Yes, “Go woke, go broke" is a real thing, sort of

(but probably not for the reasons you think)

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i. a brief intro about “christian movies”

I’ll get to the “woke” thing in a second, but first let me give you a thought experiment: Imagine that—one way or another—Hollywood gets conquered by evangelical Christians. Henceforth, all movies will be Christian Movies™️—and not the good kind of Christian movies, like A Man for All Seasons or Silence or The Exorcist or whatever. I’m talking about the kind of movie I once heard actor Corbin Bernsen¹ deride as “Christian porn”—where you walk into the theater knowing exactly what’s going to happen (the main character will start out with some Very Serious PG Problems; in the third act, said character will solve those problems by praying the Sinner’s Prayer). Imagine that’s the only kind of movie that will be made, from now on.

Now—how long would you expect that particular regime to last?

If that scenario sounds far-fetched, just know that it was the exact sort of thing I heard a whole lot of people—both thrilled people and horrified people—predicting less than twenty years ago.² The cultural vibe was, uh, very different in the mid-2000s: George W. Bush was in the White House, 9/11 had sent a lot of people back into the arms of religion, Christian rock was all over the charts, pop stars kept their names in the headlines by showing off their shiny new purity rings instead of their shiny new genders, The Passion of the Christ was breaking box office records, and Christian-adjacent fantasy like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia was doing pretty well for itself too. Nearly every major studio was rushing to create its own “faith-based”³ label.

It probably goes without saying that this moment didn’t last long—most of those faith-based labels have been shuttered, and no genre is currently less trendy than Christian Movie™️. And in order to talk about what we’re about to talk about we have to understand why the Christian Movie™️ craze died as quickly as it did.

In the first place, it seems pretty obvious that Christian Movies™️ weren’t torpedoed by a bunch of atheist haters or whatever—the numbers there just don’t add up. At the time, nearly eighty percent of Americans self-identified as one flavor of Christian or another, and given the tiny budget of the average Christian movie, only a small fraction of them would have to buy tickets to make any given FoxFaith or Affirm Films release a goldmine. The fact that most flopped anyway hints at the obvious: most Christian Movies™️ just aren’t very good—and not by random happenstance, either. There’s a structural reason for their deficiencies.

Apart from the fact that very few Christian Movies™️ feature giant robots blowing up major cities, they come with an awful lot of baked-in assumptions about what’s true and what’s not, what’s good and what’s evil, and what the solution to pretty much every problem is. Even if you’re inclined to agree with those assumptions, the fact that you know exactly where the movie is going makes it essentially boring. Interest is born from suspense; suspense is born from tension; tension is born from ambiguity and conflict. There are a lot of reasons that Christian Movies™️ failed to conquer the world, but their utter predictability was no doubt one of them.

And so far, a lot of you are cheering along with these thoughts, but now comes the awkward part where we have to acknowledge that a very similar thing is playing out again, except with “wokeness” in the place of evangelicalism.

ii. an unfortunately necessary interlude: yes, you know what “woke” means 🙄

It’s a little wild to me that I have to include this interlude (feel free to skip it if you already agree or don’t care), but it’s become something of a cottage industry online to deny that the word “woke” means anything. “lol, what does ‘woke’ mean?” goes a very common genre of tweet. “It’s just an empty slur! Conservatives made it up!” There are at least two problems with that take, though:

• I can assure you, as someone who spends most of his online time hanging out in “heterodox left” spaces: there are an awful lot of liberals, progressives, leftists, socialists, Marxists, etc. who are just as sick of “wokeness” as the average conservative. The only people who seem confused about what “wokeness” means are the woke themselves—sort of like the proverbial fish who’s never heard of water.

• An awful lot of the people currently insisting that “woke” isn’t a thing were the exact same people who were proudly describing themselves as “woke” back in 2014. So—to use the approved woke term—I’m sorta tired of being “gaslit” about this.

Honestly, the denialism is just embarrassing for all of us—it’s like if Trump supporters started insisting that “MAGA” was a slur invented by the left and not something they’ve been proudly displaying on their ugly trucker caps for eight years. The fact is that the dominant values, tone, and approach of the mainstream American left have all shifted radically in the last decade, and “woke” is the word that’s attached itself to that shift. Dislike the word all you want (maybe choose a better word for your movement next time?), but stop pretending you don’t know what it refers to.

