You can subscribe to the Buzzmeter here.
There are many rumblings around about the so-called “Un-Wokening” of Hollywood. The most recent is by Ana Marie Cox at the New Republic.
You can read it if you want. It’s very long. The audio version is 45 minutes. I did not have time to read it all. But knowing the work of Ana Marie Cox (an OG blogger from the very early days of blogging but whose voices isn’t suited to today’s new media, IMO) it is well-thought-through, intelligently written. It is also wrong. It is very typical to blame the other side for what happened to Hollywood, as they want to continually do. No one can stand to watch the empire’s collapse, least of all those still stuck inside it. But “wokeness” did not arise because of MAGA or the counterculture that has sprang up outside of the mainstream. It came about because a massive movement with a lot of money and power found religion.
The “Radical Right” of today is like the “Radical Left” of the 1960s and 1970s. They’re not there yet, creatively, but maybe someday that will happen. The creative explosion of the last Counterculture revolution came about after the great settling of post-war America after World War II. We sought to build a utopia – an Americana that was patriotic and stable, not Communist, or subversive. The Hays Code controlled film and television, forbidding any kind of indecency. They policed our schools to make sure no subversive messaging made its way in (Communist or socialist mostly, but eventually, hippies and long-haireds too).
But to see how vastly different Hollywood is now, Hair could not be made today. Talk about subversive. Back then, the idea was we were all equal. That’s why there was a need for a revolution in the first place – to find equality for groups that were left behind by the Americana of it all. Black Power, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement all exploded outward.
But Hair is full of politically incorrect things, as you will note from watching this scene. Both men today would be viewed as toxic masculinity and stalker-ish.
That’s far from the only scene that would be problematic.
The only part of that video above that would be acceptable today would be the gay-themed parts of the dance number, which is now mostly mainstream in Hollywood.
People on the Left want to be Treat Williams dancing on the table. They still identify as the “counterculture,” but since they have all of the power (or did), and control most of the institutions (or did), they have no choice but to be the people sitting there telling him not to dance on the table.
What you see with Treat Williams is like putting your finger to an electric wire. If anything defined the Counterculture, that did. It meant daring. It meant fearlessness. But it didn’t mean shame. It meant that it challenged the status quo. But the Left still believes that is what defines all of them. But it doesn’t. They won. They, we, built a thriving utopian empire — an empire that is now in collapse.
Why did it collapse? Because, just as the 1950s, it left too many people behind. Those people rose up and said “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
The “unwokening” as Ana Marie Cox calls it, is the soiling of the purest form of Leftist ideology by the trashy underclass that said we can’t stand another minute of this crap, can we have something else please?
Rather than address that, the pivot was in closing the doors of the Empire and locking out those who threatened it. Most people in Hollywood are on the “inside” and those who challenged them, whom Cox would call the “far right” are on the “outside.” It’s Orwell’s 1984 only most people on the Left can’t see it. They must define themselves as the oppressed outsiders — and yet, they haven’t been for a very long time.
The need to be the oppressed side means they need a constant supply of oppressors, which usually takes the form of white men, though not always. They have to see every day as the end of the world because, to them, it really is. Losing their Empire is rough.
To me, they look so much like the billionaires amid the collapse of the last Gilded Age. They’re clinging to the last moment in history when they were beloved icons, the thriving, alive culture with the best movies, the best comedy, the unmissable entertainment. I think of George Clooney, so comfortable with demonizing the other half of America. I think of the show The Studio which seems to exist in an alternate reality.
There is so much all around us that would make for brilliant TV shows and movies yet there are few people who would write those scripts and almost no executives who would green-light them. Why? Because to do so would mean losing their status.
This is especially true at the corporate monopolies of Netflix and Apple. Since so much power is concentrated at the top, they can’t afford to lose the one thing they know will buy them absolution for their sins of wealth and privilege and that is to obey the rules of the Woketopians.
