Disney is to introduce an openly gay character in their upcoming movie, The Jungle Cruise, and there's outrage from the right and the left. Is this a turning point for the company, or is it just the latest in a long line of questionable casting decisions?
00:00:00.000So for the first time ever, Disney is going to feature an openly gay character in a movie.
00:00:06.820The upcoming film titled The Jungle Cruise, which will be based on a theme park ride, presumably a theme park ride called The Jungle Cruise.
00:00:17.660I don't know, just my deductive reasoning there.
00:00:20.580And of course, all great films have been based on theme park rides.
00:00:24.640But this one is being billed as a turning point for the company.
00:00:29.220And it will be different from the, you might say, the more subtle homosexuality that has appeared in other Disney movies.
00:00:37.740For instance, the recent Beauty and the Beast remake.
00:00:40.600There was a great deal made ahead of time, before the movie came out, while it was being marketed.
00:00:46.140We heard a lot about the gay elements in this movie.
00:00:48.880And that was supposed to be a turning point, this big deal.
00:00:51.600But in that case, it turns out that it was merely implied that a male character had an erotic obsession with another male character.
00:01:01.060Which, to me, at a minimum, seems like an extremely unnecessary plot point to put into a children's movie.
00:01:23.000Because it's a children's movie, and I would just think, why do we need erotic obsessions, really, of any kind, in a children's movie?
00:01:30.480But that's, again, that's just, I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm the crazy one.
00:01:35.400So, now, in this case, it will be different.
00:01:39.660It will be made, apparently, very clear, explicitly so, that the hugely a-fet character, and that's the quote, it's a quote from an article, the character is going to be hugely a-fet.
00:01:53.020It will be made clear that he is gay and that he is not interested in women.
00:01:56.960And if that is how the film goes, then, now, when I say it's going to be made explicitly clear, let's hope not too explicit, but I don't really know where they're going with this.
00:02:11.220And if that is what happens in the film, if it is, to any extent, made clear, okay, this is an openly gay character, then it will be a turning point, I think,
00:02:19.460because hugely a-fet gay characters are quite common these days in film and television, and it seems like they include them in every TV show and every movie that is not for kids.
00:02:31.620But that's not usually how it goes in Disney movies.
00:02:35.220It's not usually how it goes in mainstream family films.
00:02:38.580So, this would represent Disney really crossing a threshold and entering into a realm that would have seemed unthinkable and unbelievable, even just 10 years ago.
00:02:53.660Now, as you might expect, there has been some blowback over this news, but not from religious conservatives.
00:03:01.380Again, if this was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there would have been quite a bit of blowback from religious conservatives, but not now.
00:03:10.420The outrage in this case is coming from the left.
00:03:14.240It's liberals who are upset about this, because we have been told it is, quote, problematic that Jack Whitehall, the actor hired to play the gay man, is not himself a gay man.
00:04:16.120That's actually what the left is saying.
00:04:17.900She's getting criticism from liberals because her personal lesbianism is not of a kind and to a degree that would justify casting her as a lesbian Batwoman.
00:04:29.460And that's, I mean, this is, this is just crazy.
00:04:45.400But there is obviously a huge double standard when you whine about a straight guy being cast as a gay character or even a mostly gay woman being cast as a completely gay character.
00:04:57.480When you whine about that, yet, yet at the same time you celebrate when women are cast in traditionally male roles or when a black person is cast in a traditionally white role.
00:05:07.820You know, or even when a gay actor is cast in a straight role.
00:05:13.180And I think it stands to reason that there have been dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of straight characters portrayed by gay actors in Hollywood over, you know, the course of Hollywood's history.
00:05:25.540But we're not allowed to complain about that.
00:05:29.340So the left, anytime you've got, they, they do this stupid stunt where they, uh, they take a, you know, a male character and they say, we're going to do this movie again, but with women, you know, um, anytime they do that, if, if any man breathes even a word of criticism or even rolls their eyes at it, the left will pounce on them and say, oh, you sexist, you just hate women.
00:05:58.280Um, when usually, by the way, usually when, when people complain, like if they're doing a, a female Ghostbusters type of thing, the complaint there isn't that, uh, they're stealing, they're stealing characters from men.
00:06:10.880It's like, no, it's just, it's just a stupid, childish thing to do.
00:06:16.040Like, it's just this really childish mentality of, oh, well, men had that character.
