An Attempt to Make Sense of the Jennifer Lopez Wedding Industrial-Complex Canon

An Attempt to Make Sense of the Jennifer Lopez Wedding Industrial-Complex Canon,Making sense of the Jennifer Lopez Wedding Industrial Complex Canon, a complex universe filled with dead mothers, worried best friends, sad dinners, and machetes.

An Attempt to Make Sense of the Jennifer Lopez Wedding Industrial-Complex Canon

Few actors have pretended to get married as often as Jennifer Lopez. By my count, which has been duly confirmed by dozens of Us Weekly–core slideshows detailing her fictional wedding dresses, she has donned a white dress with the intention (but not always the follow-through) of betrothing herself to a man (always a man) no less than nine times: In Selena, The Wedding Planner, Enough, El Cantante, The Back-Up Plan, Marry Me, My Family, her new movie Shotgun Wedding, and The Cell, an extended metaphor for losing oneself in a marriage. More interesting, though, is that four of these movies center entirely on the planning and execution of a modern American wedding, grappling not with the concept of matrimony but explicitly with the wedding industrial complex and its profound psychological implications.

If two is a coincidence, and three’s a pattern, then four is a cry for help. Lopez herself has been married four times, and engaged at least five, which means she may be cinema’s foremost expert on the material realities of putting together a wedding — a process, she recently told Jimmy Kimmel, that was so “stressful” it gave her “PTSD.” She’s also often a producer on her films, meaning she is in them as well as of them. In other words, we should listen to J.Lo when she makes four movies about women whose wedding planning nearly destroys their lives.

Within Lopez’s wedding-logistics cinematic universe, planning your nuptials inevitably turns you insane and unrecognizable. In the process, you will betray both the person you love and yourself, forgetting your core values the moment your tall white love interest slides a ring on your finger. Your mother or mother-in-law is often the enemy or the butt of the joke, and your best friend’s entire personality is “worried about how infrequently you get laid.” There is at least a 50 percent chance your fiancé is a doctor. Either you or he will wax poetic about how you or he “never wanted this” and “just wanted to get married on a beach in the middle of nowhere,” “just the two of you.” The wedding, its own sentient entity with a strong survival instinct, will lurch forward regardless. At one point, you will consider calling off the wedding, and sometimes, you will in fact call off the wedding. Sometimes the wedding will be back on, and sometimes it won’t, but don’t worry — there is an implicit promise that there is another, better wedding hiding in the intricately clipped hedges of the future.

Viewed as a cohesive canon, and growing qualitatively frailer over time, Lopez’s wedding-planning films expose the charms and limitations of the genre — and of buying into the wedding industrial complex itself. Both experiences can be fun and perting, even romantic, but when pushed too far, become stressful, repetitive, claustrophobic, and unimaginative, and offer diminishing returns, spawning lesser iterations of themselves across time like a series of increasingly glitchy, monstrously expensive clones. Indeed, Lopez’s invariable wedding filmography can be seen as meta commentary on the way weddings in the Anthropocene have all come to look and feel the same, hitting the required beats, sapped of inherent meaning, morphing instead into gaping, endless chasms into which we hurl our life savings so that we might, for a moment, forget that we are all marching toward death and in one hundred years nobody will remember our names.

Join me as I outline and attempt to make some sense of the J.Lo wedding industrial-complex canon and, in the process, our own desperate attempts at immortality.

The Wedding Planner (2001)

Photo: Ana Carballosa/Lionsgate

Though the JLOWICC has been on a sharp downward trajectory since The Wedding Planner, Shotgun Wedding rights the plane, saving us from crashing directly into the ocean (upon which someone is probably having a wedding). This one takes on the wedding industrial complex as its primary subject, sort of inverting the premise of The Wedding Planner: What if a man planned a wedding … and then it was hijacked by pirates? It’s also a combination of J.Lo’s favorite genres: “wedding-planning rom-com” and “movie in which her character holds a gun.”

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Who is the bride?

J.Lo is Darcy Rivera, a woman who is getting married and not that excited about it.

