++In this house, we believe that high rents fuel nativist backlashes. +
++The United States needs more immigrants. But at the moment, it does not especially want them. +
++The country’s fertility rate has fallen far below the replacement level. Absent immigration, our nation will grow older and smaller simultaneously. In that scenario, a shrinking population of prime-age workers would need to support a ballooning population of retirees. Growth would slow, productivity would fall, and deficits would swell. +
++The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently illuminated these realities. In an update to its 10-year economic forecast released February 7, the CBO reported that America’s gross domestic product would be $7 trillion higher — and the federal deficit $1 trillion lower — than it had previously anticipated. This pleasant surprise came courtesy of the past year’s surge in immigration: Due to that uptick in new arrivals, the US is now on track to have 5.2 million more workers by 2033 than previously projected. That will increase the amount of goods and services the economy can produce and improve the nation’s ratio of laborers to retirees. +
++Even as the case for large-scale immigration has become stronger, however, political appetite for it has grown weaker. In Gallup’s polling, the share of Americans who want immigration levels “decreased” rose from 28 percent in 2020 to 41 percent in 2023. By contrast, only 26 percent of 2023 respondents wanted to increase immigration. +
++This restrictionist mood is apparent in polls focusing on the 2024 presidential race. In a recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey of swing states, voters said they trusted Donald Trump over Joe Biden on immigration by a 22-point margin, 52 to 30 percent. And this was, if anything, an unusually positive result for the president: An NBC News poll released this month found voters favoring Trump over Biden on immigration by 35 points. +
++This fundamental tension — between a growing economic need for immigrants and burgeoning political backlash against mass immigration — is common to virtually all wealthy countries. The world’s 15 largest economies all have below-replacement fertility rates and aging populations. Yet a wide variety of those countries have recently imposed new immigration restrictions, and right-wing nationalist parties have gained ground in elections. +
++Overcoming this nativist backlash is a political imperative. We cannot ensure America’s future prosperity — or provide a home to the many millions who will be displaced by climate change — without fostering more pro-immigrant politics. +
++Precisely how liberals can go about doing this is hard to say. Much of today’s backlash is rooted in the peculiar challenges of asylum policy. In 2022, 2.9 million people applied for asylum, the most since at least 2000, according to the United Nations. In 2023, another 1.7 million submitted applications. +
++A large surge in asylum claims presents difficulties that an ordinary expansion of immigration does not. Governments can control the number of documented immigrants they admit annually and give preferential treatment to those who meet pressing national needs. Documented immigrants also have the right to work and impose no special burden on a nation’s judicial system or fiscal resources. They don’t need their legal status adjudicated in court and tend to have a more positive impact on the government’s finances than native-born Americans. +
++By contrast, states can control neither the number of people who claim asylum at their borders nor the skills or age profile of that population. Asylum seekers are also typically denied work permits while they await the final adjudication of their cases, which can take years. This takes a toll on the resources of the municipalities where they live. Chicago and New York City have struggled to maintain social services for their permanent residents amid large inflows of asylum seekers, with NYC spending $1.4 billion on caring for migrants, according to the mayor’s office. Predictably, the politics of immigration in the Empire State have turned rightward in response. +
++In a perfect world, liberals could mitigate all these challenges by dramatically expanding opportunities for immigration and investing in more robust administrative systems for screening, resettling, and integrating asylum seekers. In our actual world, Democrats can’t even get Republicans to support their own party’s preferred reforms to the asylum process, thanks in part to Trump’s demagogy. +
++But there is one area where many Democrats are making the politics of immigration more toxic without any help from Trump’s GOP: By suppressing housing construction through restrictive zoning laws, deep-blue municipalities are engineering a situation in which immigrants genuinely threaten the economic interests of native-born residents. If liberals want their country to be more welcoming of immigrants, they need to make their cities’ housing stock more accommodating of newcomers. +
