“Maid in Manhattan” and Invoking Audience Complicity

“Maid in Manhattan”, starring Jennifer Lopez, evoked a range of thoughts and interpretations in me. Prior to watching the film, I was inspired to engage with Lopez’s music vis a vis Chicana theorists like Lockhart and Negron-Muntaner: these theorists present a complex reading of Jennifer Lopez, situating her simultaneously in the context of Latinidad, white capitalism, and a racialized pop culture. How then, do theories like theirs that suggest Lopez’ subjective occupation of identity and “star text”, apply to the film text of “Maid in Manhattan”? Clearly, there are many problematic elements to the movie: the age-old, rags-to-riches Cinderella trope, with messages that sexual relations with powerful men are a surefire, desirable strategy for social mobility, can hardly be called ‘feminist’. Furthermore, the interactions between Lopez’s character, Marisa, and her wealthy, white love interest Chris Marshall, seemed unsettling to me. The first time that he mistakes her for a guest at the hotel she works at, he insists on her joining him for a walk. During the walk, Marisa’s body language evinces obvious discomfort; not only with the situation but also with the expensive Dolce ensemble she is wearing. I found it compelling that the ensemble is spotless white, and that there were several jokes in the scene about the difficulty of keeping it clean: the symbolism seemed to infer the tenuously constructed nature of whiteness and white identity, and the many cultural, social and political investments made to keep white identity ‘clean’ ‘pure’ etc. While the film seemed to encourage viewers to read Marisa’s discomfort as a simplistic consequence of her ‘deception’ (and indeed Chris’s comments to her later, when her ‘identity’ is ‘revealed’, sound decidedly accusatory), I argue that the focusing on Marisa’s ‘deception’ obscures the larger systems of racism, sexism and classism that situate her body as ‘maid’ or ‘lady’ using prefigured cues. For example, it seems natural to us that Chris mistakes her for a guest in the hotel, because surely a Latina maid couldn’t conceivably possess enough agency to try on a white woman’s clothes: the Latina maid momentarily indulging a whim to transgress social boundaries is simply not culturally signifiable to Chris and his wide male worldview. Thus, the movie invites viewers to perceive Marisa through a white, male, classist context, thereby reading her discomfort and her actions in a manner that centers Christ and their relationship, rather than allowing us to consider her in the context of Jennifer Lopez’ larger cultural significance as a Latina woman navigating and succeeding in a white entertainment industry.