Scattered Thoughts: PC vs Woke Entertainment
10 minutes
Language
I’ve been musing a lot on the evolution from Political Correctness in entertainment to Woke-ness in entertainment. It seems obvious that the latter is really just an exaggerated mutation of the former. Like most mutations, it’s a degradation.
Wikipedia says, “Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated PC) is a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society.” I’ve not found an equally useful definition of wokeness, but it’s definitely all that PC is, and then some. Let me take a stab at it: “Woke refers to language, policies, and measures designed to attack commonly held categories of sexual and social identity – as well as universally recognized standards of ethics, logic, and fair play – in order to supplant them with contrary or amorphous conceptions of the same, each having a tendency to annihilate essential categories, and to reduce every human interaction to a series of power relations.”
Put in another way, a PC mind is trying to frame reality in a preferred way by excluding facts it would rather not admit, and by promoting scenarios that it prefers were true, regardless of whether they are true. A woke mind seeks to redefine social reality from the top down by only permitting discussions, thoughts, or even words that correspond to a desired set of human outcomes, and, pointedly, by annihilating and purging any contrary ideas. PC is the respectable, upper middle class, “enlightened” fibber, who thinks her little lies are justified for the greater good. Woke is her vicious step-child, highly moralistic in her tone, yet entirely amoral in her methods.
Against this backdrop, I’d like to contrast scenes from two big-budget movies that show the devolution from PC to Woke. Both involve Laura Dern.
In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Dern’s Ellie Sattler character has to go outside and do a thing, while Professor Hammond stays back. A moment of cringe dialog follows, (which I don’t recall being in the book, but anyway:)
Professor Hammond: “It ought to be me really going.”
Ellie Sattler: “Why?”
Professor Hammond: “Because I’m a…and you’re a…”
Ellie Sattler: “Look, we can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back…”
Here is a textbook example of PC “excluding facts it would rather not admit, and promoting scenarios it would prefer to be true.” Professor Hammond is doubly correct here. First, Jurassic Park is his mess, and he should not be putting someone else at risk. Second, if he is any sort of man, then of course the thought of putting a woman at bodily risk (rather than himself) should be abhorrent to him. There is nothing “anti-woman” about this, (and, really, what woman on earth would respect a man – I mean a man in real life, not a theoretical man – who put her in harm’s way while sitting on his laurels?)
Those are the facts excluded by the scene. But the other side of PC is promoting scenarios that the PC person wishes were true, rather than those that are likely to occur. Yes, some women are capable of incredible acts of bodily courage and risk-taking, at least under highly specific circumstances. But how many women do you personally know who would run out and fight dinosaurs? Or, put another way, in a room of a hundred people, half male, half female, and all of whom have the option to run out and fight dinosaurs (and possibly save everyone,) or stay inside and hide from the dinosaurs (possibly saving themselves,) what percentage of the runners-out would be women? (Obviously this changes if the woman’s own offspring are under direct threat.)
Compare the percentage of (actual) women you personally know who find snakes, spiders, and, presumably, giant, bloodthirsty reptilians — along with the real prospect of violent death — both disgusting and panic-inducing, to the number of women on Hammond’s island. What are the chances that Ellie Sattler, a field paleobotanist and almost the sole woman on the island, just happens to be a member of that vanishingly small group of dragon-slaying women who can throw down as good as the boys “in survival situations?”
The purpose of this kind of scene is not to tell the truth, but rather to promote wish-fulfillment. But in another infamous scene, Laura Dern plays a character who takes wish-fulfillment orders of magnitude past mere PC, into the hubristic land of the woke. In doing so, she shows how far things have “progressed” in the field of cinematic bullshit that sacrifices art to “the message.”
In 2017’s The Last Jedi, Dern plays Admiral Holdo. In a series of scenes — where, with unintentional humor, Holdo is surrounded by a veritable army of supportive “sisters” — the lady Admiral is verbally accosted by an enraged Poe Dameron. Poe is angry because his “toxic” male instincts — the same instincts that account for his being a brave and skilled fighter pilot, rather than a manicured desk-jockey like Holdo — are being undermined by what he believes, and has every reason to believe, are the cowardly and indecisive actions of the Admiral. Now in pre-woke days, a scene like this where a subordinate officer confronts a seemingly corrupt and cowardly superior, would have led to a tense showdown, ending, perhaps, in the arrest of the superior officer, and the final vindication of the inferior officer; good old-fashioned David and Goliath stuff! But this superior officer is a woman, and Poe is just a frustrated, toxic male. Naturally, then, Poe is in the wrong.
