Thank you, Gal Gadot.
The Wonder Woman star may not have realized it at the time, but her effort to boost our spirits in the face of the current crisis worked better than she could have realized.
Only the impact wasn’t what she had in mind. At all.
The actress organized a group of famous friends, including Norah Jones, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman, Mark Ruffalo and Amy Adams, to sing John Lennon’s classic single, “Imagine.”
Conservative web sites slammed the video, not unexpectedly. Right-leaning folk aren’t keen on the song’s socialist underpinnings, atheism and borderless world.
“Imagine no possessions…”
“Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do.”
Still, even liberal news sites are alarmed at the vociferous response. The AV Club, a far-left destination, called it a “shocking twist” that everyone loathes the clip.
There are a bunch of different ways to approach the clip’s stupidity, and just about every one of them has been explored over the last 24 hours. Some of the responses focus on how patronizing it is that the video was created by a bunch of rich people with too much time on their hands …
Deadline.com also chimed in on the outrage, and the site’s readers refused to let it go.
As hard as it may be to conceive, there are worse things than being confined to your home. Like having to listen to celebrities sing along to John Lennon’s Imagine as you contemplate killing for toilet paper.
Larry the Cable Guy channeled the populist outrage, slamming his fellow celebrities in the process.
Perhaps people responded to Hollywood’s mixed messaging on the crisis. A few stars have risen to the occasion, like Tom Hanks and Idris Elba. They used their positive diagnoses as a way to inform the public and calm concerns.
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively wrote a $1 million check to help two food banks. Meanwhile, other stars are using their social media platforms to remove a sitting president, one both Rep. Ilhan Omar and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently praised for his efforts.
Elvis Costello, no right winger he, once punctured Lennon’s hypocrisy in song. His 1991 album, “Mighty Like a Rose,” took a not-so-veiled swipe at the song’s Utopia.
“Was it a millionaire who said, ‘imagine no possessions,'” he sang on “The Other Side of Summer.”
Today, Americans on the Left and Right are singing from the Costello hymnal, catching Hollywood flat-footed in the process.
And, in the process, united us like never before.
[Cross-posted from Hollywood in Toto.]
