J-Lo drags us down.

Fleshdance
J-Lo cops out.

Lopez could not describe the film’s appeal beyond the word "hot"–that handy euphemism for unexamined excitement–partly because Flashdance did away with articulation. (It opened concurrently with the education system’s collapse during the Reagan era.) That a generation’s esthetic taste could have been formed by a film as trifling as Flashdance is an alarming realization. It gives unexpected significance to Lopez’s newest music video I’m Glad–which faithfully restages many of Flashdance’s most famous sequences. Lopez stars, showing more flesh than ever even in leotards strained between her haunches. The video compresses the essence of Flashdance into about three minutes (movie-trailer length). Coincidentally, this reduction tells almost everything we need to know about the state movies are in.

Flashdance should go down in history as the single film that destroyed modern cinema. (Snobs like to cite Star Wars or Jaws, but as Robert Towne judiciously pointed out in A Decade Under the Influence, "A very talented filmmaker had made a very good film; it’s just that Hollywood followed the lessons of Jaws to a fault.") Flashdance influenced more than marketing; it changed movie content into non-content. Before its release, movie stories stayed true to social and psychological details; a recognizable or empathetic character made a movie an edifying experience. But Flashdance decimated such storytelling. The ludicrous plot about a female welder named Alex (Jennifer Beals) who longs to be a ballet dancer had about one-tenth the credibility of a regular movie. This was stretched thin when Alex practiced her avocation by moonlighting as an almost-stripper in a dingy Pittsburgh bar that featured Las Vegas-style production values. Alex didn’t study, she danced pop while dreaming of ballet–an immediate fabrication of normal, real-life work ethic. That was Flashdance’s contribution to the Reagan/80s go-for-it ethos, an odd combination of class snobbery and populism. It was "hot" because it looked easy; it looked easy because it was a lie. And that’s because it was, essentially, an advert.

Director Adrian Lyne (who slimed his way to Fatal Attraction, Jacob’s Ladder, Indecent Proposal, Lolita and Unfaithful) got his training making British television commercials. As part of the Brit-ad invasion of Hollywood by Alan Parker and Ridley and Tony Scott, he transferred the moral vacuity and visual slickness of commercials to feature-filmmaking. Lyne was the least imaginative of these carpetbaggers, mixing superficial product placement with pseudo-serious sleaze; his debut, Foxes, similarly crossed teen angst with a gauzy, softcore peepshow. 9 1/2 Weeks is Lyne’s best film, largely because Kim Basinger softened and complicated the cliches.

In Flashdance, Lyne did away with realistic affectation altogether. Unlike a traditional musical shifting into fantasy to reveal the song-and-dance in a character’s heart, Lyne breached both realism and fantasy. With an ad man’s ruthlessness, he pulverized the nuances of Alex’s desire (the 80s urge to achieve) into a blatant series of absurd tropes: Job, Fun, Sweat, Flirtation, Lust, Competition plus pulsating musical interludes about Nothing.

Remember the scene where Alex and her boyfriend stop to watch black kids breakdancing on a street? It was as revolutionary as Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Lyne allowed his story to stop dead for this moment of fake-realistic, cliche-atmospheric topicality. What J-Lo’s peers fell for as the portent of something new (Hollywood’s earliest validation of hiphop) was, actually, something awful. Instead of selling teenagers sneakers and acne products, Lyne sold them (and the rest of movie culture) a diminished way of appreciating the world and characters’ private ambitions.

In place of comprehension and expression, Flashdance highlighted sequences of impersonal, meaningless materialistic sensation. (This may in fact have opened the crack in the wall that Madonna’s craven spectacle eventually tore down.) Strangely enough, Flashdance’s box-office success–the fact that people didn’t mind that it made no sense and its story was alternately incoherent and completely predictable–meant the beginning of visual illiteracy.

Trained by television, moviegoers of J-Lo’s age became accustomed to watching stories through escalated flashiness at the expense of believability and concentration. This was a horrible pop culture swindle. The producers of Flashdance devised it using early-80s dance-pop as if speaking a new language to a new audience; the soundtrack album became a hit partly because its tunes were easily complemented by simple, gaudy imagery no different from what was then premiering on MTV. It seemed new, but it wasn’t. And wasn’t meant to be.

