Two years after Affleck denied its existence, his phoenix back tattoo returned to haunt the headlines, itself rising from the ashes of gossip rags past. Photograph by TID / BACKGRID

In March of 2016, Jennifer Garner had recently separated from her husband of ten years, the actor and director Ben Affleck, when she was asked by Vanity Fair to comment on what the magazine referred to as her ex’s “midlife-crisis tattoo”—a large, multicolored back piece of a phoenix rising from the ashes. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart,’ ” Garner said dryly, then added, “Am I the ashes in this scenario? . . . I refuse to be the ashes.” When he was approached about the tattoo that same month, Affleck insisted that it was temporary. “It’s fake, for a movie,” he told Mario Lopez, a host of the syndicated TV show “Extra.”

Affleck had been one of Hollywood’s marquee male celebrities for almost two decades. We’d seen him as the up-and-coming Boston Ben, who won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, in 1997, alongside his friend Matt Damon, for “Good Will Hunting”; as the slick, faux-Latin lover of the early-aughts era, with Jennifer Lopez as his fiancée; as the domesticated husband to Garner and the father to their three children; and as the shaggy-bearded Best Picture Academy Award winner, for “Argo,” in 2013. But in the wake of the split from Garner, a recalibration appeared to be taking place. Affleck was older, suddenly flailing; and his enormous, garish tattoo—whether real or not—was the least of it. It was rumored that he had been unfaithful during the marriage. (His camp denied this.) For a brief time, in a clichéd celebrity-breakup move, he dated his and Garner’s kids’ onetime nanny. In late 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, the actor was made to apologize for two separate instances in which he groped women on camera in the early aughts. He also publicly distanced himself from Harvey Weinstein—a major force behind his and Damon’s early success—though the actress and activist Rose McGowan suggested that, contrary to Affleck’s denials, he had known about Weinstein’s crimes and had protected him by remaining silent.

Since the split, Affleck has been photographed more than once by the paparazzi, looking despondent. The resulting pictures have become reliable meme-fodder. A series of images of Affleck vaping in his car, his eyes shut in seeming resignation, made the rounds; so did another picture, of the actor smoking a cigarette, his face a mask of exhaustion. One prankster overlaid an interview he gave alongside the actor Henry Cavill about their movie, “Batman v Superman,” in which he sat silently as Cavill spoke animatedly beside him, with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” and this became “Sad Affleck,” a popular YouTube video. Affleck’s was the kind of middle-aged-white-male sadness that the Internet loves to mock—a mocking that depends, simultaneously, on a complete rejection of this sadness, as well as a hedging identification with it. These depressed-Affleck images can arouse both amusement and a sense of poignancy, a touch of Schadenfreude as well as something like sympathy. “Same,” we might post on our social-media feeds, alongside a sad Ben picture, with the quick meanness of the Internet that tends to flatten a person’s story to a caricature, even if it is motivated by all the right reasons in the world.

Last Saturday, almost exactly two years after Affleck denied its existence, the back tattoo returned to haunt the headlines, itself a phoenix rising from the ashes of gossip rags past. Affleck was on the beach in Honolulu, shooting the Netflix action movie “Triple Frontier.” As his younger co-stars, the actors Garrett Hedlund and Charlie Hunnam, wrestled in the surf like purebred puppies, Affleck, who is forty-five, was photographed wading into the ocean carrying a small red life preserver, running in the shallow waters, and towelling off on the beach. The tattoo—so gargantuan that the bird’s tail found itself dipping below the waistband of Affleck’s blue swim trunks—was plainly visible. In one image, the actor stands alone, looking off into the middle distance. His gut is pooching outward in a way that, in a more enlightened country like, say, France, would perhaps be considered virile, not unlike the lusty Gérard Depardieu in his prime but, in fitness-fascist America, tends to read as Homer Simpsonesque. A blue-gray towel is wrapped protectively around his midsection—recalling a shy teen at the local pool. Staring at the water before him, his gaze obscure and empty, Affleck is a defeated Roman senator, or, perhaps, the most anti-Romantic version imaginable of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 “Wanderer in the Sea of Fog.” The image suggests not just the fall of Affleck but the coming fall of man. There is something about this exhausted father that reflexively induces panic. We’ve been living in a world run by Afflecks for so long, will we even know ourselves when they’re gone?