The Fabulous Desperation of Our Celebrities

The latest avalanche of content from Jennifer Lopez has me thinking about Richard Wagner, the German composer who argued in 1849 that the “consummate artwork of the future” would be Gesamtkunstwerk—“total artwork,” combining elements of many forms into one. This lofty notion, once associated primarily with opera and architecture, is now commonplace. Visual albums, installation art, video games, and TikToks routinely blend the auditory, the visual, the narrative, and the poetic—sometimes spectacularly, quite often unsatisfyingly.

Human beings can be Gesamtkunstwerk too. Or at least, that’s the best way of thinking about what Lopez is up to at age 54.

Since the ’90s, Lopez has been culturally inescapable not for any single skill, but for gliding between acting, music, fashion, and various ceremonial duties. Now she’s made a multi-hyphenate manifesto of sorts with the Amazon Studios musical film This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. Mashing up pop videos and dialogue-driven dramedy over 65 minutes, it fuses sci-fi, slapstick, and Hallmark-movie aesthetics—as well as cameos from Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, and a grab bag of other celebrities. Along with a new, similarly titled album, the project is clearly meant to be her opus, a self-aware burst of uncategorizable too-muchness. And yet it’s also, hauntingly, not nearly enough to achieve her goals.

Although the project might sound outrageous, it looks familiar: The director, Dave Meyers, has, over decades, created tonally similar fantasias for Missy Elliott, Ariana Grande, and Lopez herself. In this film, the camera swoops through busy CGI backdrops and overdecorated sets. Squadrons of dancers perform fierce choreography blending the lyricism of interpretive dance with the pulsation of hip-hop. The details are splendid (Lopez’s outfits demand pause-and-rewind admiration), and the concepts are campy but fresh. Lopez battles an abusive lover in a honeycomb of glass walls; she tries to repair her heart in a grease-streaked, steampunk factory. But as in so many superhero movies, the overall effect is hyperactive yet deadened, causing the viewer’s gaze to bounce off the screen rather than be drawn into it.

The experience is improved if you know anything about Lopez herself, which is good because a large chunk of Earth’s population does. This Is Me … Now: A Love Story riffs on the famous fact that she has been married four times, most recently to Ben Affleck, the actor she legendarily first dated and broke up with in the early 2000s. Her serial-monogamy blues fueled the 2022 rom-com Marry Me, but here, it is fodder for surreal myth. Throughout this film, her alleged addiction to love is criticized and mocked by two groups of commentators: a band of friends on Earth and a council of astrological gods played stiffly by those aforementioned celebrities. In the film’s best sequence, a pink-festooned wedding scene, the face of Lopez’s new hubby keeps switching between those of different hunks while her friends look on with exhaustion.

How does this ring cycle end? Lopez’s new album of competent pop R&B presents Affleck’s reemergence in her life as a fairy-tale culmination to her story, but the movie is more about interior milestones: loving oneself, healing one’s inner child, and other psychoanalytical concepts. (Oh yeah: The rapper Fat Joe plays her therapist, rocking dorky sweaters with majesty.) The supposed baring of Lopez’s soul is a bit facile, but of course it is: She’s using multiple aesthetics and moods not to create depth and complication, but to bedazzle the same indomitable image she’s always hustled to project. As she put it in her 2022 documentary, Halftime, “One of the things I’m proud of is that I’m able to hold it together in front of everybody, without anybody knowing how I feel.”

What’s moving about the new project isn’t what’s on-screen, but what its ambition represents. The harshest public criticism about Lopez isn’t that she loves too much; it’s that she’s just a pretty face without great talent. (For example: The comedian Ayo Edebiri, who hosted SNL the same week that Lopez performed on it, recently found herself in a light scandal when it emerged that she had called Lopez’s success a “scam” on a 2020 podcast.) Two years ago, Halftime portrayed Lopez as struggling against a deep inferiority complex. Now the gutsiness and excess of This Is Me serve as another attempt to be taken seriously.

Yet, really, Lopez shouldn’t have anything to prove. No one becomes one of the most enduringly successful figures in a generation by fluke—and no amount of sweat and expense will convince skeptics otherwise. To be famous is to be doubted, and Lopez—or any contemporary titan of metanarrative and self-victimhood, such as Taylor Swift and Drake—cannot escape that fact. Later this month, Lopez will release yet another filmed commentary on herself: a making-of documentary about This Is Me, featuring her reading love letters from Affleck. It will likely offer another reminder that our era’s defining art form is really the performance of self, seeking approval that can never feel total.