I’m Glad suggests that Lopez is intuitively aware that Flashdance’s narrative was solely in the language of advertisement. Lopez and her music video director David LaChappelle together accept that pop imagery can be endlessly recycled–looking like something new yet having the same old purpose–to sell. That’s why Lopez can’t talk about the movie’s ideas or style; for a pitchwoman it need only be "hot." For today’s non-skeptical audience of consumers, "hot" is anything easily assimilated that can be consumed in its entirety without thought but with the feel of satisfaction.

Lopez and LaChappelle refer to Flashdance’s major set-pieces–the steel factory, the "splash" dance, the kabuki dance, the ballet-school audition, the jiggle-jogging to Michael Sembello’s "Maniac" (although "I’m Glad" is a song with a completely different rhythm)–but not as film scholars. These fragments don’t evoke deep feeling like the movie references in Techine or Bertolucci films; rather, I’m Glad confirms a proposal that the cable-tv network TNT had been asserting for years: that some of the most meretricious films of the 80s have, indeed, become "The New Classics." For Lopez’s generation, Flashdance is recalled as fondly (and perhaps as legitimately) as Casablanca is endlessly and repeatedly recalled by the majority of voters of those American Film Institute polls.

It would be pretentious to say that Flashdance, An Officer and a Gentleman, Top Gun, The Breakfast Club, Fatal Attraction, First Blood, Dirty Dancing, Stand By Me, Rain Man and When Harry Met Sally constituted a new canon. These movies don’t need critical endorsement when there’s the consensus of popularity (and frequent television rebroadcasting). As a result, I’m Glad doesn’t dig into cultural memory the way director Mary Lambert did when appropriating the "Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for Madonna’s Material Girl video. Lopez and LaChappelle, like TNT, evoke the comfort of immediate identification.

Instead of trying to bestow significance upon J-Lo’s career by equating her latest venture with a past cultural landmark, I’m Glad simply announces J-Lo’s self-gratification. Going back to a movie event from her youth, I’m Glad plays out J-Lo’s shallow artistic goals. She’s not subverting ideas of the past but latching on to a landmark for unsophisticated reasons. (You have to see I’m Glad to believe it; otherwise it’s unthinkable that anyone could hold Flashdance as a model to which to aspire.)

What exactly is J-Lo honoring when she imitates Alex’s striptease-under-the-torn-sweatshirt? Or when she climbs atop a table to thump her ass at a panel of judges? Does she see herself as a Latina Billy Elliot? Was her own career path as hoary? By hooking her Bronx-to-Beverly Hills profile into Jennifer Beals’ Cinderella myth, Lopez perpetuates Flashdance’s ethnically vague sex symbolism–Maid in Manhattan II. While Beals iconographically opposed Hollywood’s racial restriction–a breakthrough, of sorts–there is no progress in Lopez repeating her footsteps two decades later. J-Lo may do her own dancing, progressing over the body-double stunts that Marine Jahan performed for Beals, but it’s a less honorable charade.

By referring only to the surface of Flashdance, J-Lo neglects that alongside Beals’ ethnic pantomime, a Puerto Rican striver’s saga was expressed in Flashdance’s theme song, Irene Cara’s "What a Feeling." Cara’s film career should have been the model for J-Lo’s adoration (the way Morrissey’s Suedehead video swoons over James Dean). In films like Aaron Loves Angela and the cult-classic Sparkle, Cara became the first teen movie star of color, bridging the blaxploitation trend and indie trend as well as uniting the sometimes riven movie audience of ethnic urban teens by attesting to the city’s–America’s–plurality. (If Cara passed for black in Sparkle, she righteously reversed what Ronnie Spector had done in the 60s.) As Cara grew into her maturity and eventual Hollywood obsolescence (take heed, J-Lo) she finally got to have her say in the Flashdance theme song (co-written with Giorgio Moroder), singing with heart-bursting aspiration that eventually won her a Grammy and an Oscar.

Lopez’s I’m Glad taints that history. Attempting a pastiche, she and LaChappelle wind up making a palimpsest, painting their commercialism over Jennifer Beals’ subversion and Irene Cara’s mini-triumph. And misrepresenting the loathsome Adrian Lyne as a visionary. J-Lo’s reduction reminds me of a Flashdance porn parody, Fleshpants: Cop a Feeling.