Disney's animated film Wish is set to hit theaters on Wednesday, and it's already generating backlash for its alleged "wokeness." YouTube channel Clipped Coin called it "recycled woke trash" with bad songs and bad writing, based on the trailer. As of this writing, the trailer has 78,000 downvotes on YouTube.
Whenever a movie gets criticized for "going woke" and then bombs at the box office, some cultural commentators on the Left insist that America is just too bigoted to appreciate diversity. When The Little Mermaid was remade into a live-action movie starring Halle Bailey, the Guardian chalked up its poor performance to a "racist backlash." When the gay rom-com Bros flopped, director Nicholas Stoller blamed the failure on straight people . "Gay men are the only people who saw the movie," he complained.
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But when audiences decry "woke" storytelling, it's rarely because we don't want more ethnic or gender diversity. Instead, we're frustrated by simplistic stories and heavy-handed moralizing.
A key feature of the kind of stories that regularly get derided as "woke" is a lack of complexity. In UnHerd, poet and author Kate Clanchy notes how the book industry has started employing sensitivity readers to make sure that new stories play well with the too-online far Left. These readers seem to be allergic to the authentic complexity of life. Clanchy's memoir was deep and nuanced, with all the warts and shadows of real life, but "woke" sensitivity readers tried to boil it down to something a 3-year-old could comfortably digest. Clanchy said she was encouraged to "eliminate journeys of thought across chapters, ambiguity from paragraphs, and nuance from sentences."
We can see the same trend in the gradual decline of the popular TV show The Simpsons. Homer was once one of the most complex characters on television. Early seasons relished showing him as a bad father (in one episode, Bart is so disillusioned that he goes to a local charity to request a Big Brother as a replacement father) while still showing his tender moments with all three of his children. Early Homer was a mess of all-too-human contradictions: an alcoholic who loved his wife, a physically abusive father who took a job he hated for his children, and a stupid and sometimes bullheaded man who bonded intensely with his genius-level daughter.
The latest episodes of The Simpsons have none of this. Writers have even cut one of the iconic gags of the series, that of Homer strangling Bart. This doesn't just reduce Homer's complexity as a character, but it sends a fairly insulting message to the audience. When writers scrub their characters of any bad actions, the implicit message is that audiences are too stupid to understand those actions as bad. Or, as Nick Gillespie summarizes at Reason, "Just like TV sets or radios, we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality — good, bad, or indifferent — onto us."
What draws us to fiction is the eternal truth underneath the fantasy. Underneath the mermaids and the magical wishes and the cartoon animation, there is sometimes a reflection of human nature. This reflection is at its best when it is as messy, as murky, and as complicated as the thing it is reflecting. Reality has warts, and fiction that pretends not to is less a reflection than a caricature.
I've published many short stories and a novel, and we authors object to "woke" storytelling because we need the freedom to tell true and authentic stories that have all the richness of real life. As audience members, we object because these simplistic caricatures treat us as though we're too stupid to understand basic nuance.
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I actually have hope that Disney has learned its lesson from its recent string of box office failures and is now moving away from simplistic and moralizing storytelling. Wish director Jennifer Lee admits that audiences yearn for authentic complexity. "When you manage characters from outside in," she says, "they don't resonate. And if it's not authentic, no one comes."
That statement has me cautiously optimistic about Wish. But let's be clear: If Wish is another box-office flop, it won't be because the star is a black woman.
Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with fee.org and contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He has previously written for National Review, the Federalist, and other outlets.
Is Disney's new movie Wish a 'woke' disaster?
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17.11.2023
Disney's animated film Wish is set to hit theaters on Wednesday, and it's already generating backlash for its alleged "wokeness." YouTube channel Clipped Coin called it "recycled woke trash" with bad songs and bad writing, based on the trailer. As of this writing, the trailer has 78,000 downvotes on YouTube.
Whenever a movie gets criticized for "going woke" and then bombs at the box office, some cultural commentators on the Left insist that America is just too bigoted to appreciate diversity. When The Little Mermaid was remade into a live-action movie starring Halle Bailey, the Guardian chalked up its poor performance to a "racist backlash." When the gay rom-com Bros flopped, director Nicholas Stoller blamed the failure on straight people . "Gay men are the only people who saw the movie," he complained.
CLEANUP UNDERWAY AFTER VIOLENT PROTEST AT DNC HEADQUARTERS LEAVES SIX OFFICERS INJURED
But when audiences decry "woke" storytelling, it's rarely because we don't want more ethnic or gender diversity. Instead, we're frustrated by simplistic stories and heavy-handed........
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