Core Post #5 - Josh Nallathambi

Watching Out of Sight what immediately stood out to me was how the movie chose to negate Lopez’s ethnicity. Her character, Karen Sisco, is by all intents believed to be Caucasian (even her father is played by classic white guy Dennis Farina), even though Lopez herself is Puerto Rican. It brings up questions about why the producers and director Steven Soderbergh chose to cast Lopez in the first place? Soderbergh had originally planned for Sandra Bullock to play Sisco, and a TV series called Karen Sisco in 2003 had white actress Carla Gugino in the role. So what convinced Soderbergh to cast Lopez? One could say that it was the allure of Lopez’s sexuality that brought an unrivaled edge to Karen’s character. As Frances Negron-Muntaner argues, Lopez’s persona as a star at the time had blended the line of latina and American and was seen in most people’s eyes as purely just Jennifer Lopez. “Embodying ideal ‘Latin’ beauty…the Puerto Rican label doesn’t seem to stick to her even in the white media” (183). Lopez’s star persona was transcending race. Soderbergh cast her for the way that she could bring a dynamite sexual energy to the character that could embody the femme fatale that Elmore Leonard had created in Karen. It’s hard to imagine Sandra Bullock pulling off the elongated striptease scene as well as Lopez does.

Beltran also highlights how Lopez’s role in Out of Sight was not about her arrival as a Latina star but her evidence for being a A-lister not only on screen but off it. The way majority or white audiences were consuming Lopez as a star was in part to the mold-shattering way her body was breaking down beauty norms at the time. The first major scene we get with Clooney and Lopez is a tight extended closeup of the two in the car with George’s hand focusing ever so playfully with Lopez’s butt. It’s almost as if Soderbergh understands the satisfaction a scene like this would give to male audiences. Here the negation of ethnicity is interesting. Karen Sisco appears to be white in every aspect except her sexuality. It goes hand in hand with Beltran’s point about Latinas as being physically sexual and available. Karen is honestly seen as a nerd or tomboy in every scene except when with Foley, then she turns into a more lustful feminine lead.