Transcript: Culture Chat — Jennifer Lopez’s baffling ‘This is Me . . . Now’

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture Chat — Jennifer Lopez’s baffling “This is Me . . . Now”’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show. This week we are talking about Jennifer Lopez’s new musical film This Is Me . . . Now: A Love Story, which accompanies her new album, This Is Me . . . Now. The movie is a surreal musical odyssey through her literal heart and mind about her quest to find love and to love herself. It’s inspired by her relationship with her husband, the actor Ben Affleck, who she was engaged to in 2002, split from and reunited with about 20 years later. She self-funded the film and it cost her $20mn. The film is wild, and some critics have been left confused by what it actually is.

So today we’re gonna talk about it. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is me . . . now. Joining me in New York, I have the comedians and hosts of the wonderful podcast Celebrity Memoir Book Club. They read celebrity memoirs so we don’t have to — Ashley Hamilton and Claire Parker. Today, they’re here to get it right. They used to have a little, now they have a lot. I don’t know. 

Ashley Hamilton
Can I say? Both true. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, Ashley. Welcome. 

Ashley Hamilton
Hi. Thank you for having me. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks for being here. Claire, welcome to the show. 

Claire Parker
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to talk about this. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So are we. So can I ask both of you what your topline reaction to this musical film was? I listened to your episode on her memoir from a couple of years ago. And you’ve really . . . It was scathing. (Laughter)

Ashley Hamilton
OK. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is this along the same lines for you? 

Ashley Hamilton
No.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Ashley Hamilton
Yes. (Laughter) The thing is, I think that she does a phenomenal job of making stuff that is not good. And I think that what happened here is that this is a bad project with bad songs and bad concepts that, like, is . . . 

Claire Parker
And a lot of AI, can I say? I found this to be a very important piece of, I’m gonna call it content because I don’t want to call it art necessarily, but I think it was an important movie that sheds a lot of light on the question, will AI take our jobs? I think if we had actually done less AI set building and actually just gone to some of the incredible set builders of Broadway, for $20mn. So I will say, to bring you back to your first question, we read her memoir, which is more than anything, a concert magazine that, I don’t know if she’s aware she put out. The premise of it is that she’s been looking for love the whole time, and she was always looking in the wrong ways, and now she’s finally found it.

And I think J Lo really represents a problem I have right now that I think is brought on by, like, the content hunger machine of you have to constantly be reinventing yourself in this way where you’re like, everything I said before was wrong, but now I’ve got it figured out. And then six months later, you have to come back and be like, no, no, no, no, OK, I wasn’t right then either. But now I have found love and it’s always like, I see it with Demi Lovato. I see it with the Smith family, I see it with health influencers who are like, if you cut out sugar and carbs and wheat and blinking, you feel so good. And then a year later they’re like, well, I didn’t have dreams for a year. And I also was waking up shaking every night. But now I figured out.

Ashley Hamilton
But the thing is, that you’re leaving out is that like, every time they recalibrate and re-present the way to live, the way to be, the things they’ve learned, there’s always a product attached. Like, it is a sales tactic to say like, the problem I had is a problem I invented for myself that I have now solved for me and for you, with the price of four easy payments of whatever. And so . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so her product though is her album and her movie, but that’s like a product that, I mean, she puts things out. 

Ashley Hamilton
And that’s what everyone does. But she keeps on reselling the exact same thing. 

Claire Parker
What she’s selling here is this idea that she’s gone from pop star to artist. She is selling with this new movie this idea that I, you know, I’ve always sang, I’ve always told you about my life, but now I’m gonna tell you what it was really like. And what she has presented feels so tinny, so high-clicking, an empty can of tuna fish to me, that I’m just like J Lo, why not just . . . The idea that she needed $20mn to tell you about her authentic self feels in itself preposterous. 

Ashley Hamilton
And like I said, this is the epic culmination of a career that has said all of those things. So to me, it almost isn’t a reselling of a new and different idea. It is the magnum opus of a career that has kind of said not a lot. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. My heart’s beating very fast right now. I think because I am a J Lo apologist. I loved this movie. (Laughter)

Ashley Hamilton
I did too. And . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think, well, I think . . . 

