Megan McLachlan recounts a tale of two showgirls: Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl movie versus Jennifer Lopez’s The Greatest Love Story Never Told.
Taylor Swift’s film The Life of a Showgirl soared to No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, an album release party movie (if that’s a thing) that includes a music video and then introductions by Swift for each song on the record. The film beat The Rock’s Oscar play, The Smashing Machine, as well as last weekend’s winner, One Battle After Another.
I am by no means a Swiftie, but I like to be part of cultural moments, and I let my friend drag me to the movies to see it. While I wasn’t a fan of the album as a whole, “The Fate of Ophelia” music video that bookends the film is a lot of fun (I’m in love with the turquoise tinsel wrap she wears during the Busby Berkeley section).
The Ankler published a Substack Live about Swift’s obsession with getting an Oscar, and clearly the pop star has an eye toward filmmaking, as the director of the film and music video. But she’s not the only pop star obsessed with getting an Oscar.
And as I watched Swift direct her cast and work with crew members, it reminded me of one of my favorite film’s of last year: Jason Bergh’s The Greatest Love Story Never Told. That Amazon documentary gave fans a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Jennifer Lopez’s visual film This is Me…Now: A Love Story — similar to the way The Life of a Showgirl gives fans a behind-the-scenes look at the making of “The Fate of Ophelia” (in fact, the movie feels like a 90-minute MTV’s Making the Video).
But what was fascinating to me is that Swift doesn’t reveal anything new that I didn’t already know as a casual viewer. There’s never any trouble during the making of the video, and every crew member has a smile plastered across their face. She never really talks about what it’s like to be a living pop showgirl. She keeps everything under wraps. Even the song “Wood” gets the shortest introduction and a smirk. She really doesn’t talk about anything personal in the film, as the songs are just “stories” (even if the internet has a theory for each and every track).
The reason why I mention this is because so much of her career is about her personal life, and yet she doesn’t reveal a lot about it (not that she should!). It made me wonder how much of Swift’s brand is the lore fans create, the reading between the lines that are or aren’t there.
Counteract that with Jennifer Lopez in The Greatest Love Story Never Told, who literally makes fun of herself in This is Me Now, talks about past relationships, and even shares Ben Affleck’s love letters with everyone. Audiences — and Ben! — didn’t like this, even if it gave you the kind of access that TMZ chases — for free! Authenticity is the name of the game when it comes being a modern-day pop star, and you’d think that people would flock to a diva diving into personal territory. But if you were on social media last year, you know she got panned across the board. It was brutal.
Lopez doesn’t just get candid about her personal life, but she also shows what believing in a project that no one else believes in looks like. She admits to self-funding the film and laments the numerous platforms that passed on distributing it. It’s fascinating. Unlike Swift’s film, at some moments during TGLSNT, no one is smiling, and everyone is frustrated. Never once while watching The Life of a Showgirl did I wonder where this money was coming from and never once did I think Swift might be worried no one would ever see her fruits of her labor. She is an artist at the top of her game with nothing to lose. Lopez had EVERYTHING to lose (and essentially, she did).
But The Life of a Showgirl is a hit, and The Greatest Love Story Never Told and the film it was based on were huge catastrophic misses that derailed Lopez’s career (she’s looking to get back on track with Kiss of the Spider Woman).
There are a LOT of reasons for this, including Swift being the biggest pop star in the world and Lopez having a more niche base, but in terms of giving audiences unprecedented access and pulling back the curtain on a once-in-a-lifetime artist, J.Lo wins hands down. I hope people remember that during her next Oscar run — and don’t punish her for wanting one.
The Life of a Showgirl is in theaters.
