Air, the new movie from Ben Affleck about Nike’s historic sneaker deal with Michael Jordan, is a film about corporate marketing, which is just about the unsexiest subject on the planet. So it’s a genuine feat that Affleck and company managed to make Air a fun time, thanks largely to a killer ’80s soundtrack and the sheer awesomeness of watching Viola Davis make Matt Damon quiver in his khakis.
Part of what makes Air so compelling is that it closely follows a sports movie template and borrows many of that genre’s go-to tropes, including the classic underdog story (Air will mercilessly hammer it into your head that in 1984, Nike was no match for its mightier and richer competitors, Converse and Adidas). But perhaps the most egregious sports movie trope it employs is the late-in-the-game Inspirational Speech: the kind that’s delivered with fiery intensity and accompanied by a swell of dramatic string instruments. In Air, Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro, a Nike exec, gets the distinct honor of delivering said Inspirational Speech at the film’s climactic moment—which, because this is a movie about marketing, takes place in a drab boardroom in Oregon.
It’s a banger of a corny sermon, but there’s some key context that adds a level of absurdity and hilarity that we must address—and it involves Martin Luther King Jr.
Earlier in the movie, Sonny is playing tug-of-war between what he wants to do—court Michael Jordan into a Nike deal by going around Jordan’s agent’s back and visiting his parents’ home in North Carolina—and what his bosses want him to do—not blow his entire marketing budget on one lanky rookie. So he flies to Los Angeles and seeks advice from his good friend George Raveling, the famed Olympic basketball coach, played here by Marlon Wayans.
Raveling convinces Sonny to follow his gut, and in doing so, he relays a story about how he’d once made the spontaneous decision to go to the March on Washington in D.C. While there, he saw King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and afterward, Raveling approached King and told him it was the greatest thing he’d ever seen. King thanked him and handed Raveling the original typewritten pages of the speech, and upon looking at it later, Raveling realized that almost the entire second half of the speech was improvised. The takeaway, he tells Sonny, is that King knew he was losing the crowd’s interest, so he went off-script and it ended up being a historic moment that we still talk about today. (If you’re wondering, yes, this actually happened to the real George Raveling.)
Cut to the aforementioned climactic boardroom scene, where Sonny and his Nike cohorts are desperately attempting to woo Jordan and his parents into signing a contract with them. Their pitch is going south and they’re starting to lose Michael’s interest, so what does Sonny do? He goes off-script. He launches into an all-time dramatic monologue about how Michael will one day be an American icon—one that we as a country will build up and then subsequently tear down, but one whose Nike Air Jordan shoe will become an immortal symbol of his iconography, because a shoe is just a shoe until Michael Jordan steps into it (cue the rapturous applause!).
It’s a hell of a speech; one that’s so rousing, you almost forget that not only is this a movie about goddamn marketing, but that you also already know exactly how this story ends. You’re rooting for Sonny and Nike to win Michael over, and reader, you’ll never believe this but they do exactly that.
And it’s all because Sonny decided to take a cue from MLK’s most famous speech about the civil rights movement.
Now, the parallel between Wayans’ earlier scene and Damon’s boardroom speech is not one that is overtly obvious. But when you do realize that’s what the movie has done, goddamn is it funny. Matt Damon taking a cue from MLK to win over Michael Jordan via the power of improvisation? It’s deliciously absurd! It’s Hollywood, baby!
And upon further reflection, it was a parallel that the filmmakers so clearly felt they had to make. Wayans’ scene with Damon is his only appearance in the entire movie, so Affleck obviously considered the MLK story to be vital, or else he would have cut that scene; Sonny flying to L.A. was otherwise unnecessary because nothing else happens there, and there’s already a scene of another of Sonny’s confidants, Chris Tucker’s Howard White, urging him to follow his gut.
The only reason to have that scene with Wayans, then, is to introduce the idea of inspiration through improvisation—which Sonny takes to heart by drawing upon it in the end to successfully win over Michael Jordan in an unprecedented marketing contract. Because he had a dream: that one day, we would all buy Nike Air Jordans of our own. God bless (Corporate) America.
