2024-08-23 05:40:02
In her deeply maligned docuseries about her utterly incomprehensible movie based on her mediocre new album This Is Me … Now, there’s a scene where Jennifer Lopez studies herself in the mirror after a workout. She takes her hair down and shakes it out. “I like taking my hair out like this. It reminds me, like, when I was 16 in the Bronx, running up and down the block,” she says. “Crazy little girl who used to fucking be wild. No limits. All dreams and shit.” It’s a moment ideally designed to help the viewer see Lopez as she sees herself: just a girl from the Bronx with dreams and perspicacity. All famous people do this in the documentaries made to further propagate their self-mythologizing, like when Beyoncé talks about being tired. It’s supposed to make us feel as if celebrities are just like us.
If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the past few months, you know that Lopez’s attempt at relatable universality hasn’t worked. People made fun of her go-to bodega order: a ham-and-cheese on unspecified bread, with a bag of chips of undetermined flavor and “orange drink,” which not even the city’s oldest bodega cat has heard of. Her surly workaholism as depicted in her documentary, rather than telegraphing to her audience that this was someone who works hard, suggested that here was someone who thought the world revolved around her. It was, in a word, unbelievable.
For her entire career, Lopez has been determined to paint herself as an approachable, albeit überfamous, woman. From her time as a Fly Girl to the present, with the recent news of her second breakup with Dunkin’ acolyte Ben Affleck (which also doubles as her fourth divorce), Lopez has been trying to convince us that she’s the same person she was as a teenager, before she got famous enough to have been in possession of a litany of boulder-sized engagement rings. But this is a fundamental failure to understand what her audience wants from her. It’s not commonality; there’s nothing about Lopez’s life that speaks to the average music consumer. It’s not relatability; even in her romantic missteps, Lopez’s breakups exist on a scale too spectacular for the rest of us to identify with. It’s certainly not more stories about her comparatively modest upbringing; no one cares about the proverbial “block” she’s been referring to since before the advent of the iPhone. Lopez believes that her audience wants her to still be the same woman she was prefame. But, frankly, who cares about Lopez before the diamonds and the divorces and the spray tans and the furs?
Now Lopez again has an opportunity to rebrand herself in the ashes of yet another high-profile relationship—her highest-profile yet. The question is whether she’ll return to the same old well of acting like Jenny From the Block or if she’ll accept her transmutation into her inevitable final form: a true diva.
Even if you go back to the very beginning of Lopez’s career, you see that it was rooted in the aspirational. In 1991 Lopez debuted in the public consciousness as a Fly Girl on Fox’s In Living Color, a sketch-comedy show created by Keenen Ivory Wayans. Lopez and the other Fly Girls would dance it out during interstitials, wearing bike shorts and tight tank tops. From there, she went on to tour with Janet Jackson before deciding to step into acting with stints on CBS procedurals and independent movies. Lopez’s big break, of course, came when she played the titular role in 1997’s Selena, about the singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s career and eventual murder. Lopez’s performance was well reviewed, yes, but it also marked the first time a Latina actress received a $1 million salary for a movie role. She was just 27; armed with an unprecedented level of bankability, as well as a new husband (her first), Lopez entered a new stratosphere and never landed back on Earth again.
She only grew in fame from there. By 1999, Lopez had become a veritable pop star with the release of On the 6, her album named after the subway she took to and from the Bronx every day. (Remember how Lopez is from the Bronx? She certainly won’t let you forget.) Here she was, trying to still seem like an everywoman—even as she wore that infamous green dress to the Grammys in 2000, inadvertently inventing Google Images, and becoming one of the most famous names, faces, and butts in the world.
