We live in a society of creative abundance. New books, movies, music and visual art come at us at an almost dizzying clip. Beyond that, a seemingly infinite collection of great works of the past is available, often at the click of a button – a grand, digital Library of Alexandria right at our fingertips. As powerful as many such works are, typically they fit into some concept of genre, adhere to basic strictures of narrative and situate themselves within the boundaries of cognition and sense, if only at their very edge.
Every so often, however, an inscrutable opus comes along – a sweeping, audacious work that defies categorization and remains, in some ways, impenetrable to even the most erudite of cultural scholars. One of these generationally defining works announced itself this week with shock and awe. I am talking, of course, about the trailer for Jennifer Lopez’s upcoming film, This Is Me…Now.
In just over two minutes, this head-spinning marvel of filmmaking takes the viewer on a journey from mountain motorcycle trip to outer space, with pit stops at several weddings and a therapy appointment. The clip (posted above, because seeing is believing, if not understanding) raises more questions than answers: What, exactly, are we looking at? A collection of album visuals? A biopic? A psychological thriller? Some secret, other thing? When did rapper Fat Joe become a therapist? How did noted astrophysicist Neil deGrass Tyson get involved? It’s a wild two minutes that offers only one certainty – whether she’s working a trench coat-draped wet look or a bohemian flower crown, JLO looks every bit the needs-no-introduction icon whose long-ago, body-baring green Versace number launched a billion Google Image searches.
Billed as coming from the “Heart,” “Soul,” and “Dreams” of Jennifer Lopez, this work defies categorization, but not comparison. The modernist literary canon offers an apt analogue in the form of a novel the true meanings of which have stumped readers for generations: James Joyce’s experimental epic, Finnegans Wake.
Trained literary theorists and ambitious amateur readers alike have spent almost a century trying to decode Joyce’s last novel, and, in that almost century, come to little in the way of definitive conclusion. From the jump, Finnegans Wake is a disorienting read. Its opening line – “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” – is a fragmentary sentence whose beginning comes as reward for those who make it to the very end of the novel’s dense 672 pages. In between those first and final lines, there’s plenty of linguistic confusion and at least nine hundred-letter-long words. It is a novel without a discernible narrative and with main characters (if you can call them “characters” in the literal sense) who take on many forms throughout its ponderous length.
In a very reductive sense, Finnegans Wake tells the story of a Dublin couple, Humphrey Chipden Earwicker (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), and their three children, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman and Issy. The family rises to a level of prominence in their community; HCE even earns the nickname Here Comes Everybody (which, incidentally, would be a great title for a JLO album) – until the sins of the father bring about a catastrophic fall.
Joyce being Joyce, HCE’s peccadillos are supposedly sexual in nature, though the presumed facts vary throughout the narrative. While HCE is brought low by “whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park,” the exact nature of the incident is kept maddeningly vague.
Similarly, unspecified ills plague another main character who frequently goes by a three-letter appellation. “I know what they say about me,” JLO declares at the beginning of her trailer, insinuating that vicious whispers of the masses are just one of the many things keeping her up at night. There’s even a Joycean hint of naughtiness to that tongue-wagging; at one point, Lopez walks into an intervention staged by friends who think she “might be a sex addict.” Nothing in JLO’s public history indicates that she operates anywhere near the level of Joyce’s legendary perversions, but perhaps This Is Me…Now will shed new light on the matter.
While readings of Finnegans Wake run the gamut from the theological to the Fenian, many theoretical frameworks agree that the members of its central family are allegorical stand-ins for the human experience. HCE is a chimeric Everyman who is referred to by countless different names, including Humpty Dumpty, Finn MacCool, Tim Finnegan and Mr. Porter. He undergoes multiple cycles of destruction and reconstitution throughout the novel, an endless wheel of sleeping and waking, death and rebirth. Could HCE be a stand-in for Lopez’s seemingly interchangeable, burgundy-suited cinematic paramours? Perhaps.
But This is Me…Now and Finnegans Wake are texts whose richness defies simple, one-to-one comparisons. Just like HCE, JLO wears many hats in her visual bildungsroman. She’s a high-stepping, steampunk factory worker. She’s a backflipping bride. She’s an emotionally exhausted Everywoman on her therapist’s couch. Art (or Amazon Prime vanity project) imitates real life. Lopez’s path to celebrity has had several stopovers, from In Living Color Fly Girl to pop star to compelling cultural icon. We’ve watched, rapt, as she’s climbed the metaphorical Super Bowl Halftime Show Stripper Pole of fame, and we’ve reveled with communal schadenfreude at her pratfalls (Gigli, anyone?), only to celebrate when she ascends again.
