“I” here has the idea of exclusively for women… submissive to men even when they are deceived by the same person. “I” is also to send a message to this world that, even in the West or Asia, women are still women, they will still choose to keep face for their husbands and keep their honor. Moreover, it is “public figures” such as Ball and Faye – two once illustrious American TV stars.
We have the right to wonder why Ball and Faye’s success couldn’t help them get off their shirts quickly, but let’s understand for them, sensitive and delicate women, who not only want to keep the privileged reputation they possess, but also want to hold on to the flame of love that somehow, have sublimated with them in art. The two films “Being the Ricardos” and “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” could… stumbling on the quality of art, but the lessons of being a wife, mother, and person of the public are invaluable!
Love is the ideal
In any marriage, love is a prerequisite, but it will be more sublime if that love is cultivated from the ideal of life. It can be easy for us to find a partner, but it is difficult to find a real partner. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are the same, they are both the characters of the hit TV show “I Love Lucy”, they are also the most sensitive couple on the American small screen in the 50s of the last century.
Writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos” deeply explores the budding rifts between Lucille and Desi while they were at the peak of their careers. The confusion, coercion, and ambiguity in the script of the film not only make viewers disturbed because of the emotions and erratic pace of the film, but also make anyone who knows Lucille and Desi understand the internal conflicts and contradictions between them. They always have to appear with joy and happiness, but at the same time they have to hide the tears inside.
Desi’s masculine romance made Lucille fall in love. The aftertaste and nature of a true “love hunter” like Desi – who both knows how to compose and sing and dance – makes it’s not difficult for him, a Cuban exile, to win the heart of a beautiful and talented actress with a huge career fortune. They began to build the “I Love Lucy” brand and easily conquered audiences across the United States. In this TV show, Lucille is the sexy peach girl and Desi is the band boss. They are acting out a perfect life, full of laughter.
In the 50s and 60s of the last century, American television really made great strides, in which Telechrome and the use of color phosphor brought viewers closer to civilization. If “I Love Lucy” brings wonderful moments of entertainment, another “spiritual dish” was born a little later, which is equally attractive. That is the “700 Club” of two names who used to work in the broadcast industry, Tammy Faye and her husband Jim Bakker.
Like Lucille Ball, a woman named Tammy Faye appears with surprisingly positive energy. She was fanatical with her own husband – Jim Bakker when she studied together at North Central Bible College. Religious beliefs have brought them together, with the purity and innocence of so-called “lightning” love and lofty ideals.
Living fully with faith and love for people, the ambition in Tammy Faye gradually separated them from the children’s programs every year, to found the “PTL Club” to “preach” and “spread the word”. During their prosperous years, the couple reaped hundreds of millions of dollars a year, with a thriving faith community that sparked religious freedom and sustained the spiritual life of the American people at the time
Deception and Collapse
Even though Lucille and Desi had a huge fan base, it was thanks to the ignorance of the media at that time that Lucille still accepted her promiscuous husband with prostitutes, to keep her family happy, to keep the viewership rate for her TV show. Lucille understood who Desi was, and she completely gave up resisting because apart from being a boy and a girl, Desi still treated her as sweetly as possible, unlike when she was a girl in her twenties, Lucille was mentally obsessed with her unruly lovers in the past.
Not to mention, Lucille Ball is not afraid to “commit” to the bloodiest men in Hollywood in exchange for the top star position. After all, she is not a “good girl” to claim to have a flawless, standard husband. But does trying to keep Desi and “acting” all out in “I Love Lucy” really bring happiness?
The most solid “walls” eventually fade, the most unfortunate thing is that the two men are willing to trade everything just to get the need to release their personal desires. If in the last scene of the movie “Being the Ricardos”, Lucille smiles bitterly to the point of embarrassment, because of her suffering to the point of irretrievability, we and Lucille already know that everything must stop, because of that heart with a very feminine hot color, There is no crime to bear a psychological problem for the rest of your life.
We and Lucille already know that everything must stop, because that heart with a very feminine hot color, there is no crime to carry a psychological problem for the rest of her life.
Lucille chose her mistress’s lipstick, and her lipstick in front of her husband, as a test, a comparison. A test of Desi’s reaction – is he genuinely repentant, or is she tolerant enough of him? The comparison for Desi to clarify between a mistress and a wife, who is better? As delicate as Lucille Ball, it is the same.
In the final show, both Lucille and Desi were completely heartbroken with fans who had dreamed too much about their marriage and family happiness, before they really broke up in many ways. “I Love Lucy” stopped airing after 1960, ushering in a series of days of hard work for Lucille Ball, helping her become an icon of American television for a long time.
If Lucille Ball was manipulated by karma, until the time of divorce she still couldn’t get rid of her husband, on the contrary, Tammy Faye was somewhat more decisive with the confession that we have all heard somewhere: “For many years, I have always pretended that everything was fine, while the fact that I was in pain all the time… I can’t pretend anymore.”
Tammy filed while her husband Jim was serving a nearly 50-year prison sentence on 24 counts. At the most important moment of the protracted investigation, Tammy was still by her husband’s side, a few of these times she cried because of the pressure, of course, there were also feelings of shame because her husband was accused of raping a young woman, and then taking the company’s money… concealing the truth. The couple’s huge income made them unable to control major fluctuations, especially after Jim’s scandal caused the reputation of the “PTL Club” to decline seriously, leading to the inevitable collapse.
In these two stories, it is clear that women are always the last to make decisions, they quit after examining their families, children, futures, and “faces”. If men have honor, why don’t women? Both Lucille and Tammy are great in that they don’t take revenge on the man by humiliating them, but on the contrary.
A game of wits and colors
Two works that came to fruition, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Being the Ricardos” both possessed outstanding costume elements. Not only trimming eyebrows, cutting hair… so that it resembles the image of the archetypal character, but these two films also attest to the abilities of top makeup artists. It’s hard to recognize Jessica Chastain with her “heavy” eyeliner, caricature makeup, or Nicole Kidman with her hair and eyebrows “like no one else but Lucille”.
If the shaping factor helps the actor a lot, they themselves have to make a great effort to balance. Nicole – the star who had a “fake nose” in “The Hours” every year, although she encountered some complaints about her appearance in “Being the Ricardos”, there are still many writers who say that this Oscar-winning actor is still able to “save” the film of average quality. The Boston Globe wrote: “Kidman has Lucille’s smoky voice, black and white footage shows incredible physical accuracy… Kidman plays Lucille like Lucille is playing a different role!” The Hollywood Reporter said that “Kidman is generally different from Lucille, but this is an infallible performance!”
Similarly, Chastain has devoted all her “tricks” as Tammy Faye from childhood to becoming a woman who stumbles with both happiness and suffering. Compared to Kidman, Chastain has a younger career, but in recent years, she has continuously appeared in heavy psychological works, which “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” seems to be a testament to acting maturity, which the Independent calls “sincerity… I can’t take my eyes off.”
Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama for “Being the Ricardos”, but she lost another important award, SAG, to Jessica Chastain. It can be said that they are two serious opponents for the owner of the upcoming Oscar statuette even though the victory seems to be more inclined towards Chastain. Voting for Lucille Ball or Tammy Faye is a way for us to understand Hollywood femininity, Western femininity, women who have the privilege of being loved but always prioritize sacrifice.
