I thought part of the issue with Christian movies is that the particular genre of soft-focus, non-denominational-but-protestant Jesus flicks don't really have a market outside North America (Passion of the Christ did well precisely because it was *not that*).
In a globalized entertainment industry, people in China or Dubai won't be buying "Touched by an Angel".
Therefore I think you're probably on the right track with the woke parallel too, in that there isn't a global market for the identity politics hysterics that only really works in the US.
"Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
I like this because I'm predisposed to agree with its conclusions.
It's slowly revealing to me why October Baby might actually be a legitimately interesting film with actual stakes and drama, even if it really was a film I disliked at the time enough to warrant someone giving it to me as a joke birthday gift. I might in fact need to re-watch it to find out if that's true. I thank you for giving me a more subtle lens through which to evaluate that piece.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen October Baby and had to look up what it was. You’ll have to tell me if it’s worth seeing, if you ever get around to rewatching it. Haha
Broadly I agree with your take, and I think the parallel to christian cinema is interesting, but I do have some anticipated quibbles (as one of the Wokeists directed to your piece via Freddie deBoer):
1. It is so, so hard to keep reading after your definition of "woke." Yes, definitional arguments are silly, but I think you've misdiagnosed why. I subscribe to the Big Joel explanation, which is that "woke" simply means "liberal". You state "The fact is that the dominant values, tone, and approach of the mainstream American left have all shifted radically in the last decade..." but I just don't think that's true, "woke" means exactly the same things now as "liberal" or "politically correct" meant 20 years ago. Yes, people are talking more about trans people now, because that is the moral panic du jour, just as CRT and gay rights and "soft on crime" and the War on Drugs and, idk, bussing and segregation were before that.
Your definition is itself difficult to take seriously because it so transparently buys into every right-wing framing of the concept. You don't even attempt to define it in a way that anyone who holds those beliefs could recognize as their own (I certainly don't). Your definition, in fact, betrays the same willful misunderstanding of the underlying ideas that every irritating right-wing pundit shares. (And I would also quibble with your contention that no one outside of Twitter cared about the racial reckoning - I agree that Twitter overstates public sentiment is absolutely true but cable news (esp Fox) was publishing about Race Riots constantly, as though the cities had become unliveable. Most people were not "indifferent" towards it - they incorporated it into their already-held beliefs about cities, liberals, black people, whatever.
But, like I said, your actual comparison is fun and interesting. Would have been interesting to see more research - for instance, Sound of Freedom is an explicitly Christian movie that is hugely popular among a certain set. I agree that movies are pretty bad lately for a variety of reasons, and bad diversity (ie, diversity that exists to tokenize cast members, rather than to tell interesting new stories) is part of that because studios learn the wrong lessons from everything. But I can't get behind the idea that it's even in the top 5 things that are causing movies to be bad right now.
Oh, I will take one moment to add: Woke does not "end the debate". The right refuses to debate these questions at all. Their position is "trans people are icky" and various trussings-up of that same thesis.
If you want real debate on, say, women in sports, those conversations are being had! They're just not being had on the right. The Olympics have been having these discussions for more than a decade (their first rule on testosterone was introduced in 2011, and recently updated due to the case of Caster Semenya, who is a biological woman who is usually required to take hormones to compete with women anyway). Contrapoints has a whole "gender critical" video engaging with each of those awful people's 'arguments'. Jessie Gender has hours and hours of video on trans topics including extremely detailed discussions on gender & sports. You can watch Hasanabi react to any given right-winger's anti-trans video on his Twitch channel if you're more into live discussion and debate.
In short, if you think the "wokeists" are suppressing debate on these subjects, I hate to break it to you but it's because you only recognize "debate" on these topics that confirms your own beliefs. The discussions are being had, and many trans people themselves think that sports rules should be nuanced and take into account a variety of factors - which is a far more rigorous debate than is being had about the topic on the right, which begins and ends with "trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in sports with 'real' women." That's not a discussion or a debate - that's an echo chamber. Be happy in your echo chamber if you want, but don't dupe yourself into thinking you're in a Free Speech Zone
Oh good, I'm glad you pointed out to me that a handful of students at a tiny elite college represents The Left and our entire political project. Here I was, out here with regular leftists in the world, largely ignoring campus politics because they affect like 100 total people, most of whom are rich. The fact that the right is SO preoccupied with what this vanguard of 19 year olds are doing, the fact that they all seem to think that those 19 year olds are The Real Left, tells you a lot more about right-wing fixation than it does about left politics or ideology. They don't engage with actual leftist positions on any of this, they engage with the 19 year olds' version of it, which is (predictably) often pretty dumb and usually unnecessarily incendiary.
