Like Paris Hilton saying she was “playing a character” (specifically, that of a dumb blonde) during her early to mid-00s heyday, Jennifer Lopez is the latest aughts figure to join that bandwagon. This “revelation” arrives in her documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a companion piece to This Is Me…Now: A Love Story—itself a companion piece to This Is Me…Now the record. Her announcement of this comes about thirty minutes into the film, as she’s getting her hair styled (complete with clip-on bangs). The man “doing her up” declares, “There’s J. Lo.” Lopez confirms, “There she is.” This assertion that the alter ego of Jennifer Lopez is someone entirely different serves as a launchpad for Lopez to then narrate that the persona of “J. Lo” was a “larger-than-life character” she created to fulfill the ultimate fantasy of who she always wanted to become: rich, famous and powerful. A girl from the Bronx who done good.
As director Jason B. Bergh (who also brought us another J. Lo documentary, Halftime, in 2022) then cuts to images and footage of Lopez from that prime era of “J. Lo,” Lopez explains, “J. Lo was created back then, with those first three albums. This Is Me…Then, ‘Jenny From the Block’ and all that. In a way, she’s kind of a larger-than-life character. It was really me becoming who I always dreamt of being.” Alas, once the impossible dream/expectation becomes a reality, there’s a certain existential crisis that tends to occur. One that is unique to the world of celebrity and something that Taylor Swift spoke on in her own “intimate documentary,” Miss Americana. For Swift, the pivotal moment of her existential dread showed up at the 2016 Grammys, with the singer recalling, “I had won Album of the Year at the Grammys for a second time, which I never thought was a possibility. And I remembered thinking afterward, ‘Oh my god, that was all you wanted. Oh god, that was all you wanted, that was all you focused on.’ You get to the mountaintop and you look around and you’re like, ‘Oh god, what now?’”
For Lopez, that moment likely came with the success of her sophomore album, titled, what else, J.Lo. Released on January 23, 2001, just three days before her then-latest movie, The Wedding Planner, the chart success of the album was further complemented by the fact that The Wedding Planner would top the box office at the same time. An unprecedented coup for a woman who was very much proving her status as a triple threat: actress, singer, dancer. (Way more impressive than Lauryn Hill boasting, “Rapper-slash-actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras.) Remaining her highest-selling record to date, J.Lo did establish that larger-than-life persona Lopez refers to in Greatest Love Story Never Told. It also provided a jumping-off point for her to create entire lifestyle brands around it (similarly to Paris Hilton, who has presently branched out into cookware), from J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez to Glow by JLo—not to mention the recent establishment of her skincare line, JLo Beauty (because everyone who’s anyone has a skincare and/or makeup line now). What’s more, even before Paris Hilton tapped into her highly profitable The Simple Life “character” (which the world wasn’t officially introduced to until December of 2003), Lopez was setting the trend on what it meant to, let’s say, “become the character you always thought you could be.” The avatar of yourself that would sub in for the less glamorous version. This being part of why it’s rather ironic that one of J.Lo’s most well-known singles was titled “I’m Real.”
But, in the end, Lopez appears to want to clarify, there was nothing truly real about “J. Lo” all along. Though, like the portmanteau “Bennifer,” her personal nickname did establish another trend in shortening fellow celebrity names in an equivalent fashion (e.g., J. Law for Jennifer Lawrence). Not to mention Bennifer serving as the genesis for subsequent celebrity couple monikers, including TomKat, Brangelina, Kimye and, more recently, Traylor. Lopez herself even had another couple name with Alexander Rodriguez: J-Rod. (So much for Ben Affleck being a “special” exception for her with Bennifer.) But the artifice of Persona (that’s right, with a capital p) fortified by such names that ultimately function as distancing-from-mere-mortality alter egos seemed, by and by, too much for Lopez to live up to the pressure of. Or so she would have her audience believe in Greatest Love Story Never Told, further expounding, “This Is Me…Now is about truth. And facing the truth of who you really are and embracing that. And the truth is, I’m not the same as I was twenty years ago.” Granted, this isn’t exactly “revelatory,” as few, if any, people stay the same after the passage of two decades, but it is meant to tie into the idea that the construct of “J. Lo” never really existed.
Just as “Britney, bitch” or Paris “That’s Hot” Hilton never did. These latter two 00s personalities also appeared to suffer the same plight as Lopez when she describes, “I was always very much about show business. Put your best foot forward, don’t let them see when you’re suffering, don’t let them see when you’re hurt… Like, that’s what my life was. But then I realized that I wasn’t being kind of authentic to myself” (emphasis on the Freudian slip choice of words “kind of”—because, in the present climate, “kind of authentic” is better than full-stop inauthentic). The same epiphany eventually descended upon Hilton and Spears (finally “allowed” to be authentically herself after being freed from her oppressive and never-should-have-happened conservatorship).
And while some are still calling bullshit on J. Lo’s so-called authenticity with This Is Me…Now (see: The New York Times headline, “Jennifer Lopez and This Is Me…Now: Is She For Real?”), but it can at least be said that perhaps she’s angling closer to (some iteration of) the truth about who she really is. Or, rather, as close to “the truth” that a celebrity who’s been, for so long, larger-than-life can get. Or, as occasional J. Lo nemesis, Madonna, once put it, “I am going through the layers and revealing myself. I am on a journey, an adventure that’s constantly changing shape.” In the erstwhile J. Lo’s case, however, that shape remains consistently curvaceous.
