Hollywood has reached peak woke
The emphasis on diversity in Hollywood is going to be the death of show business as we know it, according to entertainment insiders. There’s a growing shift toward “wokeism,” as many in the industry feel they no longer have the freedom to be creative, according to writers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik on Bari Weiss’ Common Sensesubstack.
From Harvard to Hamas, a war is raging over the future of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in America right now. And the first battle of 2024 is set to play out in Hollywood this month. On January 24, the Motion Picture Academy will – as they do every winter – announce nominations for the Academy Awards. But for the first time this year, films nominated in the Best Picture category must meet a series of formalised DEI requirements. The Academy’s new “Representation and Inclusion Standards” are intended to boost minority participation within the entertainment industry, while compensating for the history of discrimination that shut minorities out in the first place. They’re classic DEI: the race-and-identity-based ideology that’s become a core component of corporate or cultural endeavors across the US. DEI informs how students are taught, workers are hired and governance policies are established and obeyed. Some $8 billion was spent on DEI efforts last year, rendering it – at least until recently – almost “too big to fail” within American business and academic arenas. But then came Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the disastrous response of university administrators like Harvard President Claudine Gay to the accompanying tidal wave of anti-Semitism.
Disney has also lost billions from costly movie flops with DEI-related themes, alongside a high-profile battle with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over his controversial LGBT education policies. Like Bud Light parent InBev, Disney is reconsidering this approach, admitting recently in an unprecedented display of corporate honesty that its “positions on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely, and present risks to our reputation and brands”. Translation: A return to the family-friendly fare that made Disney famous, instead of “statement” films with “queer” storylines or non-binary characters such as last year’s Pixar flick Elemental, which had the worst opening weekend in Pixar history. Companies ranging from Amazon to Target are also dialing down their woke focus, suggesting 2024 could be the year that woke hegemony finally comes undone. ... Jewish representation still isn’t qualified as minority representation under Academy standards.
...the pattern in the age of wokeness — or whatever you wish to call the distinctive form of social justice progressivism that has swept through elite institutions in recent years — is for cultural territory to be either colonized by the new rules and shibboleths, or else to develop a reputation as a zone of anti-woke resistance. Examples of the first category are legion, from museum curation to young adult fiction; stand-up comedy and Substack essay writing are arguable examples of the second category. (Even if, yes, there are plenty of progressive comics and Substackers.) But the movies are an interesting case. For instance, romance is emphatically out; a kind of therapeutic management of family trauma and drama comes in. The antagonists cease to be personal villains and become increasingly structural or miasmic; conflict is borne out of misunderstanding or accident or environmental degradation instead of jealousy or the will to power. Or else the real bad guy is some authority figure who has misled everyone into unnecessary conflict: There’s an emphasis on deconstructing false histories and false family mythologies, or at least on waking up from the spell cast by prior generations’ narratives.
And too much adventuring is somewhat frowned upon as well. As The Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch noted recently, 2022 brought two major kids’ releases, the Disney-Pixar production “Lightyear” and Disney’s “Strange World,” which were movies about explorers whose message was effectively anti-exploration, teaching their protagonists to stay home, embrace sustainability and be content with diminished expectations — almost as though their creators had read a bit too much Tema Okun and decided that the hero’s quest is just another facet of white supremacy culture. Both “Lightyear” and “Strange World” were also commercial disappointments, and it’s not clear to me that any of the children’s movies whose themes I’ve just described are particularly powerful or memorable as works of art unto themselves. But maybe that’s precisely what makes them a useful indicator. Like middling ’80s action movies, this sort of kids’ entertainment is a kind of background music or cultural wallpaper for our moment. Not necessarily what kids want, but what the culture wants for them. Not a cinema of wokeness in some grand and obvious way, but an ideological ethos that comes sliding in unbidden on a Saturday afternoon when the whole family is tired and out of ideas — but at least there’s a Disney+ subscription, and the remote is close to hand.
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