So, you've proven that leftists are not debating these issues by showing a couple kids getting mad about something. Great job. Your next smashing argument is citing an open letter to the New York Times asking them to improve their coverage. What... exactly are you mad about here? I mean you clearly disagree with their thesis that the Times publishes anti-trans pieces that contain factual errors, but you're not engaging with the substance of their letter; you're complaining that they wrote the letter at all! You refer to it as a "temper tantrum" which, if true, it seems that literally every opinion piece ever written would qualify as a "temper tantrum". It sounds like you're just mad that people disagree with you, and once again show no indication that you actually want to debate or engage with the issues at all.
I'm sorry you don't like the slogan of "women are women". Hey, wild, I've *also* seen leftist trans women object to that slogan, and it's a f*cking rally slogan and not a policy position, but if that's the best you got to be mad at then I suppose I don't have much to worry about from the Intellectual Anti-Trans. Again, it's just evidence that anti-trans people prefer to bitch about Free Speech than actually engage in it, because y'all sure aren't taking the opportunities you already have to do so. Everything you say and right highlights that you only engage with opinions on the topic that you already agree with (and, of course, the Ben Shapiro approach of only engaging with a small handful of elite college students and pretending they constitute a majority of anything)
There are too many dumb items in your response to respond to them all, so I am just going to focus on the one where you so eagerly proved your own hypocrisy: "Back then liberals believed in preserving general freedom of thought while trying to avoid being deliberately disrespectful so that everyone could participate in the discourse without being berated." This makes it pretty clear. You don't want "free speech" in the classic liberal sense where the government cannot censor your political views, you want the kind of "free speech" you have when everyone around you agrees with your views.
"Berating" someone is well within the confines of Free Speech and, really, normal political debate. If you don't like being "berated" then you don't have a Free Speech problem, you have an Unpopular Opinion problem. People are not required to be nice to you no matter what, by law or morality or even the parameters of reasonable political debate, and the fact that you even wrote that sentence tells me your true ideological commitments are far less on the "free speech" side and far more on the "I just hate trans people and can't go more than 4 minutes without talking about it" side.
You think "woke" seeks to ban people being rude in elevators? Can you cite a source for that? Because I see a lot of claims on the right that "woke" is trying to "ban" things that I have literally never seen any leftist advocate for banning. Like so many other things about The Left, it seems to exist entirely in right-wing heads.
You keep using the word "ban" in ways that do not indicate to me an understanding of the word. Your "real example of wokeness in action" is... a guy told a bad joke in an elevator, then was aggrieved by the standard process of his workplace for managing complaints? Who is getting "banned" here again? Is he going to Joke Jail? Do you think that absolutely any joke is acceptable at work?
A venue electing not to host an unpopular act is not censorship. A professor getting butthurt at the lightest slap on the wrist for a joke that he obviously should not have made is not censorship, and it will not have the ridiculous "chilling effect" he cites in the piece you link. "Don't tell jokes about lingerie at work" is a pretty basic thing and, in my humble opinion, not an assault on the free speech rights of anyone. The guy made it a big thing himself by directly making the joke in the first place, and then by contacting the person who made the complaint even after being directly told not to. He could have let it go, and it would have been exactly as it should have - an idiot told a bad joke at work, he was told that it wasn't appropriate, he apologizes and doesn't do it again. The only reason anyone thinks he's a misogynist is because he's decided to make a media tour of it. God it is so hard to take this whining seriously.
I like your point about how the character won't be able to grow because she'll never be allowed to experience a moment of doubt.
And, yeah, it used to be that the characters who wanted to lead from the start were villains, not misunderstood geniuses who just need the world to recognize how amazing they are.
I thought part of the issue with Christian movies is that the particular genre of soft-focus, non-denominational-but-protestant Jesus flicks don't really have a market outside North America (Passion of the Christ did well precisely because it was *not that*).
