Emma, I read a Vulture headline that says “Ryan Gosling’s Gay Wristband Returns,” but I forgot my password and I need answers.
Some La La Land fans are outraged by a new poster released to mark the 10th anniversary of the Lionsgate film, which has “corrected” Gosling’s bent wrist in his famous dance pose with Emma Stone.
What happened to the bent doll? Is this gay erasure? I loved the folded doll!
Like many La La Land fans. It represents a small flourish, a moment of individuality, a rebellion against conformity. But this isn’t gay erasure: Gosling himself hated it. That’s why Lionsgate revealed the new poster with the announcement: “Well, Ryan, you’ve been heard!”
Does Ryan Gosling hate his own hand? Say more!
In a 2024 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gosling called her “La La Hand” and said the pose “obsesses” him because he didn’t realize the dance scene would be used for the film’s poster. During filming, she said, she ignored the choreographers’ advice and flattened her hand where Stone had hers in perfect line with the rest of her arm.
“I thought it would be cool to put my hand like that,” he told the WSJ. “Now that I look at it, and I have to look at it all the time, you know what would have been cooler than this? That,” Gosling said, imitating a stretched wrist. “It just killed the energy that way.”
So, is Gosling happy with the new poster?
According to Lionsgate executive vice president Justin Manfredi, who revealed the “small adjustment” at an event at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the actor loves it. “We let him know and he approved it,” Manfredi said.
Gosling also took matters into his own hands earlier this year, fixing his La La Hand in a video with his Project Hail Mary co-star Rocky. “This is my attempt to fix my La La Hand,” he said.
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And the Internet has reacted with a sense of proportion, I’m sure.
“This sucks. The little gay doll ruled. It was a reminder that while La La Land is a movie about a heterosexual relationship, it’s also a musical, which is the gayest genre. Plus, this kind of revisionism goes against the nature of the time. Gosling made the decision to have a little gay doll, and now it’s part of movie history. No takebacks,” Jason P Frank wrote in Vulture.
Other fans feel that Gosling’s original hand flex reflected something profound about the unequal relationship between the characters. “I never noticed it until today, but I prefer the original at least for the subtle hint that they are on different paths,” one Redditor wrote. “They should have fixed the hand and changed the font to Papyrus,” another wrote, referring to Gosling’s much-loved Saturday Night Live sketches.
“This will be proof of the Mandela effect for many people in five years,” added another. Which pretty much sums up my main fear: in five years we’ll still be talking about this.