Identity politics is a term used by Bernie Sanders and others on the fringe Right and Left as a loathsome pejorative to dismiss the specific needs of women and people of color in politics, but I’m using here because “political correctness” carries with it too many bastardized negative connotations. It’s always been easy to twist terminology to shape the world through the eyes of white men when it’s white men doing the twisting. I guess the same goes for “identity politics,” but at the moment I’m not able to come up with a better term for it.
The internet has given voice to the people in a way the human race has never seen before. As such, it has had enormous impact on all areas of our lives, from our economy, to our relationships and of course, to our political elections. What we’ve started to build and what we’re heading towards is a hive mind, that when united can become a powerful force. Those who have learned to use the hive mind to their advantage include the Pepsi Corp, who created a controversy that effectively jacked their stock prices to an all-time high (you can argue about whether they did it intentionally or just bungled things with clumsy luck, but whatever they did. people heard about their product every second of every day for about a week and this was the end result):
So that was the outcome of the Pepsi controversy, so-called, where a corporation crudely piggy-backed their product onto a sensitive social justice issue that had everyone saying the name of their product everywhere. How else can they get that kind of publicity? By putting a Kardashian/Jenner at the center of it, well-known targets of derision. They overplayed their hand, in my opinion, as Kendall Jenner was really the only one who would suffer any sort of blowback. Clearly, Pepsi did just fine. The hive mind got to think that it actually did something good for the world by making Pepsi pull the ad. So everybody wins, right?
The Pepsi incident set a standard that defends what we think about a specific issue. Granted, Americans are clearly divided on this issue. In Trump world, a “liberal uprising” about a politically insensitive ad is nonsense. Therefore, they will buy Pepsi as a reaction against it. Their version of “MAGA” is, in fact, eradicating all forms of identity politics or political correctness from public life. Give white men back their god-given power, which they’ve had since forever.
But manipulating the hive mind can also be risky business. While it worked beautifully for the Russians and Trump trolls to divide Democrats by posing as Democrats and using their own liberal outrage against them, it doesn’t always go as planned. No one would have set out to make a movie that cost nearly $100 million to test the hive mind, as Paramount did with Ghost in the Shell, which bombed, many believe, because of “whitewashing” the main character.
Ghost in the Shell cost $110 million and domestically grossed $39 million. But here’s the weird part about that. In America it was shunned for not being authentic to the source. Its foreign total though? $123 million. You see, the Catch-22 for Hollywood and casting big budget movies is that our most familiar stars will always be the ones who make the most money overseas. To be more precise, it’s mostly the male stars, preferably white. I haven’t seen or done deep research on this, but after glancing at the numbers over the years this is what I see. At this point, it’s intuitive. The more white, the more male, the better the movies do overseas. Even though Chinese films do better overall in China — and that strength is growing — American films still have remarkable clout. America is trying to compete with China, as we speak, to maintain its spot as the biggest film exporter, but that story has not yet been fully told. We already know how important China is to American film by observing how China is being injected into the plot (e.g., Gravity, The Martian, Independence Day: Resurgence). It’s always like “oh, there’s the China part.” China must be reflected in a positive light or the movie won’t even play there.
So to some extent, the hive mind was effective in sending a message about Ghost in the Shell, but it didn’t totally sink the movie from a financial perspective anyway, unless I’m missing something here.
As we saw from last year, once Donald Trump was elected, many people instantly began to regard La La Land very differently as a film that would not “look right” if it won Best Picture. I personally don’t think this was the major factor that cost it the Best Picture prize because I do believe it not earning a SAG Ensemble nomination mattered more (actors rule the Academy), but that is going to be the narrative going forward. It can also be argued that the SAG absence was an early reflection of La La Land’s faltering image problem. Pretty hard to separate the cause and effect, no matter how we choose to dissect it. The same sort of thing happened to Zero Dark Thirty and Selma, and also to The Revenant and Avatar. Even if they weren’t hit with political controversies, necessarily, the preferential ballot can’t tolerate divisiveness in any form.