Claire Parker
And I respect J Lo. I mean, I do think she is an incredibly hardworking person, but for me, I think the problem with J Lo is that she cannot figure out why she’s working so much harder than everybody else, and not the best . . . like, she wants to be the best, so why can’t she be? And I think that that’s the problem for me. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting. I feel like you guys are expecting a lot from her though. Like, I don’t really actually expect too much from J Lo other than to be really an incredible performer, which I think that she is. Like, what makes somebody a talented performer or entertainer? They, like, look good. They dance well, they sing well enough. They enable us to have fun. They, like, give us someone to root for externally and in ourselves. Like, I almost don’t mind if that stuff is artificial. It feels irrelevant to me. 

Claire Parker
I think she minds, and that’s my problem. That’s what this whole movie was about, is that she minds. She can’t just be this great performer. There has to be this deeper meaning about how she found love. And she . . . If you found love, why don’t you, why don’t you just go home and hang out with him? Why do you need me at home to know it? 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can we give listeners a little more context? OK. So this is a . . . 

Ashley Hamilton
Yes.

Claire Parker
Oh, but can we? I mean, that’s a real question, not “may we?” Like, is there a way to give context to what we saw? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Let me give it a shot and then you can add in. So this is a 65-minute film. It’s full of musical numbers. It’s like this sort of metaphorical journey through her love life. You see her different relationships and them falling apart. You see her many marriages. She calls it a therapy musical biopic. But basically, it’s kind of a series of music videos mixed with an action movie mixed with an animated fairy tale held together by a self-help narrative and a number of celebrity cameos. 

Ashley Hamilton
Yeah, so it cuts back and forth between her actual love life, a dream interpretation of her love life, and then it cuts to her gods, her angels looking at her from atop a mountain, and that’s most of the celebrity cameos. And they’re looking down on her life, you know, as her as, like, the ears, the little devil, an angel on her shoulder, whatever. And . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And that’s like Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah. 

Ashley Hamilton
Post Malone . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, Post Malone. 

Ashley Hamilton
Keke Palmer . . . (Laughter)

Claire Parker
I will say, Keke Palmer is a star that cannot be smited. She stands out. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Kim Petras was I think was in it. 

Claire Parker
She is incredible. Oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I did feel when I was watching it, like, OK, this is a star who has the fame of someone like Beyoncé. I think she’s as famous as Beyoncé. And she has this sort of like multiple, triple threat, multiple thing, in that she’s an actress and, dancer and a performer and a singer and all those things. And yet when Beyoncé comes out with a product, often it’s like a nuanced take on race in America or like, some, like, questioning what it means to be a mother or a wife in kind of complex ways. And this was less complex. But she does, I mean, even if she has something less complex to say, why not? I don’t know, there was something sort of, like, fun to me about, like, having her say, like, I’m gonna put $20mn into saying what it is that I want to say about myself. And it’s, like, doesn’t really make a lot of sense. And it’s sort of spotty in this weird way, but, like, you like watching me, right? And I was like, I do like watching you . . .  

Claire Parker
I guess I would say, and so she got to do that. She got to spend her $20mn and say what she wanted to say. Do we all have to now say, well, that’s great.

Ashley Hamilton
Yes.

Claire Parker
And I think that that’s J Lo’s question. You look at that halftime show documentary she put out a while ago about having to split the halftime show with Shakira. And how that nobody’s ever been more offended in their lives. And how it’s so unfair that even though she’s worked so hard and she wants it so bad, she doesn’t have an EGOT and I think is that, are people entitled to EGOTs?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Great question.

Claire Parker
And that’s the question on J Lo’s life. And my answer is unfortunately no. You get to have $500mn instead. I’m sorry. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, let’s do a quick 101 on J Lo’s career. Can you both help? You’re both experts in pop culture. 

Ashley Hamilton
I believe she was a dancer turned actress who was cast in Selena. And then because of that movie, they were like, oh, she can sing. And they had some songs that she was kind of thrust into the pop machine and that . . . as pop music was really launching it to a new place following Mariah Carey’s departure from Columbia Records, she was brought in to sort of be the new Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey, obviously a legendary . . .  

Claire Parker
Vocalist and songwriter. 

Ashley Hamilton
Vocalist, songwriter, musical artist. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. And from there she becomes like a pop sensation, right? She’s got hits like “Waiting for Tonight”, “Jenny from the Block”. She’s an actress in romcoms in the early 2000s. Then alongside all of it, she stays in the public consciousness because of her personal life. She’s like, married four times. She’s married to Marc Anthony. She’s engaged to the baseball player A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez. Recently, she comes back to Ben Affleck. Maybe you can give us the background quickly on Bennifer? 

