Featuring her husband Ben Affleck, celebrity cameos and a bondage tango, the singer’s movie-meets-album may be ridiculous, but her critics are missing the point
There’s something brave about Jennifer Lopez putting herself up for this level of scrutiny
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She was Jenny from the block, then she was JLo — now Jennifer Lopez has reinvented herself as simply “the Artist”. That’s the role Lopez plays in This Is Me … Now: A Love Story, a truly inexplicable cinematic extravaganza making full use of her triple-threat skills as singer, dancer and actress. It’s billed as a celebration of love, with the twist that love starts when you learn to love yourself. Well, no one ever attained the kind of top-tier diva status Lopez (an improbable 54, although she looks 36) has through modesty.
Maybe the best way to describe This Is Me … Now is to say that it’s like being trapped in a CGI render of Lopez’s ego. It starts with an animated telling of the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo, a pair of star-crossed lovers (Lopez’s parents are Puerto Rican; she grew up in the Bronx, New York). Then it lurches into a science-fiction dance sequence (proving that Lopez looks great even in a dirty vest and khakis), a bondage-themed psychodrama tango and finally a reconciliation with her inner child — all set to songs from the accompanying This Is Me … Now album. (There’s also a behind-the-scenes documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, released on February 27.)
JLo at Milan Fashion Week in her famous Versace dress
JACOPO RAULE/GETTY IMAGES
There’s something brave about Lopez putting herself up for this level of scrutiny — she financed the film with her own money (according to Variety magazine some $20 million) despite friends warning her against it. It has a self-aware sense of humour, and her tongue is at least partly in her cheek as she plays a “love addict” character, riffing on her tabloid reputation for romantic drama. Her husband, Ben Affleck, gives a vanity-free performance as a bloviating TV host (wild peroxide mane, alarming orange skin, any resemblance to Trump coincidental) ranting to camera on the subject of love.
Lopez cites her relationship with Affleck as the inspiration for the film. “There’s parts that feel very autobiographical, and then there’s parts that are kind of meta — not exactly what happened but the feeling of what happened,” she said during an online press conference I attended last week. This was a diva-tastic 50 minutes late in starting, though perhaps justified by Lopez having perfected her look: she was ageless as ever in a black poloneck and wide-brimmed hat, glossy ponytail coiled artfully over her shoulder.
The couple married in 2022, but they originally got together in 2002. Nicknamed “Bennifer” by the media that couldn’t get enough of them, they split in 2004 under the pressure of press attention. The film, Lopez told us last week, “ended this 20-year journey I had about love and being a hopeless romantic”.
The rise and fall of Bennifer closed the first chapter in Lopez’s celebrity. She started her career in her twenties as a dancer, then graduated to acting, confirming her leading lady status in the 1998 film Out of Sight — a chemistry-soaked Elmore Leonard adaptation in which she starred opposite George Clooney. The next year she released her debut album, On the 6. The lead single If You Had My Love went to No 1 in the US, and made the Top Ten in the UK.
This Is Me … Now is a self-made celebration of Lopez’s life and career that’s intended to speak for itself
COURTESY OF PRIME
This success was especially notable because she was one of the first performers from a Latin background to fully cross over. She was also a sex symbol. In the Noughties Lopez was one of the lad mags’ favourites, and she was a repeat winner of FHM’s “sexiest women in the world” rundown. In an age of skinny, her dancer’s peach became an icon in its own right: before Kim Kardashian broke the internet, there was JLo.
The urge to look at Lopez was so powerful, she even inspired Google to invent image search. In 2000 she wore a green chiffon Versace gown to the Grammys: cut below the navel and split to crotch level, it caused a sensation, with internet users searching for it in record levels. Google responded to the demand, meaning that if you type “Jennifer Lopez green dress” into your browser today, you’ll see exactly what you’re looking for. (A few months later, the South Park creator Trey Parker dragged up for the Oscars in a copy of the dress, and was almost as iconic.)
Still, not everyone was convinced by Lopez. Carey, for one, was reportedly unimpressed by early attempts to pitch Lopez as a “Latin Mariah”. Lopez may also be the rival singer accused in Carey’s autobiography of “stealing” a sample Carey planned to use in a song. It’s impossible to be certain, given that to this day Carey maintains a policy of never using Lopez’s name and of responding to any mention of her with the words: “I don’t know her.”
