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" &amp;quot;I assumed that you would know the difference between a character and a real person,&amp;quot; Joaquin Phoenix told David Letterman on Wednesday night.  He was exactly right. Most people can tell the difference, most of the time, which means that most us have built-in limits to the range of our possibilities. Our leashes are only so long. Even if Phoenix wanted to be a hip-hop star, genuinely and truly, he was never going to be one. Do you believe Lindsay Lohan will ever be anything other than a trainwreck? Did you ever let yourself wonder whether the New York Jets were really going to the win the Super Bowl this year? That&amp;#039;s why we&amp;#039;re never going to let Casey Affleck be a director, either. I&amp;#039;m Still Here \u2014 last week a documentary, this week a work of fiction \u2014 might prove to be the most-discussed, least-watched film since Snakes on a Plane. There was a sense of event in Phoenix&amp;#039;s return to Letterman last night, the end of an apparently impossibly long and involved joke on celebrity culture and our obsession with it. And yet, despite the publicity, despite all the ink and airwaves working in the film&amp;#039;s favor, nobody&amp;#039;s going to see Joaquin Phoenix pretend to be someone he&amp;#039;s not. Which is odd, given that&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;ve done every other time we&amp;#039;ve gone to see him. Phoenix might well deserve an Oscar this time around, or at least some kind of award for dedication to a part, and I&amp;#039;m Still Here might be the most incredible prank in modern movie history. (Borat might have something to say about that; Bruno probably doesn&amp;#039;t.) But the brothers-in-law made a pivotal mistake early on in their plot hatching. The better story, the truer story \u2014 the bigger lesson \u2014 was in Affleck all along. He wouldn&amp;#039;t have needed to act for a single second to draw us in. I would have been the first guy in line to watch his story play out. Imagine. Casey Affleck spends years dedicated to a notion that clearly resonated with him, that took hold of his heart. He dreams of making a larger point; he wants to make a film that&amp;#039;s important, maybe even important enough to change the way we think about ourselves and our society. He envisions himself as a director, not in the sense that he&amp;#039;s making a movie, but in the sense that he believes he&amp;#039;s changing traffic patterns or the weather. He thinks he&amp;#039;s doing a conductor&amp;#039;s work. And \u2014 poof \u2014 all of that effort, all of that investment and faith, and last night finished it. Last night, when Phoenix appeared on our TVs smiling and clean-shaven, the dream was over, up in so much smoke. We&amp;#039;re all going to watch Casey&amp;#039;s brother Ben direct the shit out of The Town instead.  Tell me that can&amp;#039;t hurt. The curious thing about the Afflecks \u2014 apart from their apparently very different hair textures \u2014 is that, from the outside, they each seem to want what the other has. I&amp;#039;d wager that Ben has watched Casey in something like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford \u2014 or even through the camera when they made Gone Baby Gone together \u2014 and felt some part of his gut go sour. Ben has tried mightily to be a serious actor, tried to convince his audience that his jaw wasn&amp;#039;t made of wood, but he never did manage the trick, and he knows it. (If you haven&amp;#039;t seen Assassination, which is one of the great films of the last ten years, you&amp;#039;ll need to correct that mistake this weekend, right after you see The Town.) And I&amp;#039;d wager just as much that Casey is seeing the directorial raves gushing his brother&amp;#039;s way this week, now batting two-for-two and finding himself being compared to Martin Scorsese, for chrissake, and wondering why it couldn&amp;#039;t have been all for him instead.  There&amp;#039;s a beautiful myth in America that you can be whatever you want to be, so long as you want it bad enough. It&amp;#039;s a lie. Whenever I&amp;#039;ve spoken to people who want to be writers, I&amp;#039;m always the asshole who tells them they&amp;#039;re probably not good enough. (It can seem like everyone wants to be a writer, which is weird, because it&amp;#039;s a life of perpetual torment, a torment I&amp;#039;m hoping to overcome, in part, with this new blog.) I&amp;#039;m that asshole because I&amp;#039;ve never believed in false hope or killing people with kindness. Instead, I tell them they have to be really, really honest with themselves. They have to answer a terrible question, point-blank: Am I good enough? Because there are a lot of people out there who are good enough. There are a lot of people who don&amp;#039;t have to make it so. They don&amp;#039;t have to play make-believe. They just are. Ben Affleck is a born director. Casey Affleck is a born actor. All the want and wishing in the world won&amp;#039;t change that. We can all dream of the lives we might want \u2014 and believe me when I say, I&amp;#039;m hopeful that free will counts for something in the end, otherwise My Second Empire will look a lot like my first one, which I didn&amp;#039;t like very much. But I also know there&amp;#039;s no truth to a clean slate. Some things will always be me, just as they will always be you, and there&amp;#039;s no use in pretending otherwise. A beard, a pair of sunglasses, and a mumble won&amp;#039;t make us something we&amp;#039;re not. Trust me, I know. It&amp;#039;s not enough of a disguise. We won&amp;#039;t be fooling anybody. READ MORE OF MY SECOND EMPIRE &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; PLUS: Follow My Second Empire on Twitter and Your RSS Feed &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8532/joaquin-phoenix-letterman-hoax-092310/?link=emb&dom=yah_life&src=syn&con=blog_esq&mag=esq>