The newest avalanche of content material from Jennifer Lopez has me occupied with Richard Wagner, the German composer who argued in 1849 that the “consummate paintings of the longer term” could be Gesamtkunstwerk—“whole paintings,” combining parts of many varieties into one. This lofty notion, as soon as related primarily with opera and structure, is now commonplace. Visible albums, set up artwork, video video games, and TikToks routinely mix the auditory, the visible, the narrative, and the poetic—typically spectacularly, very often unsatisfyingly.
Human beings could be Gesamtkunstwerk too. Or at the least, that’s the easiest way of occupied with what Lopez is as much as at age 54.
For the reason that ’90s, Lopez has been culturally inescapable not for any single ability, however for gliding between appearing, music, trend, and numerous ceremonial duties. Now she’s made a multi-hyphenate manifesto of types with the Amazon Studios musical movie This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. Mashing up pop movies and dialogue-driven dramedy over 65 minutes, it fuses sci-fi, slapstick, and Hallmark-movie aesthetics—in addition to cameos from Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, and a seize bag of different celebrities. Together with a brand new, equally titled album, the mission is clearly meant to be her opus, a self-aware burst of uncategorizable too-muchness. And but it’s additionally, hauntingly, not practically sufficient to attain her targets.
Though the mission may sound outrageous, it appears acquainted: The director, Dave Meyers, has, over many years, created tonally related fantasias for Missy Elliott, Ariana Grande, and Lopez herself. On this movie, the digital camera swoops by means of busy CGI backdrops and overdecorated units. Squadrons of dancers carry out fierce choreography mixing the lyricism of interpretive dance with the pulsation of hip-hop. The main points are splendid (Lopez’s outfits demand pause-and-rewind admiration), and the ideas are campy however contemporary. Lopez battles an abusive lover in a honeycomb of glass partitions; she tries to restore her coronary heart in a grease-streaked, steampunk manufacturing unit. However as in so many superhero films, the general impact is hyperactive but deadened, inflicting the viewer’s gaze to bounce off the display screen moderately than be drawn into it.
The expertise is improved if you recognize something about Lopez herself, which is sweet as a result of a big chunk of Earth’s inhabitants does. This Is Me … Now: A Love Story riffs on the well-known undeniable fact that she has been married 4 occasions, most not too long ago to Ben Affleck, the actor she legendarily first dated and broke up with within the early 2000s. Her serial-monogamy blues fueled the 2022 rom-com Marry Me, however right here, it’s fodder for surreal delusion. All through this movie, her alleged dependancy to like is criticized and mocked by two teams of commentators: a band of pals on Earth and a council of astrological gods performed stiffly by these aforementioned celebrities. Within the movie’s finest sequence, a pink-festooned marriage ceremony scene, the face of Lopez’s new hubby retains switching between these of various hunks whereas her pals look on with exhaustion.
How does this ring cycle finish? Lopez’s new album of competent pop R&B presents Affleck’s reemergence in her life as a fairy-tale fruits to her story, however the film is extra about inside milestones: loving oneself, therapeutic one’s interior little one, and different psychoanalytical ideas. (Oh yeah: The rapper Fats Joe performs her therapist, rocking dorky sweaters with majesty.) The supposed baring of Lopez’s soul is a bit facile, however after all it’s: She’s utilizing a number of aesthetics and moods to not create depth and complication, however to bedazzle the identical indomitable picture she’s all the time hustled to mission. As she put it in her 2022 documentary, Halftime, “One of many issues I’m pleased with is that I’m capable of maintain it collectively in entrance of everyone, with out anyone understanding how I really feel.”
What’s shifting concerning the new mission isn’t what’s on-screen, however what its ambition represents. The harshest public criticism about Lopez isn’t that she loves an excessive amount of; it’s that she’s only a fairly face with out nice expertise. (For instance: The comic Ayo Edebiri, who hosted SNL the identical week that Lopez carried out on it, not too long ago discovered herself in a gentle scandal when it emerged that she had referred to as Lopez’s success a “rip-off” on a 2020 podcast.) Two years in the past, Halftime portrayed Lopez as struggling in opposition to a deep inferiority advanced. Now the gutsiness and extra of This Is Me serves as one other try and be taken significantly.
But, actually, Lopez shouldn’t have something to show. Nobody turns into one of the vital enduringly profitable figures in a era by fluke—and no quantity of sweat and expense will persuade skeptics in any other case. To be well-known is to be doubted, and Lopez—or any up to date titan of metanarrative and self-victimhood, comparable to Taylor Swift and Drake—can not escape that truth. Later this month, Lopez will launch one more filmed commentary on herself: a making-of documentary about This Is Me, that includes her studying love letters from Affleck. It is going to doubtless provide one other reminder that our period’s defining artwork kind is absolutely the efficiency of self, in search of approval that may by no means really feel whole.