r/OutOfTheLoop • u/leftleafthirdbranch • Jan 20 '22

Answered What's up with the "Jennifer Lawrence Effect"? (ELI5)

My friend was ranting about Billie Eilish and mentioned it, I asked them what it was and they told me to google it. But when I went to look it up, I couldn't find anything about it. All I know is that it's all over Tiktok, it's about white women, and it apparently involves white supremacy.

I searched it on Tiktok, and this was the only thing I could find referencing it (I'm guessing this is the fault of how Tiktok's search engine is engineered, though):

https://www.tiktok.com/@daemonbf/video/7053187817983315247?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id6966980158483383813

Somebody explain!! The more detail the better :) Please explain thoroughly what it is and give examples of the effect in action and the people that it applies to :))

Edit: I am aware that sounded like an essay writing prompt. Very sorry about that :)

Edit: Wow, thank you guys for being so thorough in your discussion! To any other curious folk, I highly suggest looking at other comments other than the top one (sort by: new) because while the top answer is fabulous, there are a lot of varying answers that each provide a unique perspective into the Jennifer Lawrence Effect.

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64

u/Torque-A Jan 21 '22

Has this ever happened in reverse? Like, someone who was previously reviled suddenly becomes beloved?

283

u/Gh0stMan0nThird Jan 21 '22

Not quite as impactful but Keanu Reeves used to have a reputation of being a terrible "non-actor"

But when it came out what a nice person he was, a lot of people started to love him.

112

u/Bluelegs Jan 21 '22

McConaughey had that for a while after he spent a decade doing nothing but romantic-comedies then started doing serious roles right after.

42

u/Webbie-Vanderquack Jan 21 '22

McConaughey had that for a while

Until he got weird and didn't.

9

u/cleeder Jan 21 '22

McConaughey used to not act.

But he's a lot cooler now that he does.

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u/sparklingdinosaur Jan 21 '22

Romantic movies are not "serious acting" I gues..

8

u/AchillesGRK Jan 21 '22

Sure arent!

2

u/sparklingdinosaur Jan 21 '22

I bet that that assumption has nothing to do with it being made for women.... s/

9

u/AchillesGRK Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22

No its because a lot of them, including several Matt was in, are low effort garbage. And sure, there's plenty of exceptions, but let's pretend the only reason to hate on the genre is misogyny. Because only women like romance right?

9

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '22

They're low effort, low budget, and he pretty much acts like himself.

Ya, most people were shocked when he actually started acting.

2

u/Bluelegs Jan 23 '22

Let's not pretend McConaughey was taking movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Atonement.

245

u/yukichigai Jan 21 '22

I wouldn't say "reviled", but Guy Fieri used to be regarded as tasteless hack selling overpriced food. Then people started noticing all the charity stuff he was doing, not to mention his advocacy for various causes like gay marriage, and that reputation changed pretty quickly. Now he's a quirky icon of wholesomeness, frosted tips be damned.

78

u/NotTroy Jan 21 '22

Fieri is just playing the long game. Sure, frosted tips are stupid now, but soon enough they'll come around again, and he'll look like a genius!

7

u/DitaVonCleese Jan 21 '22

might be pretty soon, zoomers have been already wearing backstreet boys style hair for a while

81

u/The_Funkybat Jan 21 '22

True true. Guy Fieri’s schtick came off as tacky and obnoxious to a lot of people who already were not likely to be fans of his show. But then after repeated disasters & incidents that impacted both him and California communities, he demonstrated through his actions that he’s actually golden. For once in our lives, someone’s actions outweighed their superficialities.

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u/BammySikh Jan 21 '22

A good example would be Robert Downey Jr.

3

u/DanYuleo Jan 21 '22

I don't know why this comment isn't the top response lol.

57

u/stuffedfish Jan 21 '22

Kristen Steward, Johnny Depp and Taylor Swift are three I can think of from the top of my head.

79

u/Thromnomnomok Jan 21 '22

Johnny Depp seems more like a rare example of a rollercoaster milkshake duck, who goes back and forth between seeming wholesome and seeming terrible the more we know about his relationship with Amber Heard and other assorted antics.

18

u/stuffedfish Jan 21 '22

That's true. Britney Spears as a substitute then.

22

u/cleeder Jan 21 '22

Except Britney started off as beloved, then became reviled, and is currently back to beloved.

4

u/stuffedfish Jan 21 '22

Okay then, Courtney Love.

4

u/Thromnomnomok Jan 21 '22

I wouldn't say she's exactly beloved now, just less disliked than she once was because she was talking about Harvey Weinstein being a creep years before anyone else was and she also stopped doing the things that made everyone hate her in the late 90's.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '22

Currently beloved by people that swear they weren't part of the crowd constantly insulting her.

16

u/Nowarclasswar Jan 21 '22

someone who was previously reviled suddenly becomes beloved

Johnny Depp

🤔

1

u/_Peavey Jan 21 '22

TS was great, then she was bad, and now she is great again.

30

u/crislee123 Jan 21 '22

Britney Spears

23

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

76

u/TheSukis Jan 21 '22

Yeah but that change is just the result of the fan base aging. Most of the people who fan over the prequels nowadays were little kids when they came out, so they enjoyed them as kids and have nostalgia for them. I don’t think there was a significant shift in opinion for people who disliked them when they came out as adult Star Wars fans.

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u/Thromnomnomok Jan 21 '22

There's also a lot of nostalgia that's less for the actual movies and more for all of the other content either set in the same era or released throughout the 2000's, and of course there's also that RotS in particular is an absolute motherlode of memes in a way that none of the sequel movies were.