In a globalized entertainment industry, people in China or Dubai won't be buying "Touched by an Angel".
Therefore I think you're probably on the right track with the woke parallel too, in that there isn't a global market for the identity politics hysterics that only really works in the US.
"Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
It bears repeating! Vonnegut was the Master 🙏
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/kurt-vonnegut-8-basics-of-creative-writing
Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers, and his writing advice is indispensable
" 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."
Absolutely nailed it.
...
I like this because I'm predisposed to agree with its conclusions.
It's slowly revealing to me why October Baby might actually be a legitimately interesting film with actual stakes and drama, even if it really was a film I disliked at the time enough to warrant someone giving it to me as a joke birthday gift. I might in fact need to re-watch it to find out if that's true. I thank you for giving me a more subtle lens through which to evaluate that piece.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen October Baby and had to look up what it was. You’ll have to tell me if it’s worth seeing, if you ever get around to rewatching it. Haha
Broadly I agree with your take, and I think the parallel to christian cinema is interesting, but I do have some anticipated quibbles (as one of the Wokeists directed to your piece via Freddie deBoer):
1. It is so, so hard to keep reading after your definition of "woke." Yes, definitional arguments are silly, but I think you've misdiagnosed why. I subscribe to the Big Joel explanation, which is that "woke" simply means "liberal". You state "The fact is that the dominant values, tone, and approach of the mainstream American left have all shifted radically in the last decade..." but I just don't think that's true, "woke" means exactly the same things now as "liberal" or "politically correct" meant 20 years ago. Yes, people are talking more about trans people now, because that is the moral panic du jour, just as CRT and gay rights and "soft on crime" and the War on Drugs and, idk, bussing and segregation were before that.
Your definition is itself difficult to take seriously because it so transparently buys into every right-wing framing of the concept. You don't even attempt to define it in a way that anyone who holds those beliefs could recognize as their own (I certainly don't). Your definition, in fact, betrays the same willful misunderstanding of the underlying ideas that every irritating right-wing pundit shares. (And I would also quibble with your contention that no one outside of Twitter cared about the racial reckoning - I agree that Twitter overstates public sentiment is absolutely true but cable news (esp Fox) was publishing about Race Riots constantly, as though the cities had become unliveable. Most people were not "indifferent" towards it - they incorporated it into their already-held beliefs about cities, liberals, black people, whatever.
But, like I said, your actual comparison is fun and interesting. Would have been interesting to see more research - for instance, Sound of Freedom is an explicitly Christian movie that is hugely popular among a certain set. I agree that movies are pretty bad lately for a variety of reasons, and bad diversity (ie, diversity that exists to tokenize cast members, rather than to tell interesting new stories) is part of that because studios learn the wrong lessons from everything. But I can't get behind the idea that it's even in the top 5 things that are causing movies to be bad right now.
Oh, I will take one moment to add: Woke does not "end the debate". The right refuses to debate these questions at all. Their position is "trans people are icky" and various trussings-up of that same thesis.
If you want real debate on, say, women in sports, those conversations are being had! They're just not being had on the right. The Olympics have been having these discussions for more than a decade (their first rule on testosterone was introduced in 2011, and recently updated due to the case of Caster Semenya, who is a biological woman who is usually required to take hormones to compete with women anyway). Contrapoints has a whole "gender critical" video engaging with each of those awful people's 'arguments'. Jessie Gender has hours and hours of video on trans topics including extremely detailed discussions on gender & sports. You can watch Hasanabi react to any given right-winger's anti-trans video on his Twitch channel if you're more into live discussion and debate.
In short, if you think the "wokeists" are suppressing debate on these subjects, I hate to break it to you but it's because you only recognize "debate" on these topics that confirms your own beliefs. The discussions are being had, and many trans people themselves think that sports rules should be nuanced and take into account a variety of factors - which is a far more rigorous debate than is being had about the topic on the right, which begins and ends with "trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in sports with 'real' women." That's not a discussion or a debate - that's an echo chamber. Be happy in your echo chamber if you want, but don't dupe yourself into thinking you're in a Free Speech Zone
Oh good, I'm glad you pointed out to me that a handful of students at a tiny elite college represents The Left and our entire political project. Here I was, out here with regular leftists in the world, largely ignoring campus politics because they affect like 100 total people, most of whom are rich. The fact that the right is SO preoccupied with what this vanguard of 19 year olds are doing, the fact that they all seem to think that those 19 year olds are The Real Left, tells you a lot more about right-wing fixation than it does about left politics or ideology. They don't engage with actual leftist positions on any of this, they engage with the 19 year olds' version of it, which is (predictably) often pretty dumb and usually unnecessarily incendiary.
