I have a number of recurring nightmares, most of which are the typical ones — the teeth falling out dream, the dream where I’m in college and it’s the end of the semester and I suddenly realize that I have a final for a class that I’ve forgotten to attend for the past few months, the one where a large Estonian woman is chasing me with a big black garbage bag and screaming out "Arbeit macht frei. Deutschland uber alles. Heil Roosevelt." (you know, the usuals).
More exclusive to my psyche, I’m pretty sure, is what I’ve come to call the Jenny from the Block dream. In it, I’m on a panel at the annual Pop Culturists of America Association Organization Conference (PCAAOC). The title of the panel is "Jenny from the Block, The Video: Perspectives," and the woman to the left of me — an attractive brunette wearing a T-shirt with a silkscreen of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy passionately kissing each other — is talking about how the video for "Jenny from the Block" is a subtle protest, from a Latina-American perspective, against the commodifying nature of late stage capitalistic American culture.
She keeps returning to the chorus of the song — "Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block" — in an almost incantatory way, and she concludes her talk, which I found unpersuasive but which the audience, made up almost entirely of women in peasant blouses, seemed to really dig, by climbing onto the table behind which we’re sitting, turning to the suddenenly manifest DJ, and saying "Hit it." She then performs a fully choreographed karaoke of "Jenny from the Block," sits down once again, and turns her back to the audience and begins punching the wall.
The gentleman to my right, who looks uncannily like Sigmund Freud, waits until our co-panelist stops punching the wal and then beings arguing that Jennifer Lopez isn’t actually a real person but instead a kind of golem who’s been animated by our culture’s collective unconscious desire for a sacrificial diva-goddess figure onto whom we can project our deepest, darkest fantasies of success, failure, sexuality, chastity and ultimate power. For him, the key stanza is the second, with its almost unassimilable palimpsest of ambition, self-promotion, self-justification, naivete and yearning:
I’m down to earth like this
Rockin this business
I’ve grown up so much
I’m in control and loving it
Rumors got me laughing, kid
Love my life and my public
Put God first
And can’t forget to stay real
To me it’s like breathing
"If we choose to parse Lopez as a real person, which is to say a biologically extant being whose life is bounded by birth at one end and death at the other, and whose DNA acts as a bridge between humanity’s genetic past and its genetic future," he says, "then we’re forced to conclude that the song and video ‘Jenny from the Block’ is actually a rather sad expression of the postmodern narcissistic self, obsessed both with celebrity and with a notion of ‘authenticity’ which is not, as it’s imagined, a counterweight to celebrity but is in fact an amplifier of it, another and perhaps even more insidious projection of self-concern and self-regard.’
"If, however," he continues, "we accept ‘J-Lo’s’ non-realness, we can begin to appreciate the particular choices the video makes. It doesn’t show ‘J-lo’ existing on ‘the block,’ in ‘down-to-earth’ clothes, doing ‘down-to-earth’ things. Instead we get the flamboyant superstar, wearing her furs and flaunting her ‘rocks,’ on a yacht or in a penthouse apartment with boyfriend ‘Ben Affleck,’ who himself is aggressively made up — tanned, dressed, coiffed — to seem like a creation of our technoculture imagineering wizards. She’s not real, she’s saying, and yet she’s also, in an important sense, more real than the real person she would be, if she were real. She’s a creation of ‘the block,’ of the working class American fantasy of becoming famous, and flaunting the famousness, without losing one’s ‘roots’. She’s not a she, but she’s us."
When he finishes, I’m asked by the moderator, John Davidson, what I have to add to the conversation. I look down at the sheets of paper in my hand, on which I’ve written extensive notes about the video as one of the eighteen signs of the apocalypse as foretold by Nostradamus’s evil twin brother, Gustradamus ("Gus" for short), and I realize that I don’t believe anymore in what I was planning to say. And so I just sit there, paralyzed, while Sigmund and Raggedy Ann look at me like I’m the worst kind of fool. And then I wake up.
