The great wokeness awakening means that there’s no more mere pop culture, no songs or shows or movies, everything is a vital element in the great struggle between the way things are and the revolutionary vanguard. Much like Soviet propaganda, every piece of garbage is really fighting for humanity’s soul.
Hollywood wokeness, like corporate wokeness, depends on the conviction that the crap you buy is deeply significant. After media paroxysms over Black Panther comic book movies as the defining mythos of black nationalism, WB Discovery is trying that same angle for Latinos with an even more obscure comic book character.
‘Blue Beetle’ director Ángel Manuel Soto says the DC film is a ‘love letter to our ancestors’ – AP
What the conquistadors really wanted was a love letter about some guy in a beetle-looking mech suit in a dead franchise that the studio has already written off.
The film — starring “Cobra Kai’s” Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, aka Blue Beetle and DC’s first Latino superhero — oozes with Mexican references and elements of other Latin American cultures through almost every scene. Still, the Puerto Rican director says that all of this came naturally due to his and Dunnet-Alcocer’s backgrounds.
“We never were like, ‘Okay, so how are we going to make this Latino?’ We cannot hide who we are. If we have the opportunity to tell our collective experiences because we are Latino, they’re going to come out Latino.”
Much as Black Panther was created by two Jewish guys, Blue Bettle was created by a wite guy and the character was never Latino until 65 years later.
But please tell us how a character nobody cared about that was rebooted as Latino during the Iraq War somehow embodies the Latino experience.
Soto is promoting the film by himself due to the ongoing Hollywood strikes, which prohibit actors and screenwriters from promoting work under television and theatrical contracts. Still, he made sure to bring his cast along for the ride via a culturally relevant white shirt with illustrations of his lead cast as Mexican Loteria characters during the Los Angeles leg of the press tour. The game is similar to bingo and is popular in Mexican and Mexican-American households.
“I know they’re sad that they cannot be here, but they understand that what they’re doing is important for the future generations, and they have my full support, so the least I could do was bring them with me,” said Soto. “I know they’re here in spirit.”
Yes, the spirits of the striking cast members and the ancestors are shining down from Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
I didn’t want to be that person that my Latinidad had to conform to somebody else’s expectations of Latinidad. I wanted to be able to be free, and I wanted the actors that I hired that are Latino to be authentically themselves.
So when I said that, they were like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t worry. Our writer is Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. He is a Mexican from Querétaro and just read the script. Let me know what you think.’
Remember when we were all going to be part of one country? Good times.
Imagine this kind of thing in any other job. Don’t worry, our bookkeeper is a Mexican.
The combined racism and kitsch of identity politics, the divisive woke consumerism, the nationalism attached to junk corporate products is really where capitalism commercializes Marxism.
Marxism pushes identity politics. Corporate America turns identity politics into a tawdry product.