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When Billy Campbell -- the co-star of Jennifer Lopez's latest film, Enough -- met the actress for the first time, he greeted her by saying, "Hi, J.Lo." Reportedly, Lopez rolled her eyes, at which point Campbell asked what she'd like to be called. "Jennifer," she replied.
Campbell related this story in a number of recent interviews, and it's hard not to feel for the guy. After all, it's not as though "J.Lo" is an unflattering sobriquet dreamt up by the media and stuck to Lopez like a "Kick Me" sign. Lopez herself drafted the name, along with the accompanying persona: J.Lo, the acting, singing, dancing, clothes-designing, restaurant-opening, Puff Daddy-dating, nipple-exposing celebrity tsunami.
In the ongoing project of buffing her public image, Lopez has of late tried to distance herself from the "J.Lo" persona, but it's much too late for that. Not only has Lopez become a one-woman industry, but her whole schtick is that she is a one-woman industry - the "hardest-working woman in show business," as Us magazine recently dubbed her. These days, stories on Lopez invariably focus on her multi-faceted business ventures. ("We're empire-building here!" her manager bellowed at one cowering reporter.) As a result, Lopez is best known not for what she's done but simply for the fact that she does so much. Those J.Lo tentacles stretch too far to be disentangled now.
One might observe that J.Lo isn't so much a person as a brand, but Lopez has already preempted this contention: J.Lo is, quite literally, a brand, stitched into the labels of Lopez's clothing line. Of course, the J.Lo brand is much bigger than just the clothes. It encompasses everything: the movies, the albums, the videos, the award-show appearances, the hairstyles, the boyfriends, the scandals, and that famous green Versace dress, split deliriously down the middle and magically hovering in place over her last few bits of concealed dignity.
In fact, it's her public exploits, much more than her creative output, that have fueled Lopez's ascent. As recently as 1998, she was just another starlet, a Latina Charlize Theron, desperate enough for exposure to star in a B-movie like Anaconda. Then, in 1999, she did something brazen and, frankly, remarkably smart: she concocted a persona and thrust herself front-and-centre on the public stage.
Her first move was to release an album, which proved an excellent strategy to distinguish herself. Suddenly, she wasn't just Another Aspiring Actress, but rather the Aspiring Actress Who Also Sings. The exact motives behind Lopez's decision to launch a musical career aren't clear. But one suspects that, in part, she understood that when you're invited to both the Oscars and the Grammys, you get twice as many opportunities to wear skimpy dresses and show up in the pages of People.
Next, she dated, then broke up with, Puff Daddy. There was the nightclub shooting scandal, the night spent crying in a holding cell (all dutifully reported on the nation's gossip pages, on which she was now a recurring character). And there was, of course, the famous Grammy dress. In no time, she'd radically increased her public profile. All that was left was to give this new person a name, which Lopez did with the release of her second album in 2001, titled J.Lo. And lo and behold, the J.Lo phenomenon was born.
The ascent of J.Lo seems even more remarkable when you consider that it hasn't been fueled by any remarkable achievements. Her movies have been successful, but she's never had that Pretty Woman-style breakout to trampoline her instantly to fame. Her albums have sold briskly, but their popularity seems driven by the prominence of her persona, rather than the other way around. (It's doubtful that anyone, upon hearing her first single, "If You Had My Love," thought to himself, "What a great song! I wonder who the singer is?")
From a financial point of view, her plan has gone astonishingly well. Her J.Lo album went triple platinum. She now commands $12 million a film. More importantly, she's managed to leap-frog the Charlize Therons and Heather Grahams of the world and establish herself as a singular entity in the celebrity firmament. The brand is thriving.
So why is Lopez trying to put the J.Lo genie back into the bottle? It might be because she's realized something that moviegoers clued in to awhile back: building the J.Lo brand has been great for her profile and her pocket book, but it's begun to hurt her as a movie star.
Lopez has, of late, spun out a string of forgettable, disposable films: The Cell, The Wedding Planner, Angel Eyes and, now, the aptly-titled Enough. A big part of her problem is that her movies no longer feel like movies: they feel like brand extensions. There's no difference between the release of a new Jennifer Lopez vehicle and, say, the launch of a J.Lo cereal - delicious Fruity J. L-Ohs.
The Wedding Planner could just as easily have been called J.Lo Does Comedy, while Enough feels like J.Lo Learns Kick-Boxing. While The Cell was visually remarkable, Lopez's part consisted of little more than appearing decked out in a series of gorgeous feather dresses. These aren't movie roles; they're collectible playsets, like the kind you'd buy for a Barbie doll. Now available: Screwball J.Lo! Tough Cop J.Lo! And the all-new Fight-Back J.Lo, with real scissor-kick action!
The sad news for the moviegoing public is that Lopez once showed real sparkle as an actress. Her greatest movie role to date - the last one, tellingly, before her first record came out - was the 1999 caper film Out of Sight. Under the direction of Steven Soderbergh (who must be the greatest actors' director of all time; the man breathed life into Andie McDowell, for crying out loud), Lopez smoldered as a law-enforcement agent in bed (literally) with George Clooney's dashing crook.
Out of Sight showcased Lopez's greatest asset as an actress: her ability to be both tough and vulnerable, often at the same time. She's one of the few actresses who looks like you could break her heart and she could break your nose, and it's just a question of which will happen first.
In Out of Sight, she peeled her tough exterior away slowly, one layer at a time, in an emotional version of the dance of the seven veils; instead of showing skin, she revealed heart. It's a mesmerizing turn, the quality of which she hasn't approached since - and it's doubtful that she could. In Enough, her role again calls for a one-two punch of toughness and sweetness but, by this point, whatever subtle acting assets she once possessed have been thoroughly wrung through the clumsy machinery of brand management. Now there's no tantalizing layering; instead, her emotional arc is boiled down to: sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, now let's kick some ass!
It's difficult to quantify what, if anything, Lopez sacrificed when she chose to bring J.Lo into the world. Financially, it's been a windfall, and she's as big a star as she ever could have hoped to be. As for fame, she's got plenty. Does she deserve it all? Probably -- she certainly worked for it. But maybe if we scale it back just a bit, she'll stop making those CDs and videos and overpriced crop-tops for tweens, and act in a few good movies. Because for those who are unentranced by the J.Lo sideshow, watching Out of Sight only serves to remind us, rather vividly, of just what we've all lost in this transaction.
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