++The economic case against immigration is weak (unless you make it illegal to build apartments) +
++In recent years, commentators on both the left and right have called the economic benefits of immigration into question. They’ve noted that Americans benefit from tight labor markets, in which firms must bid against each other for a scarce pool of workers. Large inflows of immigrant laborers undermine the bargaining power of native-born workers, the theory goes, thereby depressing wages and increasing unemployment. +
++One may be able to find evidence of this phenomenon in discrete industries, but there’s little basis for believing that it holds at the level of the economy writ large. The tightness of labor markets is not determined by the supply of labor alone. If that were true, then America’s median wage would have steadily declined — and its employment rate steadily risen — as its population increased over the 20th century. But the baby boomers’ mass entrance into the labor force did not, in fact, trigger a second Great Depression in the 1960s. +
++This is because the labor market is also affected by the demand for workers’ labor. Immigrants may expand the size of the workforce, but they also increase demand for goods and services. Ultimately, fiscal and monetary policy shape the balance between labor demand and supply far more than immigration admissions do. If you understimulate the economy, you can have high unemployment amid a mass exodus of immigrant workers (as occurred during the Great Depression). If you ramp up government spending, on the other hand, you can have low unemployment amid a large increase in immigration (as we’ve seen during the post-Covid boom). +
++For these reasons, a wide variety of studies and meta-analyses have found that immigrants do not generally reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born workers. +
++But rents and home prices are a different story. +
++In principle, there is no reason why population growth must push up the cost of shelter. Immigrants need homes — but they are also disproportionately likely to work in construction and, thus, increase the economy’s home-building capacity. +
++The problem arises when governments effectively prohibit the supply of housing from rising in line with demand. Between 2012 and 2022, Americans formed 15.6 million new households but built only 11.9 million new housing units. As a result, even before the post-lockdown surge in migration, there were more aspiring households than homes in America’s thriving metro areas. +
++This was largely a consequence of zoning restrictions. Municipal governments have collectively made it illegal to erect an apartment building on about 75 percent of our country’s residential land. In large swaths of the country, there are households eager to rent or buy a modest apartment, and developers eager to provide them, but zoning restrictions have blocked such transactions from taking place. +
++This creates a housing shortage. You can house 32 families much more quickly and cheaply by building a single apartment building than by erecting 32 separate houses. To require all of your community’s housing units to be single-family homes isn’t all that different from prohibiting the manufacture of all non-luxury cars. In both cases, you end up with artificial scarcity and unaffordability. +
++If private builders were allowed to respond to rising demand — while the government ensured the provision of housing to those unable to pay market rents — we could have large increases in immigration without any uptick in housing insecurity. In our current reality, the rise in asylum seekers has coincided with a record spike in homelessness and persistently high housing costs. +
++It is hard enough to sustain popular support for large-scale immigration when there aren’t major economic downsides to that policy. Add legitimate concerns about housing costs to perennial anxieties over cultural change, and it becomes difficult for even the most pro-immigration societies to avoid a nativist backlash. Or at least, this is what recent events in Canada suggest. +
++Why Canada is getting colder on immigration +
++Canada has long been considered an exceptionally pro-immigrant country. Yet it has struggled to sustain popular support for liberal immigration policies amid its deepening housing shortage. Canada’s experience therefore serves as a cautionary tale for American progressives: If we allow municipalities to suppress housing construction, then ridding our nation’s mainstream politics of Trumpian xenophobia and electing a vigorously pro-immigrant administration will not be enough to avert popular demands for restricting immigration. +
++Until recently, Canada’s immigration politics were the envy of US cosmopolitans. In 2016, while many other nations were trying to repel Syrian refugees, the Canadian government couldn’t find enough displaced families to meet the public’s demand for sponsoring them. Since 2019, the country has welcomed more refugees than any other nation, and done so with minimal public outcry. +
++Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to capitalize on his country’s multicultural openness by putting immigration expansion at the center of his vision of economic growth. Canada welcomed 471,550 new permanent residents in 2023, up from 300,000 in 2015. +
++And that figure does not include foreign students, temporary workers, and refugees, who together constitute an even larger group of new arrivals. In 2025 and 2026, the government aims to admit 500,000 new permanent residents each year. +
++But in recent months, the political sustainability of Trudeau’s plan has come into question, in no small part because immigration’s impact on housing costs has come under scrutiny. +
++Rents have soared across Canada in recent years. From 1990 to 2022, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the country increased at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent. In 2023, it rose by 8 percent. The government estimates that it will need to add 3.5 million extra housing units by 2030 to make shelter affordable. But a recent report from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce suggests that this underestimates the housing shortage by 1.5 million units, a shortfall driven by an undercount of nonpermanent immigrants, who have been entering the country in massive numbers. +
++Trudeau has sought to promote housing construction in various ways. But his administration’s efforts have yet to offset the impact of years of highly restrictive zoning in many of Canada’s largest population centers. +
++As Canadians bid against each other for an inadequate supply of housing units, they’ve soured on immigration. +
++In a 2022 poll from the Environics Institute for Survey Research, Canadians disagreed with the statement that there was too much immigration in their country by a margin of 42 points. One year later, that margin had shrunk to 7 points, the largest single-year shift in the survey’s history. Among Canadians who said immigration levels were too high, the most commonly cited reason by far was that immigrants drive up housing prices. +
++In response to these changing political winds, the Trudeau government has sought to restrict admissions of international students while imploring universities to provide dedicated housing for their enrollees. But this minor concession to the nation’s restrictionist mood appears insufficient. The prime minister’s approval rating has sunk in recent months, with 64 percent of Canadians now disapproving of his performance. Meanwhile, Canada’s Conservative Party has ridden the housing and immigration issues to a strong advantage over Trudeau’s Liberals in the polls. +
++Abundance is possible, but scarcity seems popular +
++There are many parallels between the politics of immigration reform and those of housing policy. In both cases, countries have the power to swiftly increase their collective prosperity by tolerating some short-term disruptions. When cities let developers build more housing, they not only reduce rent inflation but also increase their tax bases, which makes it easier to fund robust social services. When rich nations let prime-age immigrants settle within their borders, they increase their productive capacity, which makes it more affordable to support retirees. +
++And yet, in both of these policy areas, we routinely opt to make ourselves poorer for the sake of avoiding change. +
++America does not need to choose between expanding immigration and reducing housing costs. But there is a risk that we’ll choose to do neither. +
++Expert knowledge is useful for problem-solving. So is adapting to new challenges. +
++One of the things that human beings seem to fear is uncertainty. Most of us like to know things, and when we don’t know things, we get uncomfortable. And when we’re forced to face the unknown, our response is often to retreat into old ideas and routines. +
++Why is that? What’s so unnerving about ambiguity? +
++Maggie Jackson is a journalist and the author of a delightful new book called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. It makes a great case for uncertainty as a philosophical virtue, but it also uses the best research we have to explain why embracing uncertainty primes us for learning and can improve our overall mental health. +
++So I invited her onto The Gray Area recently to talk about what she’s learned and how to think about it in our practical lives. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. +
++
+Sean Illing +
++How did you come to this topic? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++Reluctantly, to be honest. +
++This is my third book. I’ve been writing about topics that are right under our noses, that we don’t understand or that we deeply misunderstand. The first book was about the nature of home in the digital age. The second book was about distraction, but particularly attention, which very few people could define. +
