So like we said before, even were there no new COVID threat, you couldn't possibly make a movie for 2021 which less people would want to see. Even if the star was squeaky clean, you couldn't make a movie less people would want to see. Even you could watch the movie on Netflix, you couldn't make a movie less people would want to see. Even if it starred Kim Kardashian and The Rock, people wouldn't go.
The reason for all that is that any movie which tells Americans in 2021 that they'll kill each other if they don't acknowledge the validity of each other's perspectives is going to antagonize everybody in the country. Nobody wants to hear that their lives could get a hundred times worse than they already are.
But as passe as West Side Story seems to 2021, think of the world we're likely to hand over to 2071: wars and global warming reducing cities to rubble, the internet proliferating lies about each other's ethnic groups, survivors constantly fighting over resources like water and habitable housing, with the rate of survival heavily favored to the young and healthy.
Whether the present looks like West Side Story (and, of course, a lot of it still does), some period in the mid-future may well BECOME West Side Story for 90% of human beings before the world retreats again into 1957-like stability.
But of course, half the world already is West Side Story: the racial hatred, gun violence, dysfunctional justice system, the prejudiced cops, immigrant aspirations and nativist grievances. The fact that West Side Story could be written in 1957, a decade before every American city would become battlegrounds like the neighborhood of West Side Story, except less white of course, is almost uncanny. West Side Story, with all its problems and creakingly antique flourishes, is more a projection of the American future than of the American past. It is a perfect example of one of those works which constitute American Sublime, in which our country's condition seems projected back at us. West Side Story is severely flawed, and perhaps because it's severely flawed, it's much greater than it ever could be if it were perfect.
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Some works are just too good to not be controversial. And if they're really cosmic, they never stop. For an artist, to ignite a national controversy is as great a praise as getting a knighthood. And to get banned is a praise as great as being made a life peer.
The two greatest movies ever made, at least in my opinion, are Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game. Citizen Kane, a thinly veiled biopic of William Randolph Hearst - the Rupert Murdoch of his day, was considered so devastating to Hearst that he tried to buy all the copies of the movie and destroy it before anyone could see it. It was barely seen for twenty years after its limited release. The Rules of the Game, which showed the wealthy French as a dying, decadent, dissipated class, was such a debacle at its premiere that fights broke out and one person literally tried to set fire to the theater. Critics called it 'unpatriotic' and 'baffling.' For seven years after its premiere, it was not seen at all and the original negative was destroyed in an Allied bombing. To this day, we still have not found seven minutes of Jean Renoir's original cut.
A ban on a work of art is a far greater medal of honor to its author than a Nobel Prize. Whether the work banned is Huck Finn or Go Tell It on the Mountain, Lolita or The Bluest Eye, it's the ultimate tribute.
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West Side Story's obviously never been banned. But it was never not controversial, it only ever earned favor because of a bastardized movie, and the musical itself has barely survived outside of high school productions. Millions think we know this piece of Americana, but have more than a few thousand ever truly experienced West Side Story from the audience seat in all its eruptive power?
The reasons are numerous, and the main one is not fear of Latino protests, it's that its book (script) writer, Arthur Laurents, lived to be ninety-four, and refused to allow any revision of the original concept, because he knew that the script was the only part of West Side Story not written by a genius, and the only part people would want to change. So long as Arthur Laurents still lived, West Side Story could not, because it was Laurents's only claim to posterity. For our entire lives, West Side Story was frozen forever in 1957, a quaint piece of white jazz nostalgia by slumming highbrows, whose relevance to the modern world seemed ever more tenuous as America grew ever more diverse.
Without Laurents, West Side Story would never have been written. The egos in the room were just too massive, and Laurents had to be there as the 'Ringo' to keep 'John' (Jerome Robbins), 'Paul' (Leonard Bernstein), and 'George' (Stephen Sondheim) from bailing on each other before they'd written a single scene or song.
But Laurents is dead now, and with Laurents's death, directors and writers are finally free to illuminate just how many thousands of insights West Side Story has for us.
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Part of the internet says the reason for West Side Story box office bomb was Ansel Elgort's sexual assault accusation.
Come on....
Another part of the internet say the reason was that Puerto Ricans were not involved in the movie's creative process.
That's just false...
And then there was the controversy about Spielberg using the 'x-letter' at the end of 'Latin' while trying to be supportive and inclusive.
Sorry but,... whatever...
And then Puerto Rican orgs objected to the half-Jewish, half-Columbia Rachel Zegler playing Maria, and when Jews heard the objection that she 'doesn't look Puerto Rican,' we know exactly what we heard... She may only be half Latin American, but there is no corner of the Earth where Jews hear 'you don't look ____' and don't smell a stench. Whether anybody else hears the dog whistle, we hear it.
But... y'know what....
They probably didn't mean it that way. So... who cares?
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Rachel Zegler is not Puerto Rican. Apparently she doesn't even look Puerto Rican... and yet, there is something about her....
When Bernardo and Anita leave the room, and the camera zooms in on Maria in close proximity to the mirror. She takes out her red lipstick, she puts it on, and suddenly, she is transformed into an almost exact image of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And there is no way in hell that Spielberg didn't mean for us to see that resemblance.
Rachel Zegler was obviously cast in part because she's a magnificent singer and actress, and holy crap is she ever; but in that moment, the most famous fictional Puerto Rican and the most famous Puerto Rican in history have become the same person. Everyone who loves Maria will suddenly find themselves with warm feelings they can't understand for AOC, and everyone who loves AOC will suddenly find themselves with warm feelings they can't understand for Maria and West Side Story. All the sympathy we bring to one is the sympathy we bring to the other, and in that moment as others Spielberg films Maria with all the same reverence with which he filmed Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln.
Whenever people see this movie, be it now or in five years on Netflix, that one moment will change a million minds about AOC. Consciously or unconsciously, they will see the woman who will probably be America's first Social Democrat President, and they will see Maria from West Side Story. Art works in the same way hypnosis works. It's the art of suggestion. That's how propaganda works too, and many woke people wouldn't care about art if art's ability to distribute propaganda was not so gigantic. And whether or not that's an image you want them to call to mind, and whether or not history records it this way, that's the image which may get AOC elected.
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