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February 2, 2022

The good news is that at least two famous people in entertainment have principles

By Andrea Widburg

In Hollywood's Golden Days, the studios kept a tight lid on their stars.  Many of them were deeply damaged, weird, poorly educated, and not at all nice people, but the studios made sure that the public saw them as glowing, all-American, pure, and good people.  When the studio system broke down, we suddenly learned that the people who looked so good on the screen were anything but admirable off the screen.  However, since these same people have an enormous say in American culture, I wanted to share a few nice stories about two stars.

The first star is Keanu Reeves, who is my one Hollywood passion.  (I really liked to mess with my kids when they were teens by sighing over him.  Their disgust was amusing.)  Every story about Reeves shows a nice guy who's managed to maintain his values.  Just recently, yet another story emerged showing that Reeves has a decency that other Hollywood people utterly lack.

It turns out that, while 99.999% of Hollywood people will bow down very low to China despite its terrible human rights abuses, Keanu won't.  In a Just The News article about most of Hollywood being completely copacetic with China drastically altering the ending to 1999's Fight Club, Keanu is one of the few whose principles keep him from yielding to China's demands:

However, amid charges of Hollywood "selling out" to China, a tiny number of actors and directors — most recently film star Keanu Reeves — have refused to submit to China's demands to toe the line of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

[snip]

As with "Fight Club," Hollywood has, for the most part, quietly accepted such changes. According to Wendy Su, an associate professor of media and cultural studies at UC Riverside, there's one overarching reason why: "the vast Chinese market and the potential for greater profits."

Bunch cited the same motivation in his stinging criticism of Pitt, Norton, and Fincher, saying there's a reason for them to remain silent about the changes to their film: "fear of Chinese retaliation against their films in the future. Fear of losing money. Fear of losing jobs. Fear of financial duress."

But there are holdouts, says the article.  Judd Apatow (who hates conservatives) calls out people for yielding to China, and Quentin Tarantino refused to edit his film to suit China.  And then there's Keanu:

Most recently, actor Keanu Reeves has stood firm in his public stance supporting Tibet, which China views as part of the Chinese mainland and controls through oppression.

Reeves agreed to perform at a benefit concert hosted by Tibet House US, an international group of nonprofit organizations that promotes Tibetan culture. In response, Chinese nationalists have threatened to boycott Reeves' new film "The Matrix Resurrections," the fourth installment in the sci-fi franchise, as well as his other films.

And then there's Sean Ono Lennon.  Admittedly, he's not as famous on his own as Reeves, but he's certainly the child of two of the entertainment world's most famous people (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, for those who don't know).  He's proven to be an original thinker, which reflects well on Yoko Ono, who raised him on her own since he was five.  Most recently, he tweeted out support for those who want the right to use ivermectin to treat COVID:

Then there was his retweet of Elon Musk's praise for individualism (although Musk is a radical climate change activist who is happy to get in bed with China):

And last week, Sean Ono Lennon and his girlfriend made someone very, very happy:

It's just heartening to know that famous people, who have more influence than the rest of us do (whether they deserve that reach or not), can still be decent human beings.

Image: Sean Ono Lennon being kind.  Twitter screen grab.

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