++And then finally I started writing a book about thinking in the digital age and the first chapter was about uncertainty. And not only did I discover uncertainty hadn’t really been studied or acknowledged, but there’s now this new attention to it. Lots and lots of new research findings, even in psychology. But I was still reluctant. Like many people, I had this idea that it was just something to eradicate, that uncertainty is something to get beyond, and shut it down as fast as possible. +
++Sean Illing +
++So what’s beneath our near-universal fear of the unknown? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++As human beings, we dislike uncertainty for a real reason. We need and want answers. And this unsettling feeling we have is our innate way of signaling that we’re not in the routine anymore. And so it’s really important to understand, in some ways, how rare and wonderful uncertainty is. +
++At the same time, we also need routine and familiarity. Most of life is what scientists call predictive processing. That is, we’re constantly making assumptions and predicting. You just don’t think that your driveway is going to be in a different place when you get home tonight. You can expect that you know how to tie your shoelaces when you get up in the morning. We’re enmeshed in this incredible world of our assumptions. It’s so human, and so natural, to stick to routine and to have that comfort. If everything was always new, if we had to keep learning everything again, we’d be in real trouble. +
++But neuroscientists are beginning to unpack what happens in the brain when we deal with the stress of uncertainty. The uncertainty of the moment, the realization that you don’t know, that you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, instigate a number of neural changes. Your focus broadens, and your brain becomes more receptive to new data, and your working memory is bolstered. Which is why facing uncertainty is a kind of wakefulness. In fact, Joseph Kable of the University of Pennsylvania said to me, “That’s the moment when your brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.” +
++Sean Illing +
++We can think of uncertainty as a precursor to good thinking, and I suppose it is. But that makes it sound a little too much like a passive state, as opposed to an active orientation to the world. Do you think of uncertainty as something closer to a disposition? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++Uncertainty is definitively a disposition. We each have our personal comfort zone when it come to uncertainty, and our impression is that uncertainty is static, that it’s synonymous with paralysis. But when you take up that opportunity to learn the good stress that uncertainty offers you, you actually slow down — there are less snap judgments, you’re not racing to an answer. Uncertainty, in other words, involves a process, and that’s really, really important. +
++The way we think of experts is a good example. We venerate the swaggering kind of expert who knows what to do, whose know-how was developed over the so-called 10,000 hours of experience. But that type of expertise needs updating. That type of expert’s knowledge tends to fall short when facing new, unpredictable, ambiguous problems — the kind of problems that involve or demand uncertainty. +
++So years of experience are actually only weakly correlated with skill and accuracy in medicine and finance. People who are typical routine experts fall into something called carryover mode, where they’re constantly applying their old knowledge, the old heuristic shortcut solutions, to new situations, and that’s when they fail. Adaptive experts actually explore a problem. +
++Sean Illing +
++The idea that not knowing can be a strength does intuitively seem like a contradiction. +
++Maggie Jackson +
++Knowledge is incredibly important. It’s the foundation and the groundwork. +
++But at the same time, we need to update our understanding of knowledge and understand that knowledge is mutable and dynamic. People who are intolerant of uncertainty think of knowledge as something like a rock that we are there to hold and defend, whereas people who are more tolerant of uncertainty are more likely to be curious, flexible thinkers. I like to say that they treat knowledge as a tapestry whose mutability is its very strength. +
++Sean Illing +
++I doubt anyone would argue that ignorance is a virtue, but openness to revising our beliefs is definitely a virtue, and that’s the distinction here. +
++Maggie Jackson +
++It’s really important to note that uncertainty is not ignorance. Ignorance is the blank slate. +
++In child development, there’s an expression called the zone of proximal development, which is usually used as a shorthand for scaffolding. That’s the place where a child is pushing beyond their usual knowledge, they’re trying something complex and new and the parent might scaffold a little bit and help only where necessary, but letting them do the work of expanding their limits. +
++But that’s something we do throughout our whole lives. That zone of proximal development, as one scientist told me, is the green bud on the tree. That’s where we want to be. That’s where we thrive as thinkers and as people. +
