Why Jenny From the Block backfired on Bennifer
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“Most artists make crazy art when they’re suffering,” said Jennifer Lopez in 2022. “For me it’s the opposite. When I’m in love is when I’m most inspired.”
It’s a fact the 54 year-old singer/actor/dancer – who has been engaged six times and married four – acknowledges with endearingly self-mocking wit in the video for her new single, Can’t Get Enough. Dressed in a series of sexy wedding dresses, she dances with multiple grooms as cynical guests make bets on how long each union will last before the singer ends up with cake all over her face. She’s promising even more openness – including a scene in which her friends suggest she’s a sex addict – in her upcoming feature length film promoting her ninth album: This is Me… Now, alongside an Amazon Prime film of the same name.
It’s a sequel to her third and best 2002 album This is me… Then which was dedicated to her then-fiancee and – after a surprise 2021 reunion – now-husband, Oscar-winning actor/director Ben Affleck. The pair met on the set of their dire 2002 gangster movie, Gigli, and soon became one of the world’s most gossiped-about couples.
While gossip magazines have been in cahoots with Hollywood’s star making machine since the golden age, Lopez and Affleck got together just as American tabloid culture was at its most prurient. They became the first celebrity portmanteau duo when they were nicknamed “Bennifer” (long before “Brangelina or “Kimye” caught on).
Post 9/11, an anxious populous wanted distraction from frightening geopolitics and social media had yet to take off. Facebook (allowing us to become our own stars or diss others) didn’t launch until 2004. So back when Jen met Ben, people had a lot of love/hate judgement to displace and the media was more than willing to help them channel it. The paparazzi followed the photogenic lovers everywhere, relentlessly invading their privacy and the couple hit back with the video for Lopez’s ear worm single Jenny from the Block, in which the singer claimed that despite her extreme wealth and fame, she hadn’t forgotten her roots.
Described as “the vibe of 2002 in three minutes” by the Pop Literacy podcast, the video spliced scenes of the rebranded “J-Lo” dancing in scenes replicating the South Bronx of her difficult childhood with shots of her and a doting Affleck exchanging luxury gifts and PDAs on luxury yachts. On one level, the video offered a more naive public a quick media awareness lesson in how snapshots didn’t capture reality. We saw Affleck kneel to find and retrieve Lopez’ lost earring turned into a freeze frame shot that made it appear he was proposing. We saw Lopez get something in her eye while the paparazzi’s only take-away was tears.
On another level, considering this was an era when only men were encouraged to flaunt their conquests, J Lo’s boasts were political: “I’m in control and loving it, rumours got me laughing kid.” Here was a confident Latin woman with a trophy white male film star on her arm. Shocker!
But there was also an element of “Look at me!”/ “Don’t look at me!” confusion to the video which reached its zenith as the stunning singer dancing in a fur coat and teeny silver thong while telling us she was “down to earth”.
The same check us out/ back off tension crackled through her showcasing of her romance with Affleck. He appeared with her throughout the video – along with “all the rocks that I got” – as evidence of Lopez’s success. We watched him filling her car with petrol, receiving a watch as a gift and – most famously – kissing the buttocks she recently insured for $28 million, before removing the string of her bikini bottoms as they lounged on the deck of a luxury yacht.
The video, and the music itself, was lampooned by the media when it was released in September 2002.Yahoo Music’s critic called the track “agonizing... a cynical appropriation of hip-hop culture”. The Village Voice didn’t buy Lopez’s attempt to “fast talk herself into authenticity”. Even a decade later the International Business Times sneered that “Poor J-Lo couldn’t lounge on her yacht, be adored in a hot tub, or wear her $1 million engagement ring without someone taking her picture... Lopez deals with the perils of fame the only way she knows how... by taking off most of what she’s wearing.”
Almost exactly a year later, Gigli became one of the most expensive box office bombs ever, failing to reach the box office top 15, although Affleck was paid £12.5million for his role as an incompetent gangster. Jonathan Ross warned viewers that “nothing can quite prepare you for how bad Gigli is”. LA Weekly dismissed it as a “formless windbag of a romantic comedy.” The Telegraph’s critic chuckled that “the screenplay sounds like the product of underwater Chinese whispers between pretentious sex therapists.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Affleck and Lopez’s relationship imploded along with their careers. They cancelled their wedding with four days’ notice and split by 2004, citing media intervention as one of the main causes of their rift. They said they realised the scrutiny was too much when they found themselves hiring three different decoy brides to distract the paps. Although surely there would have been a way for them to swap rings if that was what they really wanted?