The expansive wanderings of the subconscious mind play a large role in the This Is Me…Now trailer. The project does come, after all, “from the dreams of Jennifer Lopez.” Presumably, some of the movie’s stranger set pieces, including something that can best be described as a dystopianSinging In The Rain homage, take place in the Land of Nod. The dreamworld plays a large role in Finnegans Wake as well. At times, Joyce appears to suggest that the urgently needed space for rebirth only exists when one is “afloat in a dream lifeboat.” Some readings suggest that the entire novel takes place in a dreamscape. That would explain much of the shifty opacity of the prose (just as “it’s all a dream” would justify JLO’s sojourn to outer space). Joyce hinted at as much when sniping back at the book's many critics: “They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly during the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?”
That lack of clarity is one of the main joys of Finnegans Wake. While purposeful enigma can certainly frustrate, it can also delight. There is something titillating about a work that poses itself not just as a story, but as a mystery to solve (or to stop reading in exasperation, having overestimated one’s patience for dense, meandering wordplay). Joyce conceals much from the reader in Finnegans Wake. In addition to HCE’s oft-discussed original sin, there’s ALP’s letter about her husband. Her “untitled mamafesta” (another great potential JLO album title) winds up in scraps in a midden heap where it is discovered and reconstituted by Biddy the hen. From then on, the letter’s contents are relayed in several different, conflicting versions. Is the missive a condemnation of HCE, or a vindication? Is ALP a woman scorned or a gal standing by her man? All we have is rumor and report.
In Finnegans Wake, we hear more about ALP than we see of her – not an uncommon trait for women in Joyce’s epic works. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom is presented to the reader through the descriptions of other characters until the book’s orgasmic (literally and figuratively) final chapter, in which she gets the last word. (“Yes.”) Similarly, ALP is the topic of much tongue-wagging discussion in Finnegans Wake. In one of the novel’s most famous chapters, two loose-lipped washerwomen discuss Anna Livia. She is at once “the dearest little moma ever you saw,” and a “queer old skeowsha.” While the two women purport to know ALP, they are unable to paint a portrait of her that isn’t full of contradictions (not to mention the names of a thousand different rivers). ALP contains multitudes – not all of them flattering. Allegorical riverwomen of modernist literature – they’re just like us!
There’s a heady metaphor for celebrity here. Someone as ultra-famous as Jennifer Lopez is as well-known to us as she is fundamentally unknowable. Is she a calculating, calculated, larger-than-life pop diva, or one-time wide-eyed girl-next-door riding an uncontrollable rocket to stardom? Is she both at once? This Is Me…Now promises an intimate, if unhinged, glimpse behind the glamorous curtain of global fame.
Star-controlled autobiographical projects are all the rage these days, popping up on big and small screens and bookshelves alike. JLO wants to control her own narrative.And if she chooses to exercise that control by way of a bonkers-looking movie, well, more power to her. In many ways, This Is Me…Now suggests something more revelatory than other vanity projects of its ilk. In eschewing the standard documentary tell-all format in favor of something far weirder, Lopez is showing us that she has a much more deranged sensibility than one might associate with Jenny from the Block. The trailercertainly promises something…interesting. HuffPo called it a “chaotic mess,” but perhaps the naysayers just lack the foresight to appreciate an auteur-ist star who dares to flout conventions of genre, narrative and basic common sense. Perhaps JLO aligns with Joyce in realizing that only through the deeply absurd can we approach an understanding of the divine. Still, through all the surrealistic dance numbers and cryptic ruminations on the human condition – “How does anybody sleep that way? When your heart never goes to sleep?” – This Is Me…Now will only reveal as much as its subject wants to show us.
The final section of Finnegans Wake gives ALP her moment in the Molly Bloom seat, allowing her to relay her inner thoughts to the reader. In it, she ponders her own end, lamenting, “I done me best when I was let… A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?...They’ll never see, nor know.” Bleakness gives way to something hopeful, not necessarily in content, but in form. Anna Livia Plurabelle speaks the final sentence of the novel, which bleeds right back into its start. The cycle beginning anew – rebirth, renewal, restarting. Like JLO, ALP remains forever unknowable but, when it comes to her story, she gets the last word, and the first.