Alanis Morissette had a message for Ben Affleck — and she delivered it in front of thousands of people, with a movie clip to make the point. During her Butterfly with a Machete: A Rock Traumedy residency in Los Angeles, the 52-year-old singer paused to run through a list of things people have criticized her for over the years. Then she named her former Dogma co-star. “I've even had a guy ask me why I didn't lead with my sexuality,” she told the crowd. “Thank you, Ben Affleck.”
Then she played the clip. On the screens behind her, footage rolled from Dogma, the 1999 Kevin Smith comedy in which Morissette played God and Affleck played Bartleby, a fallen angel — the scene in which Bartleby's head explodes. A fan video of the moment, captured by Entertainment Weekly, spread across social media on Thursday, hours after the show.
Affleck has not responded to the comments.
The Show Behind The Moment
The moment came during Morissette's four-night Los Angeles residency at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood, which played November 5, 6, 10 and 11 — the first residency by any artist at the venue. The show is a confessional stage piece built around her songs and her life story, with Morissette serving as both singer and storyteller. More than two dozen songs fill the night, nine of them from Jagged Little Pill, the 1995 album that made her a star. The Affleck bit was staged as a sketch inside the show, with the actor appearing on screen as Morissette told the story.
It was not even the week's only viral moment from the run. Morissette has also been going viral for falling on stage during the YouTube Theater shows. But the Affleck callout is the one with a 27-year fuse behind it — a callback to a movie the two of them made together when both were at the start of their fame.
Why She Said It Now
The timing was no accident. Just days earlier, Morissette had spoken publicly about her sexuality, telling the November 3 episode of the “Handsome” podcast that she is pansexual. She had also spoken about it in September. The Affleck remark, as she told it from the stage, was one of a long list of things people have said about her over the years — a list she was working through, name by name, in front of a crowd that knew every word.
Morissette has spent much of the last three decades refusing to be filed under one label. She was barely in her 20s when Jagged Little Pill turned her into one of the biggest stars of the 1990s, and she has since built a career that runs through acting, comedy, meditation and writing alongside the music. She has said that life keeps getting better for her, and that includes reaching menopause — a line that drew its own headlines when the residency opened. The show, by design, is a place where she gets to tell her own story on her own terms. On this night, that included settling a 27-year-old score.
A 27-Year-Old Movie, Back In The Conversation
Dogma premiered in Los Angeles on November 9, 1999, and it has never really left the conversation. In the film, directed by Kevin Smith, Affleck and Matt Damon play fallen angels, Bartleby and Loki, who try to find their way back into heaven; Morissette plays God. The cast also includes Salma Hayek, Jason Lee, Alan Rickman, Chris Rock and George Carlin. Affleck himself praised the film's “cool cast” when the stars reunited last year — and social media users reacting to Morissette's on-stage clip kept coming back to her role as God, the one character in the film who gets the last word.
The joke lands because of who Morissette played. In Dogma, God is the one character who never loses control of the room — she arrives at the end, fixes what the angels broke, and leaves. Casting a pop star as God was one of the film's most talked-about choices in 1999, and Morissette has leaned into it ever since. When she cued up Bartleby's death on the screens behind her, the crowd got the reference instantly: the woman who played God was, once again, having the last word on a man who had crossed her. It is a punchline 27 years in the making, and it needed no explanation — the room already knew the movie, the scene, and exactly who was telling the story.
That is, in the end, what the moment was: Morissette taking the last word, on stage, in front of thousands of people, with the receipts rolling on the screen behind her. For anyone who wants to revisit the scene that started it all, Dogma is available to stream on Prime Video. Affleck, meanwhile, has said nothing — and the clip, captured by Entertainment Weekly and passed from phone to phone, is still spreading.
