🤸🏻♀️ Delulu is the Solulu, Part One
Tomorrow is a leap day, after all . . .
Is anyone else diving down online rabbit holes about Jennifer Lopez’s new self-funded, pseudo-autobiographical-but-"not her" and "not a music video" hour-long special on Amazon Prime, This Is Me . . . Now: A Love Story?
It is remarkably opaque for all her proclamations about revealing never-before told truths about her life, but if you watch at a meta-ironic level it’s an utterly fascinating take on an artist going all-in on themselves, critics be damned.1
Cringe is the new camp, and I’m not sure if J. Lo is in on the joke, but I have a feeling she knows that it doesn’t matter. The movie will get us talking either way. Throw that into a licensed perfume bottle and sell it.
Clara describes it perfectly in her
review, amo ergo sum, or, jlo's journey to self-love:“My life’s new goal, and also coincidentally my biggest fear, is to find a fraction of The Audacity. The Gall. The Temerity. To release a project like this one. To put my legal name and my fully recognizable face and $20 million from my bank account to produce a movie with no narrative beginning or end, a cinematic ouroboros that boldly defies the very tenets of logic.”
From Clara’s earlier review about the trailer:
“She is clearly operating at a level that my pedestrian mind cannot even fathom. Please be serious — how could I (how could any of us) even begin to criticize this leap into an entirely new dimension? What is creativity if not insanity persevering? No. I am sitting down, I am listening, and I am learning.”
Me too.
My favorite line was one of her friends talking about the moment in every artist’s career when they have to go all-in, risking everything by betting on themselves.
It describes how I feel about my whole Free Time endeavor. I took a risk I never would have pre-pandemic, selling a property in Google’s backyard that I bought in my corporate heyday, after my renters told me they were moving out at the end of 2020.
Riding high on five years of up-and-to-the-right revenue momentum, I applied all the proceeds into launching this new part of my business, primarily an independently published book and podcast.2 Despite rolling in so much doh I can barely see straight ever since, I still have no regrets. That said, I also haven’t experienced any redemption arc windfall of cash on the other side . . . YET. 😅
That’s the thing about these potentially life-changing risks: they seem insane—and insanely stupid—until they work.
If it doesn’t work, the project ends up in the field of broken dreams, and you are now qualified to speak at conferences like FailCon as a consolation prize.3
If the risk does work, you get to ride the survivorship bias4 train all the way around your victory lap, as audiences and publications the world over celebrate your vision, perseverance, and hard work! If you are gracious, you will chalk a good chunk of it up to luck, including the incredible fortune of where you were born and to whom.
Back to J.Lo and her layers and layers of ambition—and what husband Ben Affleck describes in the doc as a bottomless need for public adoration: What good is celebrity #sponcon for boosting relevance and sales without a behind-the-scenes making of?
Thankfully Amazon just dropped The Greatest Love Story Never Told documentary. Yes, I immediately watched all 86 minutes at six a.m. yesterday with my morning coffee before starting work.5
Jennifer Lopez has delivered us a veritable mille-feuille, a French pastry named for it’s “thousand layers.”6 Living her love story, singing and dancing it for a strange non-narrative film based on a new album of the same name, then narrating the production process while producing it.
I appreciated New York Times critic Wesley Morris’ take in J. Lo and Behold: Is She for Real? (Gift link)
“She has only ever wanted to give us what she’s wanted for herself yet never convincingly attained: comfort. Lopez wants, needs, hungers, craves, desires, seeks, pines, wishes, dreams, hopes, believes, yearns, aches, hustles. You can see all of that in the hard violence of her dancing — nothing comes easy, nothing flows. It’s a lot of bursts and breaks.”
It’s so delusional it somehow works . . .
As a proper geriatric millennial—not to mention one who isn’t on social media—I first encountered the phrase delulu is the new solulu after my husband sent me this reel a few weeks ago, only ten years after K-pop fan communities first launched it 😂:
I can’t tell you how much this video—and this phrase—continues to delight me!
As you know from Doh, sometimes one runs out of money and even delulu before a creative dream has time to succeed financially.7 Or maybe it’s that just one part of the dream needs to recede so the next right thing has room to surface.
Heck, after Jennifer Lopez fronted $20 million of her own money to produce the fever dream, Amazon bought it for an undisclosed amount. The pride and relief that washes over her face as she takes that call at the end of the documentary is palpable. Now it’s ranked at number five in Prime Video’s top ten U.S. movies.
In conclulu: A wildly ambitious vision is only delulu until it works. The question is if you can hang on that long . . .
❤️
Continue reading Part Two:
Urban Dictionary defines meta irony as:
The point of meta irony is to muddle the joke making your audience wonder if you’re being serious or joking and ultimately leaving them confused. And maybe even concerned.
Meta-Irony is a layer of a joke. First comes “Sincerity/Pre-Irony,” then “Sarcasm/Irony,” and last “Post Irony/Meta Irony”
Meta Irony is commonly used in Gen Z humor, because of the world they grew up in which was very bleak (ie 9/11, constant news updates, having a date for when it’s too late to stop climate change, stock market crash, a generation born into the tech age, etc.)
Gen Z humor follows a nihilistic approach, nothing matters so who cares what I say or do or actually come off as “cringe.” Meta-Irony and Gen Z humor looks for the zany and random because they are so completely immersed in media that they have seen it all and have a need or search for more.
May the record state: I may not be raking in the dough yet, but the book did win seven publishing awards, and the podcast was nominated for a Webby. I have to remind myself of these when I’m too narrowly focused on money as the main metric. #evolulu!
FailCon was founded by Cass Phillips in 2014. According to the New York Times:
Five years ago, Cassandra Phillipps founded FailCon, a one-day conference in San Francisco celebrating failure. Discouraged by a growing chorus of start-up founders promoting their triumphs throughout Silicon Valley, and nervous about her own prospects as an entrepreneur, she craved the stories of people who had flopped.
The conference was a success. And every October for the next four years, up to 500 tech start-up newbies have gathered with industry veterans who dish on their “biggest fail” and lead round-table discussions with titles like “How to Conduct Yourself When It All Goes Off the Rails.”
The Decision Lab defines survivorship bias as follows, with a handy diagram:
Survivorship bias is a cognitive shortcut that occurs when a successful subgroup is mistaken as the entire group, due to the invisibility of the failure subgroup. The bias’ name comes from the error an individual makes when a data set only considers the “surviving” observations, excluding points that didn’t survive.
This goes without saying, but the documentary title, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, is so deeply ironic that you wonder if she’s aware? Or only Ben? First of all, this is certainly not the greatest love story of all time, and secondly, once you tell it, THE TITLE NO LONGER APPLIES!!!
Now try to pronounce mille-feuille when you live with a fluent French speaker—impossible 😭
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J Lo's doc will become holy grail for those under 20 - excellent post !!! Love delulu-solulu dual neolog
I can't watch it after that preview, but I'm glad you watched and reviewed it for us, Jenny!
My husband really wishes I would give up my delulu idea of making self-employment work, and "get a job, already." If only it were that simple...