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What’s her damage?

Her parents got porced when she was in high school and they now hate each other. She had a failed first engagement with a boyfriend she met serving in the Peace Corps, played by Lenny Kravitz.

To what extent is she a quietly and unbelievably good person? She did Peace Corps.

But how sad are her dinners? The entire movie takes place over the course of approximately 24 hours, so we never see Darcy outside of this wedding. She does, however, briefly drink Champagne out of the bottle alone, which serves the same function as a “sad dinner alone” scene.

And how is her job getting in the way of her wedding? I genuinely don’t know what her job is, but it involves her having been in the Peace Corps at one point.

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Who is the groom?

Josh Duhamel is a Minor League Baseball player named Tom, a character never seen before in these films: a groomzilla, so obsessed with planning the perfect wedding that he nearly loses the love of his life!! And that’s called feminism!

So is he a white doctor of at least six feet tall? He is a six-foot-four nondoctor, which is the tallest one so far.

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What’s his damage?

Insecurity and Etsy addiction.

To what extent is he a quietly and unbelievably good person? He is sensitive.

Does someone make a joke about him being secretly gay? Nobody has to — the movie’s joke is that he cares more about the wedding than she does, which is presented as an emasculating trait.

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What kind of wedding is it?

It takes place on a small, private island in the Philippines.

But did one of them picture a small wedding on a beach? Despite the fact that they are in fact having a small wedding on a beach, Darcy still says she wishes they were “on a boat, just the two of us.”

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Who or what is ultimately trying to keep the bride and groom apart?

Darcy’s ex-boyfriend Lenny Kravitz, who spends the entire movie being Lenny Kravitz–y (no shirt, etc.).

Does the groom, at one point, mention that the bride is not acting like the woman he fell in love with? Nay, the opposite! Darcy tells Tom, “The last few months you’ve turned into a different person.” He replies, “I’m sorry, I just wanted everything to be perfect.” And that’s … called feminism.

So what is the fundamental misunderstanding that almost ruins (or does ruin) the wedding? Darcy and Tom get into a huge fight after the pirates hold their guests hostage, but not about the pirates holding their guests hostage — it’s about how Tom is a different person than who she fell in love with.

Does the wedding get called off? Yes, Darcy hurls her engagement ring at Tom in the midst of the hostage crisis.

But does it then get called back on? Yes, after they successfully murder a ton of pirates and it reminds them why they fell in love in the first place.

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What is being telegraphed about the wedding industrial complex?

Men are as capable of being seduced by the siren song of Wedding Capitalism as women. And that’s … called … feminism.

Any specifically trenchant insights? “I thought if we had the perfect wedding, we’d have the perfect marriage. But that doesn’t exist.”

Is the movie title a pun? Theoretically, yes, but the wedding isn’t actually a shotgun wedding; it’s a normal wedding planned by people who have been together for several years. So it only functions on one level (there is a shotgun at the wedding).
Who is the mother or mother-in-law, and is she made a mockery of? Jennifer Coolidge steals the movie, as usual, as Josh Duhamel’s mom, who gives Darcy a rusty knife for her “something borrowed.” Darcy’s mom is more of the villain here, complaining about her father’s new girlfriend and being generally unpleasant. If you’re keeping track, so far nobody’s mom or mother-in-law has been both normal and alive.
Who is the best friend, and is she worried? Darcy appears to have no real friends. We only see her interact with various chaotic family members, Tom, and pirates.
How is Bali involved? They wanted to get married in Bali, where Darcy did her infamous time in the Peace Corps, but it was too expensive. Also, the pirates are from Bali.
Is there a machete somewhere, for some reason? The pirates have them.
Does J.Lo perform? At the end, she sings “Walk Like an Egyptian” onstage at her wedding.
Does somebody talk about J.Lo’s body in an unsettling way? Jennifer Coolidge walks in on her changing and says, “You look so much better than the rest of us. Is that genetics or Pilates or … ?”
Does her love interest describe the exact color of her eyes? Nope.
Is there a moment of physical comedy involving a near-death experience? The entire movie is this.