As a Cuban, I’m offended by the casting of Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the most famous Cuban entertainer of all time, Desi Arnaz, in the new film, Being the Ricardos — but only in an alternate woke universe. In the real world, I’m totally fine with it. And I was born in Santiago and lived one block from the former Arnaz family home. Everyone else outside the echo chamber of Hollywoke could also not care less about the Bardem-Desi “controversy.”
“Casting a Spaniard to play a Cuban in a film that literally features a scene about how the two identities are not interchangeable might actually constitute a previously uncharted level of gringo f–kery,” wrote Laura Bradley in the Daily Beast. The Industry’s slavishness to such shallow, foolish, counterproductive sensitivity will soon be the death of it. For evidence, see the year’s biggest bomb — Steven Spielberg’s politically corrected West Side Story.
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But in West Side Story, Spielberg literally went woke for broke — down to long stretches of Spanish dialogue with no English subtitles, and his painful justification for it: “I felt that subtitling the Spanish was disrespectful to the second language of this country,” Spielberg said. “It would make English the dominant language, because then there would be two being spoken: the English by the characters speaking and the English that would [be written] underneath the spoken Spanish words.” It also helped convince potential moviegoers to avoid the picture like the plague.
Spielberg bespoke a madness that makes Hollywoke not just toxic to the normal people it abhors but an object of derision. Power players like him can decry the casting of white Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican “Juliet” in the 1962 classic all they want. Wood’s beauty, grace, and performance will continue to inspire young Latinas long after the culturally appropriate new Maria, Rachel Zegler, has been forgotten.
Unlike his simplistic virtue-signaling colleagues, Being the Ricardos writer-director Aaron Sorkin, for all his leftism, understands the complexities of art, and defiantly stood by his casting of Bardem as Desi. “It’s heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community resegregating ourselves,” Sorkin said. “This should be the last place there are walls. Spanish and Cuban are not actable. If I was directing you in a scene and said: ‘It’s cold, you can’t feel your face.’ That’s actable. But if I said: ‘Be Cuban.’ That is not actable. Nouns aren’t actable. Gay and straight aren’t actable. You can act being attracted to someone but can’t act gay or straight. So this notion that only gay actors should play gay characters? That only a Cuban actor should play Desi? Honestly, I think it’s the mother of all empty gestures and a bad idea.”
“Unexpectedly,” the very un-woke Spider-Man: No Way Home is printing money at the box office this month: Nolte: Woke-Free ‘Spider-Man’ Crushes Box Office With $50M Thursday.
UPDATE: The horror! Spanish actor plays a Cuban-American. Plus, “The plot centers around (1) the marital problems of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and (2) the turmoil stemming from reports that Ball once registered to vote as a Communist. There’s also a heavy dose of feminism, which is natural in a film about a female television pioneer in the 1950s. The anti-anti-communism is another matter. Seventy years after the fact, the same people who wanted an investigation of possible Russian influence in the outer reaches of social media are still incensed that, at the outset of the Cold War, Congress investigated, with reasonable cause, possible Soviet influence in Hollywood — the utterly dominant force in American culture at the time.”