If Birdman not been the surprise winner at the PGA (and had Boyhood not been the frontrunner for so many months), I believe it would have built up similar negativity, enough to bring it down. But Birdman was the surprise favorite, winning all of the major guilds. La La Land won all but SAG — but not even having a nomination there (significantly, among a nationwide group of industry voters) made the film divisive by its very nature. It also suffered from being hyped and anointed the frontrunner way too early in the race, so much so that by the time people saw it, like the actors in SAG or the general public, they were expecting something more, something bigger, perhaps something without a melancholy ending.
And then there was the issue of race. While the majority of people who cover the Oscars and film in general tend to be white and male, there are a series of disconnects between the press, the publicists who sell movies to Oscar voters, the voters themselves, and the general public. The conversation about race and La La Land was a difficult one to have. People took sides. In the hive mind, there was an internal war brewing about the film, involving those who thought it left out the multicultural diversity of Los Angeles, and worse, slighted the John Legend character by making him the jazz sellout while Mr. Bunny Bread, Ryan “Hey Girl” Gosling, was the Jazz purist. Film critics sided with the film, for the most part, and it became verboten in those circles to criticize it, as clearly that wasn’t Damien Chazelle’s intention. In fact, he’d originally wanted to cast Michael B. Jordan in the Gosling part. But you know, we’re back to that star thing and money. Gosling is the bigger star. Either way, it bubbled up in the hive mind and then died down after the Oscars revealed Moonlight the surprise winner.
Navigating the hive mind is going to be tricky business for Hollywood as it is the one place where controversy does seem to matter (unless you are as protected and insulated as Casey Affleck was). Thus, a film like Suffragette can get nailed for being exclusive to the white feminist experience, and as a consequence get shut out of awards, while Selma can be nailed for painting LBJ as not as nice as American history wants him to be. Neither of these reactions could have been predicted.
The truth is that no production is going to be controversy-free. Even now, there are already stirrings of gripes against Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit – a film which is cast with many black actors, but because there weren’t any women of color in the trailer the knives are being sharpened. Good, bad, I don’t know – it has left the white male hive mind resentful and angry that anyone is daring to criticize anything from a different perspective.
But if it’s me, and I’m making films in Hollywood, I would want to get a clue, and fast, about the potential blowback from the hive mind well before I brought the film out.
Aaron Sorkin recently voiced confusion about the lack of opportunities for women and people of color in Hollywood. He said he’s always believed that people got where they were because they were good enough, and in my own conversations with people in the industry that does seem to be their attitude. They truly believe Hollywood is a meritocracy. They don’t see it the way most of us see it, that it’s really a factory for white males to achieve their dreams, like almost every other aspect of American life except for one or two industries, like music or art.
Whitewashing should be dumped at all costs. Why even go there? It’s a shitstorm waiting to happen. It’s a shitstorm because Hollywood asks that we all participate in their scheme, yet it focuses almost exclusively on one demographic. You have to ask yourself how you’d feel if the only reflections shown in movies were white faces? If you had a platform to launch a complaint, wouldn’t you? Or a better question might be: why wouldn’t you?
If you don’t mind the shitstorm, hey, go for it. But the thing is, we’re hoping to have moved beyond all that in 2017. This, because there are so many talented actors of different ethnicities who really could use the work. Asian actors in particular find roles scarce, as do all women of color. If there is a built-in opportunity to cast an Asian actress (Aloha, Ghost in the Shell) why not do it? Stars have to be made and built. Look at Margot Robbie. She’s being offered every part under the sun. The next thing you know, they’ll be casting her to play Hillary Clinton. Good for her, but can’t we do more than make stars out of blonde blue-eyed beauties in a world fast becoming filled with many more people of color?
Hollywood is a business. Everyone is just trying to make a buck, but the hive mind of the internet has given many people a voice who wouldn’t ordinarily have one. That will continue to impact profits and reputations. I’m guessing that if anyone brings this up in a production meeting/ they will likely be shut down by someone saying it doesn’t matter. But it does matter. More and more we’re becoming a big massive hive mind that will be great in some ways, terrible in others. But we’re also becoming a global community. We can’t keep telling nothing but stories about the white experience and keep expecting people to come back to buy tickets to see that. It is one thing writers, directors, and producers will have to keep in mind from inception onward. Things are only moving in one direction, and there’s no going backwards now.