00:06:30.200Now, in this case, there are people who are really upset about it saying that it's problematic that Jack Whitehall is not gay.
00:06:38.000Um, and objectively, you know, of course, objectively, all things be, none, none of this should matter.
00:06:49.260Whether you cast women in male roles, gay people or straight people, other way around, whatever, that doesn't, it doesn't matter because acting by definition means pretending to be something you are not.
00:07:04.760But if an actor must now actually be whatever he is pretending to be, then he's not pretending anymore and it is no longer acting.
00:07:15.640At most, what you would have then are reenactments.
00:07:21.460You would have actors reenacting their everyday lives.
00:07:26.560I guess that's the only kind of movie that's allowed to be made anymore.
00:07:29.060Or certainly, we'd have to cease production on all sci-fi films, um, on all fantasy films, on all historical films.
00:07:39.240You can't very well have Daniel Day-Lewis acting like Abe Lincoln if he isn't Abe Lincoln.
00:07:45.840Only actors who are Abe Lincoln can be Abe Lincoln.
00:07:49.360So I think it's fair to say to Daniel Day-Lewis, are you really Abe Lincoln?
00:07:53.900And, of course, we'll give him a chance to respond, but if it turns out that he's not Abe Lincoln, which I think there's at least a 90% chance that he isn't, then he has just committed a great offense against Abe Lincoln.
00:08:07.040I think what we're seeing here is what happens when identity politics invades even the fictional realm.
00:08:15.540That's how bad it's gotten, that I guess the identity, the warriors for identity politics, they have, they have invaded every realm in the real world, and now they are, now they are trying to commandeer even the fictional realm.
00:08:32.680And it does to the fictional realm what it does everywhere else, which is it destroys.
00:08:36.760But I think, actually, that is, that's not even the real point here.
00:08:44.780That's not the real takeaway from this whole story.
00:08:48.040The real point, the real takeaway is that leftists are once again dissatisfied with their own success.
00:08:55.260They have been handed another significant, really, I would say, incredible cultural victory, which is the injection of explicit homosexuality into a mainstream family film.
00:09:28.700And they still find some ridiculous, pedantic reason to turn up their noses at it.
00:09:35.960As I wrote yesterday, they're like a football team that wins 70-3 and then cries after the game that it was rigged against them because the other team managed to put up a field goal.
00:10:04.880You can cede all the ground in the world to them, but then they're going to look at that little sliver of ground that you have not yet ceded, and they're going to say, I want that too.
00:10:14.060I won't be satisfied with all this until I have that as well.
00:10:54.600You know, religious conservatives, cultural conservatives seem to have simply accepted that the left's sexual agenda will be infused into everything.
00:11:03.440In fact, many of them will probably take their kids to watch the film.
00:11:10.700So for all the complaining conservatives do about Disney, for all the complaining they do about bias in the media, notice what happens.
00:11:20.740They just continue going along with it, especially when it comes to Disney.
00:11:25.260Because if you ever suggest that perhaps we should stop letting our kids watch Disney films, most conservatives, Christians will just recoil in horror.
00:11:37.740I remember when, when Beauty and the Beast was coming out and they were making this big deal about the gay element of the film, which ended up being, from what I never even, I never watched the movie.
00:11:48.580But from what I understand, from what I read, from sources I trust, it ended up being kind of a, essentially a non, a non-event.
00:11:55.920And so they made a bigger deal of it than it actually was.
00:11:58.380But before we knew that, I remember talking, I think I wrote on Facebook, and I said,
00:12:03.240are we at the point where we should consider not watching Disney movies anymore?
00:12:08.800And all of these Christians were saying, well, no, we can't do that.
00:12:17.020They were mad at me for even suggesting it.
00:12:19.980They're more attached to Disney than they are to their, to their principles and their convictions.
00:12:24.660In fact, it seems that their number one conviction in life is that I need to be able to keep watching Disney and all the other entertainment that I like.
00:12:34.880So we can complain about the entertainment industry all we want, but when it comes down to it, very few of us are willing to actually adjust our entertainment consumption habits.
00:12:47.280Very few of us are willing to do that.
00:12:49.560We will just keep on ingesting it, and we'll let our kids continue to keep ingesting it.
00:16:11.540Now, it used to be that churches were the normalizing agent in a culture.
00:16:17.540That is, it used to be that churches kind of decided what was considered normal for a culture, what was considered mainstream, what was considered acceptable.