For
decades Hollywood, along with academia, has been one of the two prime movers of
cultural Marxism in America: promoting leftist causes and narratives, undermining
traditional morality and social structures, and rewriting history. Increasingly,
showbiz is now being choked by its own wokeness – just as our universities are –
as the social justice whiners have inevitably begun to turn on their own.
Hollywood
is floundering.
This past Easter weekend at the box office was the
worst in more than a decade. The big studios with their mega-budget
franchises (where would Hollywood be today without Marvel Comics?) increasingly
have to resort to overseas profits to keep afloat. Showbiz awards shows, which
have degenerated into self-congratulatory displays of anti-Trump
virtue-signaling, have been failing spectacularly, posting record low ratings
year after year. Trump Derangement Syndrome has caused celebs to publicly double
down on their contempt for all those unwoke Americans in the flyover states, pushing
audiences farther away than ever before. Meanwhile, independent flicks like Gosnell and Unplanned aimed at underserved conservative audiences are
succeeding despite media blackouts
and social
media subversion.
Instead of engaging
in some serious self-examination and concentrating on projects that might win
back the American heartland moviegoer, establishment Hollywood is now
preoccupied with proving its commitment to identity-politics ideology. Enforcing
diversity of gender and skin color (but not of worldview) in all the “above-the-line”
fields (acting, directing, producing, showrunning, etc.) has become the
dominant consideration in the entertainment realm now. Actress Brie Larson, for
example, says playing superheroine Captain Marvel is “my form of activism”; she
has has spent almost every minute of her movie promotions slamming “white male
critics” and speechifying about gender equality. “Oscars are so not white this year,” CNN
announced after a record number of non-white actors won awards in the 2019
ceremony. Deadline
declared ecstatically that “Diversity was one of the biggest winners.”
Like all
totalitarian environments, Hollywood is also purging itself internally of
anyone deemed insufficiently woke. Likeable, nonpartisan comedian Kevin Hart, for
example, was pushed out of hosting this year’s Academy Awards show because of a
ten-year-old “homophobic” tweet. Actress Roseanne Barr was famously removed
from her own show and denounced as a racist for joking that Iranian-born, Obama
adviser Valerie Jarrett resembled a character from Planet of the Apes.
And the industry which never tires of making movies condemning the Communist-era
blacklist has taken up a blacklist in support of the search-and-destroy #MeToo
movement. Showbiz hypocrites who slandered Supreme
Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a rapist yet who knowingly covered for, if not
engaged in, decades of systemic sexual predation are now demonstrating they #BelieveAllWomen
by shunning the suspects among them, even over unconfirmed accusations.
Breitbart’s John Nolte called the blacklisting
of Allen an “un-American smear” by Hollywood “moral cowards”:
This is
objectively obscene to anyone who believes in artistic freedom, fairness, and
the concept of free expression — but look at what we have on our hands
again; a Hollywood that doesn’t have the moral courage to stand up, that once
again refuses to do the right thing if it means risking a backlash in the
industry or alienating a potential sponsor-employer like Amazon.
Pointing out that the Communist-era blacklist
was an “abomination… because innocent people were destroyed, not just over
their political beliefs, but with lies — lies told by liars with axes to grind,”
Nolte says Woody Allen is being accused “of a #MeToo crime during a moral panic
filled with the kind of false and spurious allegations that have already
consumed Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush and comedian Aziz Ansari.” The #MeToo movement
lobby is powerful and ruthless; when superstar Matt Damon, a card-carrying
Progressive activist, expressed the reasonable opinion that allegations of
sexual misconduct need to be “analyzed on a spectrum” because “a pat on the
butt is not the same as rape or child molestation,” the backlash was so overwhelming
he was cowed into a public apology.
On another social justice front: like gay and
lesbian activists before them, transgender activists are now engaged in a
full-court press for societal acceptance – and not just acceptance, but full-throated,
culture-wide celebration. Hollywood, of course, is the key to advancing that
mission, just as it was the key to bringing about the culture-wide embrace of homosexuality
through TV shows such as the sitcoms Will & Grace and Ellen.
Breitbart News reports, for example, that
trans activists are targeting the Internet Movie Database website (IMDb.com)
for “deadnaming,” or publishing the birth names of trans actors, at least two of
whom are claiming that IMDb has not replaced their original names with their
new names as requested.
So far IMDb is
resisting, noting in a statement that “to preserve the factual historical
record,” it strives to accurately reflect “cast and crew listings as they
appear in a production’s on-screen credits at the time of original release.” IMDb
adds the new name to the trans actor’s page and credits, with the name credited
on previous productions added in parentheses. That sensible practice is not
enough for a few trans actors who, like all totalitarians, want to rewrite the factual
historical record to conform to their preferred reality.
IMDb won’t be able
to hold out long. Neither it nor any other Hollywood entity has the will or
inclination to stand firm against the relentless, bullying LGBT lobby.
Social
justice is never about justice. It is about power and payback. It is about
superimposing the Marxist paradigm of oppressor-versus-oppressed on every one
of society’s structures, traditions, and moral codes, then ratcheting up the
pressure until they all collapse – to be replaced by the redistributive justice
of the collectivist State. Like American universities, where the student
revolutionary inmates are now running the asylum, establishment Hollywood has brought
this on itself. It is now in the process of reaping the whirlwind of its own
all-consuming progressive agenda.
From FrontPage Mag, 4/29/19
