Why Does the New Aaron Rodgers Documentary Exist?

Welcome back to “Why Are We Still Watching?,” a highly irregular dialogue between long-suffering Jets fans (and New York Magazine staff writers) Gabriel Debenedetti and Simon van Zuylen-Wood. Aaron Rodgers un-triumphantly returned in September and has “led” the team to such a dismal season that Gabe and Simon haven’t mustered the strength to chat about it. But now they’re back to discuss a strange new Rodgers documentary.

Simon van-Zuylen Wood: We are speaking several days after the premiere of the Netflix documentary Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, which took us so long to review in part because we didn’t realize it was in three parts and over three hours long. I’m taking this call just a few long heaves of the pigskin from MetLife Stadium, at Terminal C of Newark International Airport.

Gabriel Debenedetti: Ooh, find me a flight to Costa Rica or Cairo, or maybe Tahoe.

SVZW: All locales the Jets’ mystic-MAHA quarterback visits in the film, from his famous ayahuasca retreat to his famous darkness retreat to his appropriately enigmatic visit to the Pyramids with James Van Der Beek. The documentary leaves a number of things a little opaque, including Aaron’s rift with his family, and almost completely avoids mention of his past relationships with Shailene Woodley, Danica Patrick, and Olivia Munn. It doesn’t even tell us much about some of Rodgers’s onscreen companions in the actual documentary, including the woman massaging his plaster-covered foot.

GD: For the record, the cast-massager is celebrity hairstylist Riawna Capri. (This took some Googling, since she’s not named but only ever described in the film as Rodgers’s “friend.”) All this confusion is part of the package; it’s clear from the start that we’re going to learn only about the parts of Aaron Rodgers’s personal life that Aaron Rodgers wants us to know about. It’s very first person and leaves little room for substantive criticism or context.

SVZW: What would you say this movie is about?

GD: This is not an easy question. Over three episodes, it covers his rise from unheralded junior-college quarterback in Northern California to Super Bowl–winning quarterback with the Green Bay Packers. It then moves on to his tenure with the Jets and the devastating Achilles’ heel injury that almost immediately ended his first season with the team. Much of the movie is framed around his recovery — physical as well as mental — so it delves into some of his unorthodox healing practices, which in turn leads us to the infamously authority-distrusting parts of his nature.

SVZW: And therefore it is a painful watch for Jets fans, because we know the comeback set up in the film leads nowhere in real life.

GD: Right. After covering last year’s failed season and the dashed hope that Rodgers would return from injury to salvage it, Enigma wraps after just the first game of the 2024 season, a loss.

SVZW: At which point the filmmakers presumably had to stop filming and turn their footage into a movie. What happened after the cameras stopped rolling is that the Jets lost more games, fired their coach, demoted their offensive coordinator, fired their general manager, and squandered what was, on paper, one of the most talented NFL rosters in recent memory, including All-Pro receiver Garrett Wilson and All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner. They are 4-10 and out of playoff contention. I think the malaise of this season has taken a greater toll on the fan base than the black comedy of last season did because Rodgers is finally on the field — and the team is still awful.

GD: I don’t know what the viewership numbers on these games have been, but at least in my household they’ve been plummeting.

SVZW: The ratings have been plummeting even among the participants on this phone call. We had tickets to the Jets-Seahawks game at the Meadowlands the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Correctly anticipating a loss, we wound up selling them at a steep discount on StubHub.

GD: In the documentary, it’s not obvious that Rodgers thinks of himself as a football player doing a career retrospective so much as a public intellectual or possible politician setting himself up for a post-football future.

SVZW: Yeah, the last time we publicly commiserated about the Jets was toward the end of the 2023 season, before Rodgers had been floated as a potential VP for then–presidential candidate RFK Jr., who appears in Enigma hiking with the QB and is now, remarkably, Trump’s presumptive secretary of Health and Human Services. As journalists, we should note one “scoop” from this documentary, which is that, according to Rodgers, Kennedy asked him to be his running mate — not just that he was one of several contenders.

GD: Which I believe is actively different from how it was reported at the time.

SVZW: Though the film covers his arc as a football player, including his frustrating inability to win a second Super Bowl, its purpose is to showcase the ways Rodgers is more mysterious and unusual than an ordinary superstar jock. I basically buy this premise. What other major athlete would be eccentric enough for RFK Jr. to tap as a potential running mate? Friend-of-the-mag Kyrie Irving?

GD: I just don’t think it succeeded in making him seem more enigmatic. There’s plenty in the movie that confirms people’s suspicions about Rodgers’s unusual approach to health and wellness — again, there’s a lot about ayahuasca and some brain-wave measuring — and his vaccine skepticism. And there’s very little reflection on the time he misled the press into thinking he was vaccinated during the second pandemic season. (He said he’d been “inoculated.”) This is all a lot of things, but it’s not exactly mysterious.