So, in the interest of getting everyone on the same page, wokeness is the belief that:

1. the entire history of the U. S. (and, let’s be honest, literally every other country) is the history of white/cis/het/etc. men subjugating and oppressing BIPOC, womxn⁴, LGBTQQIA2S+++, along with whatever other acronyms we invent next week, and this oppression is baked directly into the system,

2. but even though the injustice is fundamentally systemic, the solution, for some reason, is not to work to reform or replace the system, but (surprise!) the exact sorts of things that reinforce the power of the already-powerful: corporate DEI trainings, byzantine systems of obligatory euphemisms and inarguable orthodoxies, and occasional campaigns to make sacrificial lambs of random individuals who’ve failed to use the right euphemisms or affirm the right orthodoxies (and, by random coincidence, have jobs that the canceling mobs want).⁵

In a sense, I have to tip my hat to anyone who can take a quasi-Marxian analysis of history and somehow jiujitsu it into protecting the careers of the privileged,⁶ but hopefully you can see why so many of us—even those of us who are sympathetic to left-ish political goals—are inclined to roll our eyes at this stuff. Either the woke diagnosis (“We’re trapped in a bigoted, oppressive hellhole!”) is embarrassingly melodramatic, or the woke prescription (“We’d better teach rich people some new etiquette!”) is woefully inadequate. Or both, I guess.

Standard disclaimers apply: yes, racism/sexism/etc. exist, are bad, should be stopped. But at this point it’s become clear how misguided and ineffective the “woke” approach is, and an awful lot of us are just sorta tired of having its tenets yelled at us. Y’know, sort of like everyone was sick of having the tenets of evangelical Christianity yelled at them by the end of the 2000s.

Which brings me to:

iii. so, is “go woke, go broke” a real thing?

Oh! Right. The whole thing this article was supposed to be about.

I mean, yeah, it probably is. If it’s not yet, it inevitably will be, and likely soon. But mostly for pretty mundane reasons, and specifically, a lot of the same forces that made Christian Movies™️ nearly extinct.

If you’re unfamiliar, “Go woke, go broke”—which loosely translates to something like “If you make woke entertainment, it will fail commercially”—has been a common catchphrase on certain antiwoke corners of the internet for several years now; to be honest, though, I was a little skeptical of it, until I saw the reaction to this video:

If you can’t watch it, it’s an interview with Rachel Zegler, who’s slated to star in the upcoming unnecessary remake of Disney’s Snow White. According to Zegler, “it’s no longer 1937 [can someone in the fact check dept confirm this plz???], and…[Snow White]’s not gonna be dreaming about true love. She’s gonna be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” And for the last month or so, my YouTube feed has been overflowing with rage about this clip.⁷

From what I can tell, most of the backlash isn’t coming from a bunch of far-right, “women-belong-in-the-kitchen”-type edgelords, either (this Slate piece suggests I’m not crazy in surmising as much)—it’s mostly just normies who are annoyed to see a story they love forced through the same tired “woke” thematic sieve as everything else. I personally have no strong opinions about the original Disney Snow White, but I have to concur that this new movie, as summarized by Zegler, sounds…really boring. What are the odds that the title character will be allowed to experience even a moment of doubt, confusion, or regret? What are the odds that the audience leaving the theater will have their thinking changed in any meaningful way? I feel like I’ve already sat through the whole movie, and I’m exhausted.

“👏🏻MORE👏🏻WOMEN👏🏻LEADERS👏🏻” is, of course, one of the many woke orthodoxies (I assume because the woke set want more Thatchers, Palins, Boeberts, etc.), and I don’t think the median moviegoer seriously disagrees with it (see: Thatchers, Palins, Boeberts, etc.), but does anyone really want to sit through an entire film about a character—male, female, or otherwise—“dreaming about becoming a leader”? Anyone who’s met such a person in real life knows that leader wannabes range from insufferable to megalomaniacal. It’s not for nothing that the heroes of classic Disney movies with leadership themes—Aladdin and The Lion King, to name a couple—are defined primarily by their reluctance to become leaders, while the ones “dreaming about becoming leaders” are, y’know, the villains.

To be clear, good stories about female leadership can and do exist. One of my (leadership-gifted, ftr) daughter’s favorite franchises, for example, is The Hunger Games, and it’s not terribly hard to see why—while the series doesn’t shy away from letting its protagonist lead, it’s also honest about what leadership is: often a necessary evil, usually a zero-sum game, and always something that comes at a steep personal cost. It also allows its protagonist to experience normal human emotions, like love, and allows her to make a choice between love and leadership in the end—a real choice, one whose outcome isn’t ideologically predetermined. In other words, by being honest about human nature and eschewing simple answers, The Hunger Games is able to create that necessary ingredient for a good story: tension.

I haven’t seen Snow White yet, obviously, but it sounds like it will be severely lacking in that department—and I’m clearly not the only one to think so.

iv. conclusion: lemme try to tie this all together (lol, good luck)

I’m sure the wokest readers already either stampeded toward the comment section or rage-quit a while ago, but I might as well reiterate what I’m not saying here. My point isn’t “woke = bad” any more than the point of my intro was “evangelicalism = bad.” A lot of people out there probably consider me woke and/or evangelical (though mostly not the same people). The point is only this: moral certitude tends to make for really boring stories.

