This Is The Most Trenchant J.Lo Thesis Yet
"You's who?"
Tomorrow will be devoted to Cowboy Carter, no traditional Friday Post. In the meantime, here’s a J.Lo blog :)
Jennifer Lopez is always getting her lashings. Remember the “Love Don’t Cost A Thing” challenge, which only one person did? Remember when people tried to tell you Bennifer was a publicity stunt to, I don’t know, get people to care about The Last Duel. Lest we forget “52 What It Do?” Jennifer Lopez always does the most, and Jennifer Affleck does even more. It was not enough to make a sequel to a 20-year-old album. Jennifer Affleck made a documentary about making a movie for the sequel to her 20-year-old album. She is the most extra person on this earth, and even she knows it. “It’s not like anyone was clamoring for a new J.Lo record,” she shrugs in that doc, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. Nevertheless, she persists.
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On the clock app the last two weeks, there’s been a fixation on what I would call one of the documentary’s more normal scenes. J.Lo works out in her home gym1, and has a full-circle moment in the mirror2 as she wraps up the workout. “I like taking my hair out like this,” she begins. “It reminds me, like when I was 16 in the Bronx, running up and down the block. Crazy little girl, who used to fucking be wild. No limits, all dreams, and shit.” She furrows her brow, examining herself in the mirror, who she was and what she became. It is standard documentary fare, and one of the doc’s best moments: Here is a regular “degular shmegular girl from the Bronx,” as Cardi B used to say, who now writes $20 million checks to make a movie where she’s working in her heart’s factory and sharing twenty years of love letters that Ben Affleck would really rather she not. God, I love this woman.
But Lopez’s Bronx classmates call bullshit. “I truly have left this woman alone for years. I have been annoyed in silence since high school,” one woman shared on TikTok. “And guess what? I’m a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx who went to the same high school as you, and you’re lying. I saw your high school photo, you did not have hair like that. And we also both attended an all-girls Catholic high school in an Irish and Italian neighborhood, so you were’nt running up and down the block. You know damn well you were sitting next to Megan Farley and Christine Marketti in class. Why are you lying? Please stop using us to look human. We are sick of you … we are not all ‘running up and down the block.’”
Leos are prone to self-mythologizing3
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