SVZW: As an aside, I was intrigued by the smoothie he drinks. At one point, a chef or trainer machetes a coconut, flips it so the juice pours into a glass, and puts the coconut milk into the blender. Then he adds coffee from an espresso machine. Then there’s some sort of mushroom powder …

GD: Yeah … I mean, sure. His job is to be in shape.

SVZW: I would have loved to hear from his apparently estranged parents and siblings. Rodgers says the fissure between him and his family stems from his disagreement with their strict brand of Christianity, which he says fixates on shame and sin. So Rodgers branched off, questing after other kinds of spirituality and self-actualization. It struck me that before he became known for his opposition to the COVID vaccine, his hippieish views coded more left wing, and he could have become a different kind of political folk hero. (Tie-in alert! Check out New York’s current cover package on the political horseshoe that is RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, for which Rodgers is kind of a player-coach.)

GD: Make Aaron Healthy Again! Jets fans can believe in that version of MAHA. But yes, the documentary is extremely on the nose when it comes to this stuff. Rodgers says his conversion story began in Berkeley, of all places, where he went to college.

SVZW: Not that he was joining DSA Berkeley, but he did talk about how mind-expanding it was to be in a left-wing environment.

GD: Watching protests at Sproul Plaza. But again, this is Rodgers telling his own story. If the truth is that he grew up in an oppressive, highly conservative environment that — in his telling — wanted to make him smaller than he was, that does explain a lot about the way he approaches the world. Unfortunately, we have to take his word for it because the film doesn’t interview his family or almost anyone who knew him in his younger days.

And for a documentary whose central project appears to be presenting him as this sort of beatific, above-it-all figure, it does itself a disservice by not fully interrogating his beliefs or the skeptics’ case against him. This gets me to one of my central issues with the documentary, which is that I’m not really sure whom it’s for. Jets fans? Hard to see how that makes sense. Rodgers superfans? Not sure they exist in numbers sufficient to justify the project. Casual football viewers? I can’t see them getting too far past the first episode. But maybe this is really about Rodgers building a new following.

SVZW: It’s for the crunchy moms. I got in trouble with our commenters last season when I talked about how I fell for Rodgers watching him pal around with Liev Schreiber on HBO’s Hard Knocks. And I am admittedly drawn to misunderstood-seeker types, maybe because they offer a contrast to the more rigid norms of the journalism world. So though the movie was flawed, I found myself earnestly trying to model his openness, rather than approach the assignment cynically. I’m an easy mark, but I thought it was vulnerable of him to suggest he is a perfectionist because he fears he is unlovable.

GD: To use one of Rodgers’s favorite phrases, you’re saying I need to go through more of an “ego death” to appreciate him. I’m less sympathetic to him than you are, but I would also never admonish him to “just focus on football.”

SVZW: To “shut up and dribble,” as Laura Ingraham famously instructed LeBron James during a bout of political activism.

GD: Right. Can we go back to the Jets for a second? It’s possible I would have more patience for him if the team were better. He has skipped out on mandatory team activities to, uh, explore. (His jaunt to Egypt was not well explained at the time or in the documentary.) At some point before I can no longer throw a football, I would like them to make the playoffs again. We shouldn’t gloss over this: They are the owners of the longest-standing playoff drought in all of major professional American sports.

SVZW: On that front, I’m going to defend Rodgers yet again! To me, the villain of the season is not Rodgers but owner Woody Johnson, the pharmaceutical heir who employs our vaccine-skeptic quarterback. He impulsively fired the team’s coach five games into the season, spiraling the clubhouse into dysfunction. This recent Athletic piece painted an almost comically damning picture of Johnson’s meddling. My favorite detail is that he once killed a trade for wide receiver Jerry Jeudy because his Madden rating wasn’t high enough.

GD: Yeah, Woody is a big-time villain here, too. But he’s not about to sell the team. So what should they do with Rodgers?

SVZW: He’s under contract for the 2025 season, but a recent report suggested the “sense” around the team was that he would not be asked back. My sense is that we should stubbornly run it back with him. The wonks would say I’m succumbing to the sunk-cost fallacy, but I’m in too deep to give up after two years of disappointment and emotional unwellness. During one game this season, the internet went down in my apartment, which froze the TV because the game was being broadcast on Amazon Prime. So I couldn’t see what was happening, which — even though we say we hate watching — caused me to melt down and start ranting about Jeff Bezos and streaming culture and corporations. We’ve now done three whole dialogues about the Jets, plus invested over three hours into this Netflix doc, and we almost went to a game; I’ve put in a lot and need the Rodgers experiment to end on a happier note.

GD: We’re getting at the heart of Jets fandom here. That feeling of, Maybe next year, something will work out, based on very little. Being a Jets fan isn’t about results. It’s spiritual, and it’s a little incoherent, just like Aaron Rodgers. Of course he should come back for a third season.

SVZW: See you in 2025.