++Sean Illing +
++When does uncertainty become paralyzing? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++Forward motion involves choices. Uncertainty is never the end goal. It’s more like a vehicle and an approach to life. Most of the time it’s our fear of uncertainty that leads to paralysis. It’s not the uncertainty itself. If we approach uncertainty knowing it’s a space of possibilities, or as another psychologist told me, an opportunity for movement, then we can be present in the moment and start investigating and exploring. +
++But if we’re afraid of uncertainty, we’re more likely to treat it as a threat. And if we’re more tolerant of uncertainty, we treat it as a challenge. +
++Sean Illing +
++You cite some research about fear of the unknown as at least one of the root causes of things like anxiety and depression. It certainly makes intuitive sense, but what do we know about that relationship? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++This is a very new but rising theoretical understanding of mental challenges in the psychology world. More and more psychologists and clinicians are beginning to see fear of the unknown as the trans-diagnostic root, or at least a vulnerability factor, to conditions like PTSD and anxiety. But by narrowing down treatments to just helping people bolster their tolerance of uncertainty, they’re beginning to find that might be a really important way to shift intractable anxiety. +
++There’s one gold-standard peer-reviewed study by probably one of the world’s greatest experts on anxiety, Michel Dugas. He found that people who were taught simple strategies to try on uncertainty, their intractable anxiety went down. It also helped their depression. And then other studies with multiple different kinds of populations show that focused strategies about uncertainty boost self-reported resilience in patients with multiple sclerosis, who are dealing with a lot of medical uncertainty. +
++Sean Illing +
++It’s just a fact of life that things will change and the world won’t conform to our wishes, and so I feel like we end up going one of two ways: We either embrace the limits of our knowledge or we distort the world in order to make it align with our story of it, and I think bad things happen when we do the latter. +
++Maggie Jackson +
++That’s right. I think it’s also backbreaking work to continually retreat into our certainties and close our eyes to the mutability of the world. +
++I had a real epiphany when I was doing some writing about a Head Start program that teaches people from very challenged backgrounds, both parents and preschoolers, to pause and reflect throughout their very chaotic days. And it seems like something that doesn’t have much to do with uncertainty, but they were basically inhabiting the question even though it was a very difficult thing to snatch these moments of reflection within their lives. +
++In parallel to that, there’s a lot of new movement to understand the strengths of people who live in lower economic situations that are often chaotic. What was amazing to me is that I realized how much I grew up expecting that stability and predictability was just an entitlement. That this is the way we should live, that this is the skill set you need to adapt in order to thrive. Many of us have airbrushed out of our psyches the ability to live in precarious situations. +
++Sean Illing +
++So when someone is confronted with the feeling of fear that comes with not knowing, how should they sit with that? What’s your practical advice? +
++Maggie Jackson +
++Well, first, you can remind yourself that this is your body and brain’s way of signaling that there’s a moment when the status quo won’t do. That this might be uncomfortable, but it’s not a situation or a state of mind that prevents forward progress — it’s actually propelling you forward. +
++It’s truly changed my life writing this book, and it’s taken away a little bit of the fear that I might carry into new situations — from giving a speech to being in the presence of someone who’s very upset. I used to want to just offer a solution, and give that silver lining, and get that moment over with and get them on the road to happiness. And now I feel much more patient. And with that comes the ability to follow a path down an unexpected road, or even take a detour. +
++To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. +
++The bonkers, star-studded musical-biopic-fantasia-mess proves Jennifer Lopez can do whatever she wants. +
++Throughout her career but particularly over the last decade, Jennifer Lopez has earned the title of one of the busiest people in the entertainment industry. From performing at the Super Bowl halftime show to churning out rom-com after rom-com to repurposing “Let’s Get Loud” at a presidential inauguration and headlining a Las Vegas residency, the multihyphenate is truly everything everywhere. +
