Bennifer 2.0: How Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got us talking again
Looking at pictures of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck draped over each other on a yacht it's almost like we can squint and pretend we're back in the heady days of 2002.
One of the (now multiple) images to be published in recent days shows the pair replicating steamy scenes from the music video for Jenny from the Block, in which Lopez has her bottom affectionately caressed by her then-fiancé - and now reunited partner.
The pictures, first posted on celebrity news website TMZ last week, quickly flooded social media with a dose of nostalgia and intrigue as people scrambled to check their calendars.
But eagle-eyed viewers also spotted an on-board photographer capturing the moment the couple canoodled on the deck of their yacht.
Tabloid 'dream pairing'
The fascination with Bennifer 2.0 reflects the special place the couple occupied when they first dated, says Ed Gleave, TV editor at Daily Star Sunday.
They got together in 2002, at the height of tabloid media, when the print press still held sway over celebrity culture. For long lens photographers and gossip columnists, they were the "dream pairing" of noughties celebrity power couples.
Both were riding waves of success that sustained media interest. Lopez, fresh from the success of her first number one album, J Lo, was sustaining a parallel career in Hollywood - starring in romcoms Maid in Manhattan and The Wedding Planner, as well as the crime thriller Out Of Sight and horror flick The Cell.
Affleck, the youngest screenwriter ever to win an Oscar - for Good Will Hunting at the age of 25 - was equally in-demand, after starring in Shakespeare in Love and Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. In December 2002, he was also named People Magazine's "Sexiest man alive".
"It's rare you get a celeb couple where both of them are A-listers, so when it happens, fans go wild for it," says Gleave.
"They were both at the top of their game and both sexy, so plenty of people cared about their private lives and plenty of people wanted to look at photos of them."
For two years they crafted their image - playing on the voyeuristic media tryst they'd helped create for the Jenny from the Block music video.
After Affleck proposed with a custom-made pink diamond ring in November 2002, the photos kept coming - including the paparazzi scene the couple re-staged last week.
But the intensity of the spotlight, as well as the punishing reception for their sub-par rom-com Gigli, eventually took its toll.
They postponed their wedding in September 2003 due to "excessive media attention", and separated the following January.
"We didn't try to have a public relationship, we just happened to be together at the birth of the tabloids" Lopez told Jess Cagle in 2018.
"We may have played into that in the beginning because it was fun… but then it was destroying us.
"It was a lot of pressure… [a] different time…".
For freelance entertainment journalist Myra Ali, the default celebrity narrative between press and public at the time was to "build people up and watch them fall to pieces".
The words "be kind" certainly didn't register.
