There's a movie out and about called, "Judy." It's a biopic of Judy Garland who earned her fame going to see a wizard, meeting a lion, a tinman, and a scarecrow and still having time to squeeze in a song called, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
Judy had a hard life, some of it because of her choices but some not because of her self-inflicted decisions. To say she had an overbearing control freak of a mother would be an understatement. MGM put stringent restrictions of her, controlling her diet to the point that she wasn't permitted to enjoy a single slice of her own birthday cake. They were fanatical about controlling her weight.
She pill-popped her way through her abnormal childhood and five marriages to David Rose, Mark Herron, Mickey Deans, Sidney Luff, and Vincente Minnelli. Her schedule was so frenetic that she took pills to stay awake, pills to go to sleep, and pills to take the edge off her hunger.
The PG-13 movie depicted all those things and one thing more. There's a scene in the movie in which Judy Garland, now an adult, is in London performing at one of its theaters. One night after her performance, she can't sleep so she begins to walk around London in the dead of night all alone.
Wait a minute! Judy Garland out and about alone pounding the now-deserted pavement and darkened London? That sounds dangerous.
Yes, it's in the movie. It just so happens that at that early morning hour, she comes across two men who tell her that they're her biggest fans. They chit-chat a while and then it's suggested that they find a place to have breakfast (at 2 or 3 AM), so they traipse over to a place but it's closed. At this point, the ever-resourceful Judy says, "Why don't we go to your place and I'll fix breakfast?"
The two men are taken aback at the fact that one so famous as Judy Garland, their idol, would even suggest such a thing, but they see she's serious so they betake themselves to their apartment. While Judy is in the kitchen displaying her culinary talents, one of the fellows says that they've been to every one of her London performances except one. Judy's curiosity now comes to the forefront.
Now comes the revelation: the one time they missed seeing her was when the other fellow was arrested on "obscenity charges." Now the movie audience figures out just who these two are. Now the scene has been set for Judy Garland to make a speech about how narrow-minded and awful people are, how they don't understand people who are different and how afraid they are of anyone who's like those two.
Wait a minute one more time. Judy Garland is out walking around unattended, by herself at 3 in the morning? This looks suspicious, so suspicious that it needs checking out. If one were to run a check on it, he would discover that such a meeting never happened. She was never out on the streets alone; she never met two such men. The entire scene was a setup, a con perpetrated on the audience so that Judy would have a context and a soapbox on which to make her speech. It was all contrived.
But that's not all. In the last scene of the movie, Judy is on stage for the last time in London and the request comes from the audience, "Sing 'Over the Rainbow.'" Judy is struck by the request and begins to sing, but she has an emotional moment and drifts off into silence mid-melody, not being able to finish her signature song.
After an awkward silence, all of a sudden, there are the two men again in the audience and lo and behold, one of them rises out of his set and begins to sing "Over the Rainbow." There he was, the hero to the rescue. As he sings, the audience, one by one, begins to stand, one by one and two by two and sing along as well. Then Judy, touched beyond measure, joins in and the whole place sings in unison.
Wait a minute. That too was contrived. It never happened.
The point is that scenes were contrived, inserted into the movie so that a message, a piece of propaganda could be delivered to the unsuspecting audience. It was a contrived shaming of those watching the movie.
The credits roll. The people in the theater go home having been conned and they don't know it.
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