++It only makes sense that she would tax herself with a superfluous three-part project revamping one of her highest-performing albums, 2002’s This Is Me… Then — not even during its anniversary, by the way — all of which essentially serves to emphasize her persisting dominance in pop culture. (And oh yeah, her current state of bliss with her husband, Ben Affleck.) +
++The first part of this trifecta, which includes a forthcoming documentary and a new album out today, is the Prime Video movie This Is Me… Now: A Love Story. The trippy musical isn’t the sort of high-brow, experimental venture one might expect from a pop star of Lopez’s caliber (think more like a wacky Marvel film than Beyoncé’s Lemonade). If anything, This Is Me… Now is a confirmation of the singer/actress’s elite showmanship and her ability to bounce back as a cultural figure and chronic divorcée. It’s exactly the sort of galaxy-brained project one makes when one has nothing to prove and $20 million to spend — and one is high on love. +
++This Is Me… Now is a messy, green-screen fantasia — but to what end? +
++From the moment the movie trailer dropped on social media, This Is Me… Now seemed primed for jokes about Lopez’s theater-kid-level earnestness and whatever Oscar-winner Ben Affleck planned on doing in the film. (He’s almost unrecognizable as a rambunctious news anchor, in addition to a few other cameos.) +
++On one hand, it is obvious meme material. We’re talking about Lopez here, who has largely opted for maximalism over subtlety as a performer. (This is a woman who inserted a pole-dancing routine from her role in Hustlers into a Super Bowl halftime show, after all.) And as the star of a slew of romantic comedies (Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, Second Act, Marry Me), she’s no stranger to reveling in cheesiness. +
++That being said, the semi-autobiographical movie relies a lot on big metaphors and unsubtle imagery. For example, in a dream sequence, Lopez’s heart is represented by a giant, combustible apparatus operated by dancing factory workers and fueled by rose petals. But it somehow feels right from the brain of such an iconic Leo, known for wearing her heart on her sleeve. +
++The hour-long movie opens with Lopez reciting the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo, two star-crossed lovers from rival tribes. After Alida’s father forbids their romance, Alida prays to the gods for help, who then turn her into a red flower. When Taroo asks the gods to help him find Alida, he is transformed into a hummingbird, leading him on a continual search for his one true love. If you’re fluent in the history of Bennifer and all the tabloid scrutiny that followed the first round of their relationship, you’ll see where all this allegory is going. +
++But before Lopez can reunite with her Prince Charming, we’re taken on a fantastical musical odyssey through her tumultuous, star-studded romantic history. Directed by notable music video director Dave Meyers, the film is admittedly reminiscent of some of his later, less visually appealing work — from the overly glossy, video-game-like sheen to the depressingly gray-and-amber Zack Snyder look of the film. The constantly rotating, borderline nauseating camera angles brought to mind his unfortunate collaborations with Ariana Grande. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25290009/Screen_Shot_2024_02_16_at_2.32.14_PM.png)
Courtesy of Prime Video
++In slightly more grounded moments— if you could describe any part of this film as grounded — Lopez is able to overcome a vexing amount of green screen to convey something real and exciting. In one particularly fun number where she reimagines her three ill-fated marriages, she adds new life to the otherwise middling single “Can’t Get Enough.” In arguably the movie’s most powerful scene, she makes amends with her younger self for putting men before her personal happiness. This is also where she performs the title track “This Is Me… Now,” a standout on an album that doesn’t seem to be brimming with hits. +
++Of course, Lopez’s penchant for astrology is included throughout the film. One of the funniest and most enjoyable aspects is the Zodiac Love Council, who struggle to match Lopez with her one true love. The astrological gods are played by a random but somehow pitch-perfect ensemble of celebrities including Lopez’s Monster-In-Law co-star Jane Fonda, rapper-singer Post Malone, actress Sofia Vergara, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s sweetheart Keke Palmer, comedian Trevor Noah, screen legend Jennifer Lewis, and hyper-pop singer Kim Petras. +
++Oddly enough, these supporting characters have more chemistry than you might expect and are as committed to the bit as Lopez is — and really, isn’t commitment the most you can ask for from an overstuffed vanity project? +
++The movie isn’t as confessional as you may think +