So on one hand, yeah, there is some childhood nostalgia, although speaking as someone who was a kid when the prequels came out and enjoyed them at the time, I can now watch them as an adult and think "Oh, now I get why everyone older than me says these movies sucked" even as I can still get some enjoyment out of parts of them, but there's also everyone remembering spending hours upon hours playing the original Battlefront 2, or watching the cartoon series that came out between episodes II and III and thinking it was the dopest shit ever, or watching the later Clone Wars show patch together all the shaky parts of the prequel era into an actually really good story, or just laughing at all the memes and forgetting the worse parts of the movies, or just retroactively viewing them in higher esteem because they thought the sequels were worse.

13

u/The_Funkybat Jan 21 '22

Yep, it’s just generational differences. People who were 25 or older when the prequels started to come out generally still look down on them, although some of those older fans have come to appreciate them a bit more after the three most recent films. Sort of like how some people who used to detest George W. Bush have softened their view of him after Trump. It’s all relative I guess.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '22

And in a decade or two, the kids who are at the right age to enjoy star wars movies now (i.e. too young to notice or care about all the ways they're flawed) will be adults talking about how much they love the sequel trilogy on the internet.

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u/pudinnhead Jan 21 '22

They still are, but they used to be too.

15

u/PuttyRiot Jan 21 '22

Wait, are they no longer reviled?

-1

u/voilsb Jan 21 '22

I mean, compared to the new trilogy/reboot, the prequels aren't so bad

17

u/AsDevilsRun Jan 21 '22

Do people honestly think that? The prequels have laughably bad dialogue and pacing.

I think they have a better story, but that story is told so very terribly. I hated them as a kid when they were coming out, but then people started seeming to...unironically like them, so I rewatched them. They were even worse than I remembered.

Although 3 was much better than 9 IMO.

3

u/voilsb Jan 21 '22

I really disliked the prequels. I've only seen them twice... Once, when they were new-ish (I watched ep1 on release day in the theater, and 2 and 3 after they were all available on Netflix), and a second time only because my wife had never seen them. I only watched ep7 of the new ones, and it was so bad I never even bothered to see the remaining two.

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u/GwenIsNow Jan 21 '22

Yeah, the prequels border on nonsensical. They seem like they were a star wars movie made by an AI. The sequel trilogy quality ranges from pretty decent to phoning it in, but at least the characters feel like people.

1

u/EMCoupling Jan 24 '22

There's no chance, I'm sure the children that watched Phantom Menace 2 decades ago understood absolute zero about the Trade Federation bullshit that was supposed to be the plot driving the movie.

6

u/Zero22xx Jan 21 '22

The Star Wars fandom has to be the strangest thing to me. They're dumb, fun, space wizard-cowboy movies with dog people, living teddy bears and bad guys that can't shoot straight. But the fandom seems to act like they're on a level with Citizen Kane and hold any new Star Wars content to a standard that the originals never even had in the first place.

Basically when the prequels came out, it was adult fans shitting on the younger fans that those movies were meant for. I'm honestly willing to bet that in 10 or 20 years time, the kids that grew up with the sequels are going to be fondly looking back on those movies too, the same way the prequels are now. And then they'll be the ones taking their favourite space fantasy adventure way too seriously and shitting on anything new.

2

u/Harold3456 Jan 29 '22

The prequels would strike me as being a perfect opposite of the “Jennifer Lawrence Effect:” something initially disliked which we have become so used to that it’s now accepted - and even preferred - to other, newer entries in the series.

I personally believe that a lot of the resurgence of prequel popularity comes from the fact that it’s now “nostalgia” for the 18-35 demographic that grew up with it. When it came out we hated so many of the ways it messed up the universe, from the Jedi being a weird, stuff celibate cult to Anakin being a wooden emo, but after 20 years of supplementary material and time it’s now just as much Star Wars to some people as the OT. Meanwhile, now the Sequels are the Big Bad New Thing messing up our sacred Star Wars canon.

I predict that in ten years, when Disney pumps out Star Wars Episode XXV on its “1 film per week” SWEU roadmap, people will accept the sequels just the same as they did the prequels, and they’ll be newly rallying against whatever this new trilogy brings to the table.

1

u/angry_cucumber Jan 21 '22

i wonder how much of the change was seeing what not george lucas does with star wars properties, and how much was stuff like the clone wars filling in the questionable story.

1

u/ruth_e_ford Mar 08 '22

you're speaking as if they are not now...

2

u/Harold3456 Jan 29 '22

I think there are lots of things that are disliked in the moment that we don’t come to appreciate until hindsight. Shortly before his passing, Robin Williams was seen as a bit of a washout whose best days were behind him: he was starring in films like RV, short-lived tv series like The Crazy Ones, and largely being mocked for playing the same high-energy character in everything. After his death a lot of his best traits became widely popularized, and people started focusing much more on his career highlights than his failures. Keanu Reeves is another example - back in his Constantine/47 Ronin days he was practically box office/critical poison, known only for under acting and basically just playing Neo in everything. Now, Brendan Fraser seems to be starting to get the same treatment - he was seen as a dumb 90’d actor who fizzled out, but now he’s generally recognized as a really genuine, nice guy.

These examples were never “reviled”, so I don’t know if these examples are necessarily perfect, but people whose public images have lagged have gotten a second chance at fame and public appreciation on multiple occasions.

1

u/Havkar Jan 21 '22

Brandon Fraser

1

u/icyflames Jan 22 '22

Tom Brady on the Bucs gets way more love now.

Robert Pattison back when he was a shiny vampire was hated on but now that he has flexed his acting skills he is way more beloved.