After recent complaints
from Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Stephen Merchant that political
correctness has infected college audiences and turned them into humorless prudes,
Sarah Silverman replied that such comedians need to get with the times or risk
becoming irrelevant. But if a couple of recent Hollywood examples of anti-PC backlash
are any indication, it may be Silverman who is on the way to becoming
irrelevant.
First, the
fearless, equal-opportunity offenders at South Park set their sights on the PC “language police”
in their season opener last weekend. Then, this Friday is the premiere of The
Green Inferno, the latest from torture porn auteur Eli Roth, in which a
planeload of naïve Social Justice Warriors ventures into the rainforest to save
an endangered tribe, only to become victims of cannibalism and their own
self-righteousness – or as the Los
Angeles Times puts it, “kids who head into the jungle to do good, and end up good eats.”
Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) are progressive
crusaders hellbent on eradicating racial and economic injustice, real or
imaginary, through bullying and “a fixation on identity and privilege,” as
Cathy Young wrote in The
Observer. “SJW” is
actually a pejorative label, but SJWs themselves proudly embrace it. As a
Columbia student and former SJW wrote in July in the New
York Post, the first
time someone hurled the term at her as an insult, “I was elated. I considered
myself a superhero, fighting one stigma at a time until the United States
became a land of truly equal opportunity.”
But in South
Park’s season premiere, SJWs are portrayed not as superheroes but as a bullying,
intolerant fraternity, one of whom – “PC Principal” – takes over the South Park
kids’ school and sets out to abolish sexist microaggressions and gender bigotry.
One character utters the forbidden opinion, “I don’t think Caitlyn Jenner is a
hero,” and PC Principal decries it as “transphobic and bigoted hate speech.”
Real-world SJWs were not amused. As the New York Post points out, culture site Bustle complained the episode made it “seem like a bad
thing to strive for correct language around transgender issues,” and film
critic Bob Chipman sniffed that the show’s creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker
have “morphed into the Trump of TV comedy.”
Admittedly, Stone and Parker don’t represent
mainstream Hollywood – they’re much too fair and balanced and edgy for that –
but they’re not alone in declaring open season on SJWs. Eli Roth recently told
the Los Angeles Times that the smug hashtag
activists who share handwritten slogans on Twitter were his inspiration for The Green Inferno. “I wanted to write a
movie,” he said,
that was about modern activism. I see that a
lot of people want to care and want to help, but in general I feel like people
don’t really want to inconvenience their own lives. And I saw a lot of people
just reacting to things on social media. These social justice warriors. ‘This
is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ And they’re just tweeting and
retweeting. They’re not actually doing anything.
“The SJW culture has gotten so out of
control,” he continued, and Inferno
is his way of addressing it. Like the South
Park episode, the movie has already struck a nerve with actual SJWs such as
the tribal rights attorney at Huffington
Post who finds it an “incredibly
offensive depiction of indigenous people.”
The more self-congratulatory and self-serious
SJWs become, the more they become parodies of themselves – holier-than-thou, irrational,
and ragingly uptight – and the more tempting it becomes to poke fun at them. Political
correctness still reigns on campuses across America, and in Hollywood as well,
but no totalitarian ideology can long withstand ridicule.
From Popzette, 9/28/15