By 2001, she had married her backup dancer Cris Judd. Before their subsequent divorce was even finalized two years later, she had started dating Ben Affleck, their very public relationship coinciding with the release of 2002’s This Is Me … Then, Lopez’s greatest foray into cosplaying as a normal person. (This had been predated by her single “I’m Real” the year prior, which demonstrated how normal she was while eating ice cream with ethnically diverse children and wearing a leather bikini top and motorcycle gloves.) This Is Me … Then and its lead single, “Jenny From the Block,” was Lopez’s most entrenched effort to seem like a normie. In the music video—which famously features a far less embattled-looking Affleck than the one we presently know—she does everyday activities, like filling her expensive car with gas and getting a booty rub on a luxury yacht. The attempted message was clear: I might be one of the most famous people in the world, but I’m really just like you.
That through line connected her movie roles, from The Wedding Planner and Maid in Manhattan to Monster-in-Law. The characters she played were approachable, beautiful, down-to-earth, and racially ambiguous; never too glamorous or otherworldly, they were merely women who were struggling to find a boyfriend while also having a career. Can women have it all? Lopez, a woman who possesses the financial means to purchase almost anything she desires in this world, has spent her film career trying to find an answer to that question.
Through it all, her personal life continued to be flummoxing. She and Affleck broke it off for the first time in 2004, their engagement not strong enough to withstand the brutal media attention. That same year, she married Marc Anthony; they had twins together but were separated by 2011 and divorced three years later. From 2011 to 2016, Lopez dated Casper Smart, another backup dancer, who was almost 20 years her junior. In 2019 she got engaged to former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez before finally splitting up in 2021. She got back together with Affleck that year and married him several times in 2022. Her divorce filing lists April 26, 2024, as their separation date. Aug. 20, the date Lopez filed for divorce, marks the two-year anniversary of the day they held one of their wedding ceremonies. She may have had to cancel her summer tour, but filing for divorce on your anniversary? Diva.
Hers is just about the least relatable story you can think of: Movie/pop star gets back together with her equally famous ex-boyfriend, bankrolls her own terrible movie about their love story to the tune of $20 million, then divorces him. But here’s the truth about Lopez. She is no longer an undeniable talent, like many of her musical peers, a guaranteed box-office hit, or a cultural zenith. Her records are boring, and her movies are often merely fine. These days, she doesn’t have her finger on the pulse—or, perhaps, as it’s been long rumored, Ashanti is no longer singing for her—and for many years now she has ceased to resemble anything close to a regular, approachable, common person.
But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. What fun is it for the general public to witness another regular citizen? Instead of clinging to roots that her audience just doesn’t believe or care about at this point, Lopez should finally embrace the label that might serve her best: rich, out-of-touch, overly indulged celebrity weirdo. Her peers have leaned into that kind of iconography; Beyoncé, for example, rarely does interviews and makes very few public appearances, all of which are highly controlled. She capitalizes on the ways she’s out of touch, and her work represents it; her latest business venture is a pricey whiskey by Moët Hennessy. Mariah Carey, meanwhile, has gone full diva-in-repose: Every day is Christmas in her world, and we’re simply living in it.
With this fourth divorce under her belt, Lopez has the opportunity to transform herself in an image more in line with how she lives and how the public views her. Jenny From the Block could never afford to get divorced four times; J. Lo can, and will, follow her heart, whatever the cost. Jenny From the Block might have thoughts about her favorite bodega sandwich; J. Lo has a long list of demands on her rider and doesn’t want anyone to make eye contact with her. Jenny From the Block might use affordable creams and serums; J. Lo surely gets vampire facials at a referral-only Calabasas clinic that I never even knew existed. Finally, she can step into who she’s been gearing up to be her whole life: our very own modern-day Elizabeth Taylor, but without the burden of a Richard Burton. The diva she has worked hard to be, a light mess, a difficult person who lives so far out of the bounds of reality that she acts as a distraction for the rest of us who can’t escape like she can. After all, Lopez hasn’t even approached the idea of relatability since the mid-’90s. Why keep pushing a message too unbelievable to consider?
The sweet irony is that embracing her grandeur is what would finally make Lopez relatable. Is there anything more normal than being a corny woman, stuck in her own delusions, blindly following her heart into dark places where it won’t be protected? Been there, sister—let’s get loud about it.