There is another way to look at it, however. With a whole generation coming of age online, they have been conditioned to see storytelling as corrective rather than exposing hard truths about humanity. I’ll use two Netflix shows as examples.
The first is Adolescence:
This show has been widely praised by critics and is now being shown to school kids in the UK. The thing about it is that is a complete fabrication. It’s at best a PSA like Reefer Madness.
Adolescence would have been great if it were a true crime show, which many people were lured into believing it was, but it isn’t. It is based on various cases involving knife attacks by young men on the rise in the UK. The show makes it very much about ‘incels’ who listen to Andrew Tate and have formed a tight cabal of underground misogynists who think it is their right to kill girls.
When in fact, several of the most recent high-profile stabbings involved non-white perps yet those cases and those problems are erased from the narrative because it has to be that it’s the nice white boy who is carrying around evil in his heart. Fear HIM. Anyone who brings this up is instantly branded a racist, but if you’re going to pretend you have solved the problem of knifings in the UK, well, you did not do the job with Adolescence, as if young men don’t have enough to worry about right now.
Adolescence is deceptive and manipulative, but more than that, it’s CORRECTIVE. It’s meant to be an explanation and a potential solution: just take away their phones, censor their information, and you can have your nice little boy back, as if that will solve the problem of violence.
The second example is Black Mirror Season 7. The old Black Mirrors used to be more about a universal experience, not a specific corrective for all of the evils that live inside of us (only white people, of course, especially white men). I often point to my favorite episode, Nosedive, which envisions a future that can speak for all of humanity.
After 2020, Black Mirror changed. It had to. Everything had to. Ana Marie Cox can’t blame the Republicans or MAGA for that. It was 100% on the Left for what happened in our schools going back to 2012 and 2013 when identity, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology became a religion online among tweens. They took it literally and began making the strident rules that would later explode outward that Summer. Most of us old people didn’t see it coming. But a new religion was born, and it has completely overtaken Hollywood. Anyone who pretends like it hasn’t is either a true believer or a liar.
In Black Mirror Season 7, we have a couple of good episodes. But the best episode, in my opinion, was Bete Noir.
At least I thought so until I began watching the reactions to it on TikTok and YouTbe and then I realized what it was. They say it’s “White Women’s Tears” and it’s what every Black woman experiences on the job. Silly me, I actually just thought it was a good episode with two really interesting leads, and that they had the courage to depict a complex Black female lead.
That it’s “corrective” is what made me think that the “wokeness” is here to stay. It’s baked in. It’s the operating system. It’s a feature, not a bug. We’ll never go back to “the way things used to be” because whole generations have come of age online, in a virtual world. They see life differently. They don’t necessarily know or remember life without the internet.
“Wokeness” merely means obeying the fundamental ideology of the New Left: the white male patriarchy is oppressive and dangerous. Marginalized voices must be amplified and elevated. Every show must be intersectional and diverse. There must be at least one non-white lead. The only people who are allowed to be truly evil are white people.
That’s why the end of USS Callister had to be spoiler alert — girl boss saves the day, evil white men die painful deaths.
Netflix is so popular now, they can do whatever they want – and what they want is to be seen as “good people doing good things” by obeying the rules, just like Hollywood in the 1950s.
The counterculture threatens to upend it, which is why Ana Marie Cox and others see it as so dangerous. They don’t want everything to be upended. They want things the way they were back when the Left controlled everything. I used to be a part of that world. I used to think there was nothing that existed outside of it.
Meanwhile, movie theaters seem only to make money by churning out generic crap (that is always obedient to the ideology, yes, even that must be). I’m not saying there will never be good movies again. Every so often, something manages to break through, like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which opens tomorrow. But it’s rare.
I don’t think “wokeness” is going anywhere, certainly not at Netflix. It has become their brand. But it’s not going anywhere in American culture writ large. They can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Just as the great subversive Film Noir movies rose up beneath the Hays Code, those kinds of films will have to find a way. ART FINDS A WAY.