Claire Parker
I think in the early 2000s when they were coined as Bennifer, Ben Affleck and J Lo, that was one of the first times we had a couple name.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was the first portmanteau . . . 

Claire Parker
They were the birth of, like, this idea that a couple could be so powerful that you would refer to them as one person. They were so important, and they were such an important piece of like, early 2000s nostalgia as those millennials grew up and people loved them. And then when they got back together, people were going bananas! 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. I mean, like a total pop culture dream. How much fun is that? 

Ashley Hamilton
They recreated a bunch of their early photos together. It was just this crazy moment. 

Claire Parker
But again, that capitalised on the nostalgia of the adoring fans and audience. And I think that that is a point that can’t ever be lost on J Lo, that this idea that all she wants is true love at home, so that then she can take a photo of it and sell it back to us. It is hard to buy into this idea that we’re getting the true depth of J Lo, when she has been so quick to capitalise on it. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. So where we are now is that she’s doing this relaunch. I’m just calling it a relaunch. I don’t know if it is, but it feels sort of like a relaunch in some ways. This movie is one part of a three-part project. It was also an album. The album came out the same time. And then there is this film, and then a documentary is coming out in a couple weeks about the making of the film. 

Ashley Hamilton
I will be tuning in. 

Claire Parker
Can I say, I saw a little teaser for that, and that’s what kind of, I said, come on, where she’s like, nobody really knew what was going on. And I was like, I did know. You actually sold it to me. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. With all of that in mind, why do you think this project is happening now? What do you think she’s trying to tell us about where she’s going? 

Ashley Hamilton
I could quite honestly never predict what will happen next. I do think what she’s trying to do is say, I’m a serious artist, too. I think she’s been trying to say that for years. And like you said, why can’t stuff just be fun? I agree. I wish that she could just say I’m a performer and we’re having a good time. Let’s get loud, baby. But instead she’s saying, respect me as an artist and I can’t . . .  

Claire Parker
I think she’ll always pursue global domination. I mean, that is something that I think she desperately wants, and she will go at it. And from every angle she can think of, I think she’ll keep being self-referential. She’s created this, like, entire J Lo ecosystem. I know, like, the Bennifer 2.0 engagement was sent out in a video in the J Lo newsletter that you had to go to JLo.com . . . I mean, the way that she creates content that then filters down through three levels of, like, J Lo . . . 

Ashley Hamilton
Subscriptions.

Claire Parker
Yeah. She wants you to shop the J Lo brand sofa at the J Lo department store at the J Lo mall, but that’s only playing J Lo music that’s explaining why now she’s learned to love herself, I mean . . . And that’s what she wants. And God bless her, I hope she gets it. And she wants J Lo country. And I’m having . . . I mean, she’s a great dancer. She’s a beautiful woman. And I like some of the J Lo songs. 

Ashley Hamilton
Me too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I was watching on the train right here, I was watching her Super Bowl halftime show, and there’s this moment before she goes on stage. This is like, backstage and she’s sort of like doing her move, like, preparing. And it was sort of like, she thought, I don’t know, she probably didn’t think she was alone, but it seemed like she thought she was alone. And she was sort of . . .  

Ashley Hamilton
She has not been alone . . . in years. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Practising. Yeah. It’s true. But it felt a little like, it was a reminder that this is a woman who’s working very, very, very hard and has been working very hard for a long time. I think that feels a little bit like what you’re pushing back at is that she’s trying to prove something when really her just being a really hard worker and going on and dominating that performance, like it was an incredible performance . . . is maybe what we might want more of from her. 

Claire Parker
Yeah, I think we have to live in this world where the benefit or the prize you get for being someone who works really hard and being a great performer is that you put on a great show and you get to have $500mn. I think this idea that if you just work hard enough, you should get to be lauded as the greatest human connector of all time, no, some things, you don’t get to have everything. I also think right now we’re in this interesting point where we’re watching these household celebrities that are at the end of the era of being like a true star. We don’t have a Tom cruise anymore. We’re never gonna have another Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck or . . .  

Lilah Raptopoulos
Brad Pitt . . .  

