A lot of people welcomed the recent news that Selena Gomez will be portraying Arizona’s own Linda Ronstadt in an upcoming biopic — including singing Ronstadt’s songs. Critic Robrt Pela’s has a different take.
I called my friend Rauchine the other day, to ask what she thought about the news that Selena Gomez, one of her favorite singers, will be playing Linda Ronstadt, one of my favorite singers, in a movie about Ronstadt’s life.
Rauchine thought this was a good idea. Selena is a singer and an actor, she pointed out. She ought to be able to portray a famous singer pretty well.
Not according to a lot of Linda fans. I’d noticed a number of them carping about the casting on social media. Well, maybe not the casting so much as the fact that, instead of lip-synching to Ronstadt’s classic recordings, Gomez will be re-recording the singer’s biggest hits for the movie, which is only in pre-production.
It’s been done before in rock-n-roll movies — most recently in “Rocketman,” the Elton John biopic, and memorably by Sissy Spacek in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and Beverly D’Angelo in that movie about Patsy Cline.
But those actors were not superstar singers when they played one.
It was probably mostly old people complaining about this, Rauchine guessed. She thought they wanted the movie to be more about Linda and less about Selena. By “old people,” I guessed she meant me and my contemporaries, people who grew up listening to Linda Ronstadt, back when she ruled the radio airwaves, when all her albums and singles went gold. When she was the queen of rock music.
Rauchine referred to this as gatekeeping, something I thought sounded familiar. She suggested that Linda Ronstadt fans didn’t want to share their singer with young people who might not appreciate her the way they did.
“Maybe they don’t like that a lot of people will go see this movie to see Selena, and not because it’s about Linda Ronstadt,” Rauchine thought. “I mean, that’s why I’ll see that movie when it comes out.”
Rauchine, who’s a 24-year-old actor living in Manhattan, seemed to think this was silly. She said that people her age might know of Linda Ronstadt, but probably couldn’t name one of her songs. That would change, she thought, once young Selena fans went to see her playing Linda in her newest movie. Plus, she said again, Selena can actually sing.
Can she? After we hung up, I listened to a couple dozen Selena songs. Maybe because I’m an old person, everything I heard sounded like pretty much every other contemporary pop song I’ve heard in the last 20 years: A robotic, vocodered female voice singing over a loop of mechanized hand claps.
I’d read that Linda Ronstadt has agreed that Selena Gomez, who vaguely resembles her and is, like Ronstadt, Mexican American, should play her in the movie, which will be directed by David O. Russell of "Silver Linings Playbook" fame. I want that to be enough for me, a lifelong Linda fan: Linda Ronstadt approves.
While I wait for the Ronstadt biopic to be made, I’ll return to my new Selena Spotify playlist, hoping to hear something that doesn’t sound like R2D2 chanting to a click track. And straining for gratitude that someone will be singing Linda Ronstadt songs in a movie that will introduce her to a whole new generation.
