Hollywood stars react to outbreak in very different ways
Celebrities singing Lennon’s hit song face backlash from the ‘common folk’
Surely, it was meant to be a kind gesture.
This wasn’t Evangeline Lilly adamantly refusing to follow the guidelines of nearly every health expert or Vanessa Hudgens shrugging off the deaths resulting from this global pandemic as “inevitable.”
No, this was clearly meant to make people smile. A few days after posting a photo of herself in a large walk-in closet with the caption, “Staying home is my super power,” Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot posted Wednesday to Instagram a video engineered to go viral. Spoiler alert: It worked, but probably not for the reason she hoped.
It opens with her, in a purple sweater and silver necklace, speaking into the camera.
“Hey guys. Day 6 in self-quarantine, and I gotta say that these past few days got me feeling a bit philosophical. You know, this virus has infected the entire world,” Gadot says. “Everyone. Doesn’t matter who are you, where you’re from. We’re all in this together.”
She goes on to explain that, inspired by a clip of an Italian man playing John Lennon’s Imagine on a trumpet from his balcony, she put together her own video. It’s full of her celebrity friends singing the ballad, a cappella. There’s James Marsden, Zoë Kravitz, Amy Adams, Mark Ruffalo and so many more, all looking cosy. Behind many of these celebrities are their cavernous homes, natural light flooding
in through enormous windows. There are some outliers, such as Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon and Natalie Portman, who are walking around outside near what appears to be idyllic forests. The abundance of nice clothing is only rivalled by the amount of off-pitch singing. No makeup is out of place. Nearly every house you can glimpse in the video is bigger, nicer and more well-decorated than yours. If this is what self-quarantine looks like, sign us up!
“I guess the sentiment is nice, but every single one of these people are so out of touch with reality that it’s cringeworthy to for them to say ‘we’re all in this together,’” commented one Instagram user. “No not really, us comment folk are struggling just to get tested. Meanwhile, you-all are getting quarantined in your million dollar mansions.”
Another user took a blunter approach, writing, “How is this supposed to help lmao just open youall damn purses.” Things weren’t much better on Twitter.
“Hey celebs, we don’t want to be sung to,” tweeted film writer Casey Cipriani. “We want you to use a million or two of your money and order ventilators, masks, and gloves from the manufacturers then donate them to a hospital. Or pay for the salaries of an entire staff at a bar, restaurant, or daycare.” She added the hashtag “imagine.”
“No politician can unify people in the way that the Imagine video seems to have united every single person against it,” joked comedian and writer Josh Gondelman. So why the vitriol?
We know that rich celebrities have better access to COVID-19 testing kits. They likely have access to better health-care options than most Americans. It’s not a stretch to say most of them can likely take a few years off work without too dire of consequences. That’s not the case in a country in which “four in 10 adults say they couldn’t produce $400 in an emergency without sliding into debt or selling something,” as The Post reported in 2018.
As a result, the video feels a bit tone deaf. That isn’t to say culture consumers want their celebrities to remain silent during times of crisis. Contrast that video with one made by World War Z author Max Brooks and his father Mel Brooks.
In it, Max urges people to stay in their homes if possible and to wash their hands thoroughly. “If I get the coronavirus, I’ll probably be OK,” he says. “But I give it to him, he could give it to Carl Reiner who could give it to Dick Van Dyke, and before I know it, I’ve wiped out a whole generation of comedic legends. When it comes to coronavirus, I have to think of who I could infect, and so should you.”