[HE comment on yesterday’s “What The Hell?” piece about West Side Story’s American flag poster]
“West Side Story — the ‘57 musical, the ‘61 Oscar-winner, the forthcoming Steven Spielberg movie — is about conflict between feuding families in a very particular Manhattan neighborhood within a particular 20th Century chapter. It’s not a generic red, white & blue thing or a U.S. of A. thing but a 1950s urban thing writ large.
“The original Eisenhower-era stage musical converted the tribal battle between Romeo and Juliet’s Montagues and Capulets in 16th Century Verona into a resentful white trash vs. Puerto Rican immigrants animosity in New York City’s upper west side slums — a fair and apt analogy.
“Was all of 16th Century Italy consumed by warring families thrusting swords and daggers? No, but the apparent idea behind using the U.S. flag in the poster for Spielberg’s film is to suggest that WSS represents some kind of vast American saga about warring tribes being at each other’s throats, not merely in a poor section of 1950s NYC but right effing now…a tragedy about 21st Century America (reds vs. blues, heartland bumblefucks vs. urban wokesters, define it however you like).
“I’m not at all convinced that the tragic saga of Romeo and Juliet can or should support that kind of broad social metaphor. The flag is a reach — a bridge too far.”