Viewers soon learn the truth, a truth that Poe was too blinded to see, because he was thinking of war in terms of narrow, traditional categories, such as “attacking,” “evading,” “holding the line,” and other such man-ish tripe. The truth is that the all-wise Holdo has a secret plan. What is this secret plan? Why, nothing less than to sacrifice herself by hyper-spacing through the Empire’s First Order’s battleship, while slowly ferrying the crew and passengers to this place that she knows about, just around the corner, in space. (She knows A LOT of stuff Poe doesn’t know, because she’s a knower.) Now leaving aside, for the moment, that this “plan” could not work, and that Poe couldn’t guess it because it makes absolute nonsense of the established rules of the Star Wars universe, Holdo’s style of leadership is still nothing short of execrable. Of course a competent pilot is going to have questions about what seems, to all appearances, to be a cowardly series of maneuvers that will destroy the crew and end the Rebellion’s Resistance' hopes. And any competent Admiral would understand how things looked, and that something like general battle strategy is not the private gnosis of only a few higher ups, but a form of knowledge accessible to all competent people under her command. If she had a need for secrecy in this matter, she should at least have pulled Poe aside, and let him in on the plan.
He might have protested her self-sacrifice. He might have tried to persuade her to give it one more try, and only then sacrifice herself. Being a disgusting man, he might have volunteered to sacrifice himself. (Heck, he might have even explained to Holdo that hyperspace doesn’t work that way in the Star Wars universe, whereupon she could explain to him that now it does work that way, because Disney doesn’t give a shit about canon!) But he would have at least respected her, and understood that she wasn’t sacrificing the crew and the Rebellion’s Resistance’ hopes to her own incompetence and cowardice. But no, HE JUST MANSPLAINS!
Well, he actually does in this scene is challenge her in exactly the same way that any man would challenge another man under identical circumstances. And this is where the scene’s “woke-ness” shines through. Because he is a man, and she is a woman, his actions are not to be interpreted as what they plainly, contextually are, i.e. one officer confronting another over apparent cowardly incompetence; but rather as an out-of-control man challenging a woman and refusing to believe her. I mean the nerve! Of course, being a woman, she is wiser and more cool-headed than he. His brand of brash, swashbuckling decisiveness might make him feel better, but that’s just exactly why men ruin everything, and cause all the wars. (Tell that to the Saga writers, but I digress.) Woman know these things! As super-popular character Rose Ticco later puts it – while educating another benighted male – “That’s how we’re going to win. Not by fighting what we hate, but by saving what we love.” Blehh! Gag me with a spoon! But this is what we’ve come to.
And while viewers of Jurassic Park only had to endure a few cringe-worthy slights at men, these were sensibly kept to a minimum so as to leave the main story intact. It was, after all, the 90’s. Hollywood types have always been liberal, and have always used scripts to virtue-signal, and gain social credit. But those film companies still wanted to make money, and tell stories that the audiences loved. Now, it’s not so clear if it matters to these companies what audiences think. It’s even less clear that these studios understand that a loss of audience interest must translate to a loss of sales.
The Last Jedi, and most subsequent Disney forays into Star Wars (The Mandalorian excepted,) along with its most recent Marvel outings, have tripped over themselves to drive home, and feature in a central and defining way, both the wishful thinking of the old PC pirates, and the even more thoroughgoing radicalism of their woke intellectual offspring. Something in the air has changed so that these companies either do not care about alienating the very audiences that pay them, or else are so riven with brained woke religionists that they literally cannot tell stories without subordinating the stories to their personal ideological obsessions. All the elements of woke entertainment, and especially of woke usurpations of traditional IPs, are now firmly in place. The playbook can easily be listed in bullet-point form:
Beloved male characters are to be killed off, or castrated, or made buffoonish, or pushed to the background, or shown to have never really been as great as everyone thought.
Beloved female characters are to be brought to the foreground, and rendered more central than their male counterparts.
New male characters are to be given some cool scenes, but also put in their place, lest they “take up air” needed by new female characters.
New female characters are to have little or no learning curve, and are to be shown to be somehow already in possession of skills and instincts that ought to have taken years if not decades to hone.
New characters, especially female characters, are to be portrayed as trauma survivors. Nobody has a wholesome background.
Female villains, while being portrayed as equal to or greater in bad-assery than male villains, must never actually be evil evil. Somewhere in their past, a man has hurt them.
Fatherhood must never be shown in a positive, wholesome light, except as a means of validating a daughter-figure. This includes institutional fatherhood, in the form of old, solid, reliable things. These must be shown to be full of holes and hypocrisy.
Masculine traits are to be portrayed as problematic, unless wielded by a female, in which case they are to be portrayed as indispensable and admiirable.
Male characters who are strong, thoroughly masculine, and admirable are not to be admitted into stories under any circumstances, save temporarily, to validate a strong female character. If possible, these “worthy” males should be killed off, or otherwise neutered, once this task of validation has been accomplished.
The list could be longer, but one only has so much time to dwell on disorder. And speaking of only having so much of something, just how much money are Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others willing to lose in order to advance the new woke causes? Just how much money do these companies think a guy like me would be willing to spend to watch them castrate and destroy every character and story I’ve ever cared about? These people must realize that we needn’t go to their films, nor stream their latest wokified takedowns of traditional IPs. They do realize that, don’t they? Don’t they?
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