Someone, no doubt, will be annoyed that I’ve compared wokeness to evangelicalism,⁸ and no doubt there exist important differences between the two (example: evangelicalism offers forgiveness!), but the two are similar in at least the one respect that matters for this discussion: they both offer flat, simplistic interpretations of life, the universe, and morality that will bore the average moviegoer to tears.

There’s been a perception that the last handful of years has comprised a “reckoning” of the American history of injustice, but in fact most of that “reckoning” happened on Twitter/X/whatever, and statistically, virtually no one actually uses Twitter/X/whatever. The reckoning, it turned out, consisted mainly of a handful of very privileged people chasing each other around with words for a few years. I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t have been that way, just that it was—and the average person remained either unaware of it or indifferent toward it. Those are the people buying most of the movie tickets, not the bluebloods on the former Bird Site—and those people go to the movies to be entertained, not to be preached at, even if they agree with the message.

My general impression is that the woke fever that’s gripped the chattering classes over the last few years is finally starting to break (evidence: I’m not too terrified to post this piece anymore), and as far as I’m concerned, the vibe shift can’t come soon enough. As a ✨professional storyteller✨, I very much prefer being able to write characters who behave like humans, rather than characters constrained by whatever rigid morals the high-priests-of-the-moment are dictating. We’ll see if this ruins my career when I hit “publish,” I guess, but the current vibes have got me feeling optimistic. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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Two years ago: Dear Evan Hansen is good, actually

In retrospect, this piece might have been the beginning of the end for me on social media. I couldn’t figure out what inspired all the loathing for Dear Evan Hansen (come on, it was pretty okay), until I realized that the film’s central theme—that online activism is rarely what it appears—had become impossible to stomach for the exact sort of people professional movie critics tend to be: wealthy, overeducated people who spend all day posting their moral opinions online. We’d passed the event horizon of online brain-poisoning, at least for the upper classes, and most likely for all of us. Oh well.

The film, based on the 2015 stage musical of the same name, tells the story of a high school senior who, desperate for attention, inserts himself into the drama following the suicide of a classmate who’s a near-stranger to him, and inadvertently launches an online movement in the process. Since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, the armies of critics have come out to say, “Wait a second! That’s bad! Making someone else’s suicide all about yourself is what you’re not supposed to do!”

Which — sigh. (…Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

You haven’t heard “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” until you’ve heard it with a funk-metal bagpipe solo. You’re welcome! 🕹🌙🧸

1. Corbin Bernsen is of course best known for acting in TV series like L. A. Law and Psych, but he’s also built something of a career for himself directing Christian Movies™️, including the definitely-necessary film adaptation of the dating website Christian Mingle (!!!), which I have never seen but of course ruthlessly mocked when it was first announced.

2. One of the defining moments of “Welcome to the internet, where everyone is insane and screaming 24/7” for me was my junior year of college, when I stumbled into the IMDb discussion board (yes, IMDb used to have discussion boards!) for the then-upcoming film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Seemingly a third of the posters there were evangelicals who thought the movie represented some sort of beachhead in an inevitable Christian takeover of Hollywood and another third were gay atheists who were convinced that Christians would walk out of the movie enflamed to do some hate crimes. Turned out it was just a movie about a talking lion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Wiktionary tells me that the term “faith-based” took on its current connotations in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but I had never heard it used at all until George W. Bush made a big issue of government support for “faith-based” charities in his 2000 campaign—and then suddenly it was everywhere. It’s kind of weird how everyone was looking for a euphemism for “religious,” and it seems vaguely related to the topic at hand, but I’ll let you connect the dots.

4. My Mac tried to autocorrect this to “women” multiple times. Bet you had no idea Tim Cook was a MISOGYNIST NAZI

5. In this sense, “wokeness” is the pretty clear successor to the “political correctness” of the 1980s and 1990s—and just like “woke,” “politically correct” took less than a decade to go from a term people would proudly apply to themselves to a term those exact same people would insist was a slur invented by their political rivals. And don’t tell me I imagined this—I just read through the entire run of Dykes to Watch Out For and watched the whole thing happen in real time. Y’know, again.

6. Marx’s great insight, of course, was that the powerful inevitably leverage the dominant thought mode of the era to protect their own power, but even he would probably appreciate the irony here.

7. Elsewhere, I’ve expressed the sentiment that we ought to be deeply skeptical of whatever the Capricious Internet Algorithm Gods show us, but I’m clearly not the only one who’s noticed the backlash here.

8. For the record, though, we really could have a discussion about the fact that a lot of the grifters and hangers-on of 2020s wokeism are the exact same grifters and hangers-on of 2000s evangelicalism. Just a random coincidence, prolly