Have you noticed that for decades, from mystery/thrillers to dystopian sci-fi, and almost everything in between, Hollywood has designated corporations and corporate execs as the source of villainy in much of its scripted content?
Hollywood, in its generic sense, however, itself is a series of corporations that is very much a cog in woke capitalism, which also includes Big Tech.
That is, in the real world, among other things, the woke show business sector has become hostile to both personal sovereignty and national sovereignty.
Life imitating needlessly politicized art, except Hollywood — a.k.a. Hollywoke — lacks awareness of its hypocrisy.
The formerly edgy and boundary-expanding entertainment space perhaps seems to be speaking power to truth as a yet another arm of the fringe, authoritarian cohort currently controlling the Democrat Party from the White House on down.
[Even as it reflexively supports a Big Government agenda, Hollywood has moved a lot of its productions out of California and to other states and even overseas, in part to avoid excessive taxation.]According to The American Conservative in October 2022, “Hollywood has long been liberal, but with the advent of wokeness, it has gone crazy.”
The virtue signaling, especially in identity politics, finding its way into almost every storyline hardly seems to be working in the marketplace, Breitbart News reported.
Major studios, streamers, cable providers, and other media giants lost a combined $542 billion in market value in 2022, with left-wing studios the Walt Disney Co., Netflix, and Comcast accounting for the bulk of the bloodshed…Hollywood’s horrible year was the result of a one-two punch of a downturn in the streaming market coupled with consumers continuing to cut the cord by the millions…
Parenthetically, an amusing throwaway line the Showtime series Ray Donovan might be revealing about the behind-the-scenes behavior of all kinds in the progressive but simultaneously immoral and cutthroat, industry is often vastly different than the public image-making.
As Tommy Wheeler, a fictional movie actor character in the streaming drama quipped in one episode: “Everybody thinks this business is a bunch of radical liberals, but you f— with the profit margin, they will hang you from a tree like anywhere else.”
That aside, audiences in general seem to be rejecting leftist pop culture indoctrination disguised as entertainment content, subtle or otherwise.
While using its platforms to lecture America about its shortcomings as the prone-to-selective-outrage liberal elite see it, moreover, decadent Hollywood has shown no reluctance in doing business with CCP-controlled China, despite that country’s rampant human rights abuses.
In mid December, Breitbart News senior writer John Nolte — who has opined extensively on this topic — summed up Hollywood’s dilemma:
All of Hollywood’s problems will disappear if the industry returns to entertainment. That doesn’t mean only laughs, naked boobs, and cartoon violence (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Hollywood has used movies to tell important stories and explore issues for a hundred years without resorting to ham-handed woketardery. Movies like 9 to 5, The China Syndrome, Mississippi Burning, Malcolm X, Philadelphia, Shaft, Norma Rae, Glory, All About Eve, Silence of the Lambs, and a million more managed to say something without being smug lectures. Idiots.
Commenting on Avatar 2 apparently tanking at the box office in China, Nolte separately observed the following:
“Hollywood went all-in to appease China, and there’s no Plan B warming up in the batter’s box. Stars are gone. Sex appeal is gone. Inspiration is gone. All that’s left are smug lectures, green screens, bloat, bluster, drag queens, and muscle-bound men preaching against masculinity.”
Hollywood is also still lamenting the McCarthyism blacklist of the 1950s.
Yet these same movers and shakers who champion diversity, equity, and inclusion — or DIE as critics have reshuffled the acronym — have no hesitancy in abruptly cancelling anyone who works in front or behind the camera if the latter publicly express views that run counter to the liberal narrative.
Self-censorship or exclusion rather than free speech typically prevails in this context.
The only exception to the above are those handful of luminaries who are so deep into their careers that they are beyond the reach of DIE gatekeepers.
In a line attributed to movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn back in the day, he quipped “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”
As expressed in a quote attributed to Andrew Breitbart, however, “politics is downstream from culture.”
In November 2022, The American Spectator noted that “[F]o modern Hollywoke, ‘adult’ necessarily means a captive to progressive propaganda rather than a free-thinking selective mind.”
Hooray for Hollywood?
Added: More insight from Nolte:
People complain and write books and produce documentaries about how cruel the old moguls — Zanuck, Mayer, Cohn, the Brothers Warner — were, but those guys look like hippies compared to today’s generation of mogu— I mean, anti-art multinationals. Conformity, censorship, and the total erasure of art to please the bottom line — that’s today’s Hollywood.
The old Production Code offered a hundred times more artistic freedom than today’s Woke Production Code. The old Production Code only told you what you couldn’t do, which allowed artists to find the subtext of workarounds…The Woke Production Code tells filmmakers what they must do, what they must say, what political and cultural lines they must color within. The result? Blah. The death of individual expression in movies and television…