Claire Parker
Brad Pitt. That’s right. Yeah. And I think you look at someone like J Lo who did come from the end of that era, you look at someone like Will Smith who came from the end of that era, and they’re trying to figure out how to stay relevant by adopting the new methods of culture, which is the person-to-person vlog. And I saw a lot of that in the teaser for the new J Lo documentary about the behind the scenes, about the heartbreak. She’s gonna be like for the first time, I want you guys to know the truth of my career is I’ve always been scared and I’m like, I guess, like, was that part of your appeal? Did we not know that sometimes you’re nervous? I feel like you (inaudible) . . . I don’t know, I guess I could have guessed that you wanted it bad and you cared a lot, but I think her and Will Smith, you see them both trying this thing of being like, how do I open up, when the truth is the type of person who gets to the top like that is just different than you and me. A normal person does not have 30 years of pinnacle fame. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Also, I think a lot of, like, we forget that these people, like, it’s sort of, it feels almost exciting when we watch them be real people, and we think they’re gonna say something that relates to us or reflects us, and sometimes they do. But also, you remember, like, these are people who haven’t been to a supermarket in decades.

I am curious, like, with all of that in mind and with, like, all that you both know about celebrity, you know, J Lo’s 54 . . . that we don’t have like a great legacy of like how women pop stars age in this country and how they can like kind of age gracefully in the eyes of America or whatever. I don’t think that’s an easy thing. And I’m curious, like, what do you, I guess, what do you want to see?

Claire Parker
Yeah, I mean, I have to say like, a halftime show — a halftime show without the documentary about the halftime show. I want to see the results of hard work through, she has incredible performance. I mean, watching her in that factory, which was one of the scenes and that little, like, tank top just wailing on the ground. She’s a great dancer. She’s a great performer. She’s beautiful. I mean, she’s so strong. I would love to watch the product without having to be reminded of how much she deserves my admiration. 

Ashley Hamilton
I feel like my dream is that when people reach the height of success, where you never need to earn another dollar in your life for your children’s children’s children to continue being extremely rich, like, just make stuff that you like. That’s what authenticity is. But they don’t have authentic selves anymore. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Do you have any, as I guess my last question, are there any pop stars or celebrities that you feel like really did that right? 

Ashley Hamilton
Sheryl Crow. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really? Ashley. Claire, this was so fun. We will be back in just a second for More or Less. 

[BEHIND THE MONEY TRAILER PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where each guest says something that they want more of or less of culturally. Ashley, what do you have? 

Ashley Hamilton
I would like more dancing. I did not love the choreography in JLo’s movie, but I love dance-heavy music videos and choreography, heavy performance. And it left me wanting more. Dancing. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, it’s funny. This was my more too. I have a different one too. But that was like, God, what happened to synchronised dancing? Why did we let go of it? Yeah. 

Ashley Hamilton
I love dancing.

Claire Parker
My more . . . I’m gonna go more. I want more of historically contextualising critiques of what’s going on in the world. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Can you give me an example? 

Claire Parker
I recently went to see the last Sondheim musical, and when I went to read the review of it, I was like, this is exactly what I needed to make sure that I was right about what I felt. And I thought it was like a phenomenal kind of just basis of like, here’s the movies it was based on. Here’s what it was supposed to be about. And I was like, thank you for this. I feel I can better understand what I just saw it and enjoy it deeper now. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. That was Merrily We Roll Along? 

Claire Parker
No, it’s the last one he wrote before he died. It was called Here We Are. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Crazy. And I say crazy because my other more is also about Sondheim. So I got last-minute tickets to Merrily We Roll Along. It’s the big play on Broadway right now, and it has Harry Potter in it, Daniel Radcliffe. And part of what’s unique about that play is that the entire thing goes back in time. You start at the end, sort of, and only go back. And I left and I thought, I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen a plot that did that before, but it seems like a pretty easy way to create like a lot of tension and drama. And it was like I was thinking about it a lot. I know some would say Benjamin Button, but I think it’s different because he’s ageing in reverse and everybody else is just staying the same. I guess I want more going backwards plots. 

Ashley Hamilton
Oh my gosh, you should watch that episode of Seinfeld where they go to India. That’s a backwards plot. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. All right. Also, if listeners have any backward plots for me, please email them along. 

Claire Parker
That is so funny that we’re both on our Sondheim tip. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I know. Amazing.

Ashley. Claire, thank you both so much for coming on the show. This was so much fun. 

Ashley Hamilton
Thank you for having us. 

Claire Parker
Thank you. This is great. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Ashley and Claire’s podcast is again called Celebrity Memoir Book Club. You can listen to it on all platforms. I’ve also linked to it in the show notes. Also in the show notes, we have links to everything mentioned today, as well as a subscription to the Financial Times and ways to stay in touch with me and with the show on email, on Instagram and on X.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday. 

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