So, you've proven that leftists are not debating these issues by showing a couple kids getting mad about something. Great job. Your next smashing argument is citing an open letter to the New York Times asking them to improve their coverage. What... exactly are you mad about here? I mean you clearly disagree with their thesis that the Times publishes anti-trans pieces that contain factual errors, but you're not engaging with the substance of their letter; you're complaining that they wrote the letter at all! You refer to it as a "temper tantrum" which, if true, it seems that literally every opinion piece ever written would qualify as a "temper tantrum". It sounds like you're just mad that people disagree with you, and once again show no indication that you actually want to debate or engage with the issues at all.
I'm sorry you don't like the slogan of "women are women". Hey, wild, I've *also* seen leftist trans women object to that slogan, and it's a f*cking rally slogan and not a policy position, but if that's the best you got to be mad at then I suppose I don't have much to worry about from the Intellectual Anti-Trans. Again, it's just evidence that anti-trans people prefer to bitch about Free Speech than actually engage in it, because y'all sure aren't taking the opportunities you already have to do so. Everything you say and right highlights that you only engage with opinions on the topic that you already agree with (and, of course, the Ben Shapiro approach of only engaging with a small handful of elite college students and pretending they constitute a majority of anything)
There are too many dumb items in your response to respond to them all, so I am just going to focus on the one where you so eagerly proved your own hypocrisy: "Back then liberals believed in preserving general freedom of thought while trying to avoid being deliberately disrespectful so that everyone could participate in the discourse without being berated." This makes it pretty clear. You don't want "free speech" in the classic liberal sense where the government cannot censor your political views, you want the kind of "free speech" you have when everyone around you agrees with your views.
"Berating" someone is well within the confines of Free Speech and, really, normal political debate. If you don't like being "berated" then you don't have a Free Speech problem, you have an Unpopular Opinion problem. People are not required to be nice to you no matter what, by law or morality or even the parameters of reasonable political debate, and the fact that you even wrote that sentence tells me your true ideological commitments are far less on the "free speech" side and far more on the "I just hate trans people and can't go more than 4 minutes without talking about it" side.
You think "woke" seeks to ban people being rude in elevators? Can you cite a source for that? Because I see a lot of claims on the right that "woke" is trying to "ban" things that I have literally never seen any leftist advocate for banning. Like so many other things about The Left, it seems to exist entirely in right-wing heads.
You keep using the word "ban" in ways that do not indicate to me an understanding of the word. Your "real example of wokeness in action" is... a guy told a bad joke in an elevator, then was aggrieved by the standard process of his workplace for managing complaints? Who is getting "banned" here again? Is he going to Joke Jail? Do you think that absolutely any joke is acceptable at work?
A venue electing not to host an unpopular act is not censorship. A professor getting butthurt at the lightest slap on the wrist for a joke that he obviously should not have made is not censorship, and it will not have the ridiculous "chilling effect" he cites in the piece you link. "Don't tell jokes about lingerie at work" is a pretty basic thing and, in my humble opinion, not an assault on the free speech rights of anyone. The guy made it a big thing himself by directly making the joke in the first place, and then by contacting the person who made the complaint even after being directly told not to. He could have let it go, and it would have been exactly as it should have - an idiot told a bad joke at work, he was told that it wasn't appropriate, he apologizes and doesn't do it again. The only reason anyone thinks he's a misogynist is because he's decided to make a media tour of it. God it is so hard to take this whining seriously.
I like your point about how the character won't be able to grow because she'll never be allowed to experience a moment of doubt.
And, yeah, it used to be that the characters who wanted to lead from the start were villains, not misunderstood geniuses who just need the world to recognize how amazing they are.
I really need to watch Election sometime. I’ve heard nothing but raves, and I generally enjoy Alexander Payne’s stuff
Noooo not Kay Orr!