Affleck later claimed these moments of staged devotion had “ruined” his career. Film critics certainly equated the publicity around the couple’s romance with the decline of his public appeal. He earned poor reviews for starring roles in Jersey Girl (which also starred J.Lo, though her screen time was halved following Gigli) and Surviving Christmas, the New York Times’s Stephen Holden argued that “Mr Affleck’s talent has curdled as his tabloid notoriety has spread”.
But Affleck had made his name behind the camera. He became (and remains) the youngest person ever to win a screenwriting Oscar (for Good Will Hunting, 1997) and threw himself into directing with the critically acclaimed neo-noir Gone Baby Gone (starring his younger brother Casey) in 2007. Rolling Stone proclaimed the movie “a triumph” for both Afflecks. Though Ben would later go on to struggle with the alcoholism that had afflicted his father. Pictures of him as ‘sad Ben Affleck” became a meme. He later claimed that feeling “trapped” in his 2005-2018 marriage to Jennifer Garner (mother of his three children) had contributed to his drinking.
Despite the mockery, Lopez’s career stayed on a more even keel. She had already earned praise opposite Ralph Fiennes in rom com Maid in Manhattan (2002) with her plucky charisma giving heart to a formulaic plot, and continued to star in a string of rom-coms, while making moderately successful pop. Her fragrance, Glow by J.Lo, became (and remains) the best-selling celebrity fragrance of all time, she released a clothing line, and by the end of 2004 she was making a reported $300 million a year from her lifestyle brands.
At that time the rock and roll hall of fame had only admitted three Latin men – Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia and the late Richie Valens – and no women. In 2002 was the year that Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the Best Oscar actress. Did some people feel Lopez was too successful? When she released her second album, J-Lo (2001) she became the only female artist to this day to have both a number one album and a number one film, The Wedding Planner, at the same time.
Reflecting on that period in her 2022 Netflix documentary, Halftime, Lopez reminds viewers of the anti-Latina prejudice experienced throughout a career of relentless hard graft. We’re shown clips of talk show hosts mocking her curves and comic cartoon South Park’s racist caricature of Lopez singing a song called “Taco Tasting Kisses”. (The racism was also ignorant – tacos are Mexican, not Puerto Rican.)
Although it’s difficult to feel too sorry for a woman who’s now so fabulously wealthy she has jewels encrusted on her coffee cups, the film reminds us that she had a hard scrabble upbringing as the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants. Her strict mother beat her so often she left home at 18, but worked hard to become a “triple threat” singer/ dancer/actor. She danced back up for MC Hammer, Janet Jackson and the UK’s Samantha Fox and used a small role in the TV show South Central before landing a major movie career when she starred in a 1997 biopic about murdered Latin music star Selena Quintanilla-Perez. J.Lo’s electric charisma in the role was undeniable and there’s an extent to which she incorporated the late Latina singer’s passionate personality into her own as she moved into the pop charts.
Lopez was in her early 30s when she made Jenny from the Block. She was turning 50 as she made Halftime, which charted her dashed hopes of winning an Oscar/ Golden Globe for her powerful turn as a stripper-turned-thief in Hustlers and her Super Bowl performance with Shakira in 2020, during which she made a political statement about the treatment of Latin people in America by featuring a choir of young girls in cages. To date, Lopez has sold 80 million records (and 15b streams) and is estimated to have made at least $94 million from her movies.
Inspiring older women around the world, Lopez believes that her fifties are her most powerful decade yet. In 2022 she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that although she’d been forced to hide a significant amount of pain along the way, she’s gained confidence and is clearly still a physical force to be reckoned with, to which her incredible athletic performance in Hustlers can attest. On a recent appearance on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, Affleck joked that while he has to watch what he eats, his wife can still pile in the junk food without piling on the pounds. Unjust!
What fans love and critics hate about J-Lo is the confidence with which she just throws herself out there. Back in 2002 she dedicated her whole album to Affleck. The album included a song called ‘Dear Ben’ on which she gushed about her lover as “My lust, my love, my man, my child, my friend, and my king”. In her new film, This is Me Now: A Love Story, she ribs her image as a hopeless romantic with endearing self-awareness. In a scene with her therapist, who advises her to attend Love Addicts Anonymous, Lopez says: “I know what they say about hopeless romantics, that they’re weak. But I’m not weak. It takes strength to keep believing in something after you keep falling flat on your face.”
Today the couple appear strong enough to wink at the paparazzi which once pulled them apart. Affleck is slated to appear in the promotional video for his wife’s new album, which contains a song called Dear Ben (pt II). In a recent interview with Vogue, Lopez surprised fans by confessing she’d be up for making a sequel to Gigli. She clearly enjoys working with her husband. “I love anything that we can do together,” she said this month, “it’s a joy for me.”
This is Me...Now and This is Me Now: A Love Story (Amazon Prime) are both released tomorrow
