The music documentary, or “rockumentary,” usually tends to focus on a particular tour that the musician in question is on. As a genre fine-tuned by Madonna’s 1991 black-and-white masterpiece, Truth or Dare, many a pop star since has tried to recapture the same effect. Most recently (and also for Netflix), that was Ariana Grande with excuse me, i love you. Something of a yawn, to say the least. Jennifer Lopez has instead opted to (semi) home in on preparations made for the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show. What’s still known to many as the closing ceremony for Earth after COVID could no longer be ignored in the U.S., therefore was deemed of “legitimate” enough concern to enact a “shutdown” (but again, Americans don’t know from a fucking shutdown the way other countries did… and still do).
But, oddly, Halftime doesn’t hyper-emphasize all the work that went into putting on the performance, so much as the slight J. Lo felt at not getting an Oscar nomination for Hustlers. While the documentary might also be called Halftime because it’s a nod to how J. Lo still has so much left to do and say, and that the current era can be looked at as the halfway point in her own career, it doesn’t change the fact that one is expecting a more myopic view as opposed to a broad strokes look at what she’s done. And yes, there’s no arguing that she’s one of the hardest-working women in the business (even if much of what she does is derivative, appropriative and often forgettable). Over and over, J. Lo iterates that Latinas have to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove themselves. Something she was willing to do the day she fled her parents’ Bronx abode when she turned eighteen. From that moment forward, she was nonstop in her drive to succeed. But once she made it in the arena of dancing as a Fly Girl on In Living Color, that transcended into her wanting to act and then sing, becoming the triple threat she had idolized in Rita Moreno after seeing West Side Story.
It’s around the twenty-four-minute mark that J. Lo’s meteoric rise by the early 00s gets the Framing Britney Spears treatment with a retrospective look at all the tabloid headlines Lopez generated, particularly with regard to her “diva” nature and her “revolving-door” love life. Lopez recalls, “Their appetite to cover my personal life overshadowed everything that was happening in my career.” A plague that sounds all too familiar with regard to any successful female pop star in the 00s, particularly Britney. But for Lopez, there was an added layer of venom compounded by the racism inherent in American culture, and particularly pop culture. Which is why we then segue into Jimmy Kimmel mocking her as a judge on American Idol, as well as South Park’s hard-on for making fun of her, in this case with a song about tacos. The only time Ben Affleck appears in the documentary is to remark of that period, “I said to her once, ‘Doesn’t this ever bother you?’ And she said, ‘I’m Latina, I’m a woman. I expected this. You just don’t expect it. You expect to be treated fairly.’” Sounds like it could’ve been one of the sore points that led to their first breakup. Another clip shows Conan O’Brien racistly offering “our resident J. Lo, cleaning lady Judy Lowenstein” to enact an apology on behalf of the couple. Scenes of Lopez and Affleck on the red carpet for Gigli are then superimposed with an excerpt from an article that reads, “Don’t get friendly with the help, let alone marry them.”
So yes, while Britney, Lindsay and Paris were being lambasted for daring to enjoy themselves by partying it up at an age when most people do, Lopez was being subjected to a different kind of criticism. One that had its own distinctive ugliness because it was rooted in the philosophy of: how dare a woman of color refuses to acknowledge her “place”? How dare she get this popular and rich?
The passive aggressive attempts on the part of the patriarchy to cut someone like Lopez down to size is manifest when J. Lo’s manager, Benny Medina (who had his own #MeToo accusation in 2017), comments on the “insult” of the NFL feeling the need to “tack on” Shakira as a co-headliner (his own comment then becoming an insult to Shakira). He notes, “Typically you have one headliner at a Super Bowl. That headliner constructs the show and, um, should they choose to have other guests that’s their choice. It was an insult to say you needed two Latinas to do the job that one artist historically has done.”
But there’s no denying that Shakira bolstered the message of Latino unity and triumph that Lopez wanted to get across for the show. For, like Taylor Swift, it took J. Lo a long-ass minute to realize the power of her voice when it came to “getting political.” As she admits in Halftime, “I’m not into politics. I’m not that person, but I was living in a United States that I didn’t recognize.” No offense, but where had she been? Apart from the fame bubble? Trump was merely a culmination of everything America has been for so long. And the acerbic, race-oriented criticisms lobbed at her in the 00s were a case in point of that. This included her overly dissected derrière, as though it were appropriate for Billy Bush to ask her, “How do you feel about your butt?” Lopez replies, “Are you kidding me? You did not just ask me that.” “I did,” Bush assures (after all, this is the person responsible for invoking Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comment).
It smacks of Spears being told by a gross interviewer, “Everyone’s talking about it. Your breasts.” “My breasts?” He continues, “You seem to get furious when a talk show host comes up with this subject.” As though she’s being the “poor sport” for not playing along. Lopez had to endure the same shit with regard to her body, with other flashback footage in Halftime showing David Letterman “joking,” “How many of you are excited about the new Jennifer Lopez movie? You know the gimmick of this? Her ass is in 3D.” Then there’s a clip of her at the VMAs, when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog implores, “J. Lo please, let me sniff your butt.” She looks over at the puppet in eye-rolling horror, unable to believe that something so sexist and grotesque could actually be happening. But it was, and is. Hence, her commitment to showcasing “the woman symbol” as part of her stage at the Super Bowl, against the advisement of Hamish Hamilton, who warns her that could be deemed “exclusionary,” which, of course, is fucking ridiculous as it takes a giant plus sign attached to a circle to get men to notice the “I am woman, hear me roar” concept at all.
J. Lo’s “little girls in cages” idea was surprisingly less scrutinized than the female symbol, as Halftime reveals, with the suits in charge suddenly wanting to kibosh that element at the last minute (what with the NFL being owned by a slew of Trump-supporting conservatives). To which J. Lo pulls a Madonna when she said of her masturbation theatrics during “Like A Virgin” at the Blond Ambition Tour, “I’m not changing my fuckin’ show.” Another parallel to Truth or Dare comes when Lopez is getting her throat examined, mimicking a classic scene from M’s documentary during which Warren Beatty asks of having her throat exam filmed, “This is crazy. Nobody talks about this on film?” Madonna questions, “Talks about what?” Beatty replies, “The insanity of doing this all on a documentary… This is a serious matter your throat, yes?” Madonna shrugs, “Why should I stop here?” Her doctor later asks, “Do you wanna talk at all off camera?” She shakes her head no. Warren adds, “She doesn’t wanna live off camera, much less talk.” The same might be true of J. Lo, but she’s slightly less Leo in her admission of that (instead playing the nurturing Cancer card, as she cusps that sign far more than M’s dead-center Leo August birthday). Even if her incorporation of “Let’s Get Loud” into “This Land Is Your Land” at Joe Biden’s inauguration (also shown in the documentary) is proof positive of that self-involved Leo-ness.
And while Madonna is consistently told to shut up and go away, Lopez is more accepted and praised for reiterating something very similar at the end of Halftime to what Madonna has been saying since 1992: “There’s so much more I wanna say. I’m not done, not even close.” Maybe whatever she says next, however, could be just a bit more cohesive than the hodgepodge that is Halftime.
