We’re feeling so blue today we hardly know what to do with ourselves, because one of Hollywood’s brightest rising stars has caught a one-way ticket straight to the shit: Timothée Chalamet just got drafted to fight in Vietnam.
Best of luck over there, pal. We’re pullin’ for ya!
Timothée Chalamet’s standout performances in Call Me By Your Name and Bones And All made it seem like he was headed to the top, but thanks to an unfortunate draw at today’s draft lottery, it looks like he’s headed overseas to join the U.S. military in its ongoing war against North Vietnam instead. Once he ships out for boot camp, he’ll trade his call sheets for an M16 and spend several brutal weeks learning how to shoot, dig trenches, and drive his bayonet deep into another man’s belly. You can bet his drill instructors will go extra hard on the pretty boy who carried Dune to the top of the box office, but those grueling five-mile runs and crawls under barbed wire will probably feel like a cakewalk once he gets choppered deep into the jungles of Quảng Trị province and finds himself square in the path of an NVA battalion.
It’s hard to imagine a worse place for Timothée Chalamet than the frontlines of the Vietnam War. His hunky looks might have made us swoon in his shirtless Instagram selfies, but it will make him easy pickings for Viet Cong snipers taking potshots at lightly armored infantry targets. His remarkable acting skills are also now much less likely to dazzle and delight than they are to set off landmines or impale his foot on a shit-smeared punji stick camouflaged beneath the jungle’s dense undergrowth, not to mention the various tripwires just waiting to send a spiked log crashing through his lovely cheekbones. And while his mellifluous singing voice might have been an asset if he were only there as part of a USO tour to raise troop morale, all Timothée’s pipes are going to do belting musical numbers from Wonka out in the thick of actual combat is give the NVA a better sense of which way to direct their mortar fire.
Poor guy’s probably better off just draft dodging up to Canada while he still has the chance!
It’s not just Charlie that Timothée has to worry about either, because the U.S. brass will gladly rot his chiseled body with highly toxic defoliants like Agent Orange if doing so gives them even the slightest edge in their fanatic devotion to the domino theory. Then of course there’s the non-zero chance that a disgruntled fellow soldier might try to frag Timothée, especially if their sweetheart back home sends them a Dear John letter after going gaga over Timothée’s smoldering performance in The King. And even if he manages to make it through the meat grinder of asymmetric warfare physically unscathed, it’ll still leave us feeling pretty low if the boy whose goofy smile stole our heart at the movies simply stops caring about who’s a guerrilla and who’s a civilian and gives himself over to the malign indifference at the root of all human atrocity.
Damn, this is some really disappointing news for Timothée Chalamet and his fans. Here’s hoping the Nixon administration ends this pointless war ASAP and brings our beautiful boy Timothée home!