++This Is Me… Now is more disorienting than revelatory. The fast-paced, CGI-on-steroids element feels like a purposeful distraction from the fact that viewers will not learn anything about Lopez’s love life and psyche that she hasn’t been open about before. If you haven’t noticed, she and Affleck have been extremely public about their rekindling. Since reuniting in April 2021, the two have posed on numerous red carpets together, gushed over each other in interviews, starred in Dunkin’ commercials, and even recreated a moment from the “Jenny From the Block” music video on a yacht for paparazzi. +
++The therapy scenes between Lopez and fellow Bronxite Fat Joe are almost entirely played for laughs, revealing nothing novel, despite a perfect opportunity in the film for deeper introspection. Plus, the narrative explored in This Is Me… Now feels similar to many of her albums exploring her mishaps in love, including Love?, her 2011 comeback album. +
++In her 2014 memoir True Love, she takes readers on the same self-love journey, investigating her regrettable approaches to her past relationships and what she describes as a tendency to mistake passion for genuine love. Even a striking sequence in the film where Lopez dances with a volatile partner inside a glass house isn’t particularly shocking, given that in her book, she writes about being “mentally, emotionally, verbally” abused by an unnamed ex. +
++A raw, more transparent piece of art would likely confront the public’s treatment of her love life, given that the media’s ridicule and other external pressures, according to Lopez, were such a huge part of her and Affleck’s initial estrangement. It could at least include a few fun, lighthearted Easter eggs. Perhaps she’s saving more personal anecdotes for her documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, out February 27, but This Is Me… Now seems like a prime vehicle for some juicy details about her past. +
++This Is Me… Now is more about J. Lo’s power as a celebrity than an artist +
++It’s a bit ironic that the thing Lopez’s character overcomes in this film — a need for external validation — is what seems to be driving its existence. It’s hard not to view the movie within the larger context of Hollywood failing to take her seriously as an actress, despite being one of the most bankable movie stars and turning over some genuinely good performances throughout her career. +
++For example, Lopez has been open about the disappointment that was her failed Oscars campaign for the 2019 movie Hustlers, even capturing her tears during nominations morning in her Netflix documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime. While the actress earned other big awards nominations that year, including for the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes — she already has a Golden Globe nomination for the 1997 film Selena — the Hollywood establishment seems hesitant to see her as much more than a commercial star. Such treatment has presumably caused her to feel like an “outsider” in Hollywood. +
++Regardless, it’s hard to point to a moment in time since her breakthrough in the late ‘90s when Lopez’s name has not been in the public conversation, whether for her personal life or professional ventures. +
++Even initially questionable film and television roles, like starring in the NBC cop show Shades of Blue or lending her voice to the Ice Age franchise, now feel like necessary stepping stones in her trajectory. For instance, despite having a spotty, often poorly reviewed filmography, her choices in projects — particularly rom-coms and two-handers — have at least contributed to her specific brand as a movie star. Fans know what to expect from a classic J. Lo movie. It’s why she can star in a chaotic, objectively bad rom-com, like 2022’s Shotgun Wedding, without any expectations beyond being generally entertaining and delivering nostalgia. +
++The same resilience and ingenuity can be seen in her bumpy music career, which saw a downturn in 2007 following the release of her Spanish-language album Como Ama una Mujer and her return-to-pop-R&B album Brave. Her decision to judge American Idol in 2011 — a surprising gig for a pop star at her level of fame — gave her a platform to regain the country’s interest as well as advertise new music. Plus, her Las Vegas residency, All I Have, from 2016 to 2018 would also set the stage for a revival of her musical catalog. +
++All in all, Lopez’s career has demonstrated reinvention and, more importantly, redemption that not many can emulate. Her determination is, of course, the result of a celebrity culture that enjoys building women up until they’re deemed past their prime. For women of color, this cycle can be more brutal. Nevertheless, it’s historically resulted in some of our most fascinating divas and pop cultural stories. +
++This Is Me… Now is a statement of Lopez’s cultural resilience, if not just her ability to rebound from a bad relationship and find herself in another attention-grabbing power couple. She’s the kind of celebrity who can make sense out of any creative decision, including funding a self-important long-form music video based on her therapy sessions. There’s a level of shamelessness (and megalomania) required in crafting a movie like this, but it’s the sort of unabashed confidence that makes our celebrity ecosystem go round. +