The tabloid saturation of Bennifer seemed to convert a lot more people into doubters when it came to Lopez — and Affleck. This wasn’t Lopez’s first high-profile relationship. She’d previously dated the rapper Sean Combs; the couple broke up shortly after both were arrested following a nightclub shooting in 1999 (Lopez was released without charge, and Combs was acquitted at trial of bribery and gun possession).
Lopez cites her relationship with Affleck as the inspiration for the film
TODD WILLIAMSON/CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES
But Bennifer were the first celebrity power couple of the Noughties. Thanks to super-aggressive paparazzi covering their every move and the rabid market in gossip coverage, the pair seemed to be everywhere. They even leant into their tabloid obsession status by appearing together in the video for Lopez’s 2002 single, Jenny from the Block, shot as though they were being surveilled from a distance by long-lens cameras. Lopez wrote the song Dear Ben for him on the album This Is Me… Then, including the lines: “I love at your command/ From the words you speak/ So deep our bodies meet, I had to have you.”
Overexposure led to backlash — which crystallised around the 2003 movie Gigli, in which they co-starred. In theory, this should have sizzled. The couple had met on the set, so interest in the film that forged the world’s hottest couple was high. And after a few proficient rom-coms, it was a return to the screwball-inspired comedy-crime territory that had been so successful for Lopez with Out of Sight.
Unfortunately, Gigli was a turkey. The reviews gloried in their harshness, although the most damning (and accurate) verdict came from Philip French in the Observer: “It arrives with the reputation of being one of the most irredeemably awful movies ever made, but it’s not as distinctive as that.” The film was withdrawn from cinemas after three weeks. A month after Gigli came out, Affleck and Lopez announced that they were postponing their wedding — just days before the ceremony was to take place.
It was an object lesson in the way celebrity could turn sour for those it touched. The spectre of Bennifer hung over both of them for many years to come, even though they moved on to new relationships and families (Lopez has twins with the dancer and salsa artist Marc Anthony, while Affleck shares a daughter with the actress Jennifer Garner).
A science-fiction dance sequence from This Is Me … Now
COURTESY OF PRIME
Years after their breakup, people seemed to hold the era of blanket coverage against them both. After Lopez experienced a career downturn in the late 2000s, a savage post on the website Gawker blamed her and Affleck’s “disgusting togetherness” for tiring the public, and declared: “Hey, Jennifer Lopez, don’t let the door hit you in the famous ass on your way out.”
Lopez declined the suggestion, and since then she’s enjoyed a hit run as an American Idol judge, as well as a revival of her acting form (especially in the 2019 film Hustlers, which she also produced). But it’s the return of Bennifer that seems to have sealed the deal on her renaissance. This Is Me … Now is her first album in ten years, and consciously harks back to 2002’s This Is Me … Then: it even has a song called Dear Ben Pt II. “The movie shows that there have been struggles and hard times that I kept to myself,” she told us at the press conference. “Gaining the confidence to be vulnerable and to admit certain things to the world empowered me to step into this next phase of my life.” She certainly doesn’t seem to be keeping much to herself now. Lines include: “Dear Ben/ Sitting here alone/ Looking at my ring ring/ Feeling overwhelmed/ It makes me wanna sing sing”.
As for Affleck, he may not have entirely come to terms with living and loving in public. In the documentary, there’s a scene where he sees Lopez showing his love letters to collaborators. It seems to disconcert him: “I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told. If you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it,” he tells the camera.
But his bit-part in This Is Me … Now: A Love Story suggests he’s not opposed to the project. After paparazzi pictures of him carrying a Dunkin’ Donuts cup and looking sad became a meme, the couple appeared together in a Super Bowl ad for the fast-food chain. If Noughties celebrity coverage was all about tearing the famous down a peg or two, in the 2020s things are a lot more cosy.
This Is Me … Now is a mark of that cosiness: a self-made celebration of Lopez’s life and career that’s intended to speak for itself. Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Is it vainglorious? It’s hard to argue otherwise. But is it heartwarming that these two people seem to love each other beyond any fear of embarrassment after everything they’ve been through? Despite myself, I think it is.
Sarah Ditum is the author of Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties (Fleet)
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