Review Writing of Quarterly Film And Video, The Hollywood Latina Body As Site of Social Struggle - Review Writing Assignment Help

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Entertainment

It was the Entertainment Weekly photographs that clinched it. When actress Jennifer Lopez graced the October 9, 1998 Entertainment Weekly cover and headlined that week’s cover story on entertainment industry divas, the cover and inside photos were unusual, even as far as cheesecake photos go. The cover photograph consisted of Lopez wearing only a pair of black tights and a satisfied smile and posed with her back to the camera, a pure fetishization of her posterior. The photo inside was in the same vein, covering two pages and set up like a centerfold; Lopez’s rear end filled a good deal of the right-hand page. The headline superimposed on top, “From here to divanity,” reiterated that Lopez had arrived as a celebrated, or at least heavily hyped Hollywood body.

This media text was just one artifact of the overall publicity surrounding Puerto Rican actress Jennifer Lopez during late 1998 that focused on her prodigious backside and her expressed satisfaction with it, publicity which begs exploration of the complex interplay of ethnicity and stardom in the media construction of the so-called crossover of Latino and Latina film stars who become popular with mainstream audiences. This publicity was especially remarkable in this regard because of its timing; it surfaced at a time when Lopez’s position in the Hollywood mainstream was arguably becoming more solid and less dependent on playing sexualized or stereotypical Latina roles. Lopez’s film, Out of Sight (Dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1998), opened June 26, 1998, to extremely positive reviews and decent, though less than stellar, box office returns. In this film, Jennifer Lopez’s ethnicity is but a side note. While Lopez had managed to play non-compromising Latinas on the screen up to this time (consider the roles of Tejano superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez in Selena (Dir. Gregory Nava, 1997) and documentary film director Terri Flores in Anaconda (Dir. Luis Llosa, 1997)), with this role she proved her bankability in a crossover role in an A-list film and became the first Latina to earn over a million dollars with her reported $2 million salaries (Bardin). With these successes, Lopez became an anomaly in the traditionally white space of the Hollywood mainstream, a Puertorrique˜na among the ranks of A-list actresses

In October and November 1998, dozens of newspapers, entertainment magazines, and entertainment-oriented television programs around the country and the world reported the news of Jennifer Lopez’s large and well-rounded buttocks and lack of desire to change her body to conform to Hollywood ideals, a discourse that appeared at best ambivalent with respect to her rising power in the Hollywood scene. To provide a thumbnail overview of the media coverage, multitudes of newspaper columnists, many adding their own commentary to the discourse, wrote about the aforementioned Entertainment Weekly story and photos and what they described as the new, public obsession with Lopez’s rear end. Christopher Goodwin of London’s Sunday Times, for example, praised “Jennifer Lopez’s bottom, her backside, her butt, her rear, her rump, her posterior, her gorgeously proud buttocks, her truly magnificent, outstanding booty” (Style 6). And television notables were not to be left out of the fray. Jay Leno, after waxing poetic on the virtues of the Jennifer Posterior, twirled Lopez when she came on to the stage of his late-night talk show so that his life and television audiences could get an eyeful. Saturday Night Live even spoofed Lopez when guest host Lucy Lawlessportrayed her with a gargantuan rear end and ego in a skit during an October 1998 episode.

The public obsession with Jennifer Lopez’s backside during this period merits analysis as a dominant aspect of the star discourse that has positioned Lopez as a crossover figure. Minimal research bears out that Lopez currently is the most powerful Latina actress in Hollywood aside from Cameron Diaz (“Star Power® ’99”), at a time when there still is a paucity of Latina actresses even considered for speaking roles in films. This is an accomplishment not to be taken lightly. As RichardDyer asserts star images serve as definers of power and identity for a society (Heavenly). Nonwhite stars have particular salience in this regard, given that social and racial hierarchies are both reflected in and reinforced by a nation’s system of stardom. The construction of Lopez’s stardom and apparent bicultural appeal to both Latino and non-Latino audiences thus deserves closer scholarly scrutiny as a case study both of the media construction of Latino crossover celebrity and\ of the social climate of the star system in general with respect to racial and social hegemony.

Star studies scholars tend to define a star as a film actor who becomes the object of public fascination to the extent that, according to Christine Gledhill, “their offscreen lifestyles and personalities equal or surpass acting ability in importance” (xiv). The opportunity to attain star status generally comes with being cast in psychologically or romantically compelling lead roles in films, as well as though being given star treatment publicity in the entertainment media. Stardom also is much more than media representation; it is a dynamic process of productionactivity on the part of media industries, media texts that makeup star images, and audience reaction. An understanding of this complexity highlights how star images both reflect and influence social attitudes and illuminates the political importance of crossover stardom. For while the crossover is defined most simply as the process of becoming popular with a new audience, with respect to film stars often is used, particularly by the entertainment news media, to refer non-white performers who succeed in becoming popular with white audiences. Given this definition, Jennifer Lopez can be seen as a promising case study of both the phenomenon of crossover and of its roots within the general popular culture.

According to interviews, Jennifer Lopez had a middle-class upbringing in the Bronx, the daughter of a kindergarten teacher and a businessman. Lopez acted her first film role at the age of 16, in a small part in a film that was not widely released, My Little Girl (Dir. Connie Kaiserman, 1986), but she became a blip on the entertainment publicity radar in 1990, when she won out over 2000 hopefuls to become a “Fly Girl” dancer on Fox Television’s Afrocentric comedy series In Living Color. Her exposure on In Living Color, which aired from 1990 through 1994, led to further roles on television and in such films as Mi Familia/My Family (Dir. Gregory Nava, 1995) and Money Train (Dir. Joseph Ruben, 1995). All of this culminated in Lopez snagging the star-making role of slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla Perez in the Gregory Nava-helmed film Selena, which was released in March 1997.

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