ll one day be the ones profiting, despite all evidence to the contrary. Air is about getting—or keeping—us on the side not just of Nike, but of capitalism as a system, circumventing or ignoring its exploitative nature.

Perhaps ironically, Jordan’s not really a character in the film–his face is never shown on screen and he’s often depicted in profile. While Knight briefly worries that he’s disrupted the market to the point of ruin, the audience also learns he and Nike have done quite well for themselves. (Obviously, or else how would Jordan have prospered?) This isn’t a story about success that threatens existing labor relations, but of a success which strengthens the existing system through a modest challenge to contract structures within the endorsement system of the sports entertainment industry. A reverence for exceptions that alter the markets under capitalism are necessary to stave off general reforms, to say nothing of stemming revolutionary potential. 

While Air highlights the work of many of the intellectual laborers and contract signers involved in its creation, it of course elides the people that assemble the shoes in factories in the Global South. It is a two-hour Nike commercial in the clothes of a triumphant feel-good story. It’s decently written and very well performed, but more than anything exemplifies corporate mass media’s insistence on folding in on itself.

Kevin Fox, Jr. is a freelance writer with an MA in history, who loves videogames, film, TV, and sports, and dreams of liberation. He can be on Twitter @kevinfoxjr and at kfjwrites.substack.com