When Woke Wasn't Weak

My last piece on how the decline of Hollywood blockbusters may lead to a new golden age of creativity for Hollywood included an explanation of why Furiosa ate ass on Memorial Day:

Fandoms are actively avoiding movies they think are hurting their favorite brand. Furiosa, the biggest bomb this past weekend, was a prequel to the 2015 feminist entry of the Mad Max series

A few commenters were not happy with this. I don’t feel I wrote anything wrong, but I felt like I was being lumped in with the grumpy anti-woke chorus. So this is meant to distinguish myself as well as to clarify that my anti-wokeness is leftist in the political realm and strictly aesthetic when it comes to the arts and entertainment world. Since wokeness was arguably never effective in the political realm (except when Obama was President, but at the time the word “woke” was barely trending on Black Twitter), I will focus here on how it had its place in pop culture.

The Cut places 2017 as the year of The Great Awokening, which is correct, although the event that got the ball rolling, delayed though the response may have been, was the #oscarssowhite campaign of 2015. This campaign animated the 2016 discourse around the two Oscar hopefuls: La La Land and Moonlight. La La Land was the frontrunner, but its mostly white cast made it an easy target for youths who were starting to see the pattern: a movie with a white cast meant Oscar gold. Moonlight, the movie endorsed by the #oscarssowhite crowd, was an indie with a high Rotten Tomatoes score. Alex Perez may be right when he says that Barry Jenkins doesn’t capture Miami nearly as well as the other films that came out of the Miami film scene, like Piratas and Stripper Wars, but has another Best Picture winner so faithfully retained the local color of the environment it was made?

When Moonlight won Best Picture,¹ it was not just a woke victory. It was the first year in which the film that won Critics Circle awards also won Best Picture, which was, and is, rare. Critics Circle awards typically go to the film that was actually the best. Academy Awards are for movies the industry most enjoyed. La La Land was the type of self-congratulatory spectacle that the Oscars usually reward. A lyrical, reflective film grabbing top prize was exhilarating. The night felt dizzying with possibilities. That it took a Twitter campaign for this to happen didn’t matter that night. Little did we know…

Well let’s not be too hasty. There are a bunch of woke works from that time that are worth celebrating . Get Out has been unfairly maligned by the anti-woke crowd. It was not perfect² (how soon we forget it was a directorial debut), but it maintained its focus on white liberals instead of conservatives. At this time, when white liberals chide Arabs and Blacks for speaking out against Biden, Get Out is more relevant.

There was of course dreadful drek from the movement even at this time. Blackish, Hamilton and Sausage Party come to mind. But it seems like woke’s best moments were on TV, where it could afford to be more literary and reflective; stories with a more personal stamp. Shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, I Love Dick and Transparent. Even a lesser show, like Insecure, talked about Arab men’s hairy backs in the pilot. As an Arab man (with a hairy back) I was offended, but it wasn’t about me. It was about a believable peek into black women’s lives. That throwaway gag in the first episode was by far the most courageous, confessional part of a show that, if we take away the YouTube-to-Boob Tube narrative of Issa Rae’s ascent (inspiring to every creator regardless of race at the time), was actually an overrated BET soap opera.  

Still, TV was better than the multiplex. Was a time when TV was the propaganda canon and the movie theater was where you primarily found more idiosyncratic stuff. From the ‘00s on, it was the opposite. Superhero films throughout the ‘00s were officially military propaganda, with Marvel screening its films for the US military for notes before release. 2015’s The Force Awakens was the first film that married military messaging with woke casting, which has been the Hollywood blockbuster playbook ever since.

Wokeness barely had a chance in the realm of music. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was undeniable, but by the time Beyonce got her grubby poptimist hands on the woke ball with Lemonade, Billboard would be full of woke corporate garbage, from Lil Nas X’s “Montero” to annoying inspo from the likes of Megan Thee Stallion (“Bad bitches have bad days”).

By 2020, wokeness in pop culture bit off more than it could chew. After George Floyd’s murder, every company incorporated woke messaging into its advertising, giving wokeness a corporate, HR sheen that ruined its subversive potential. Celebrities with black squares on their Instagram did not quell the growing resentment they inspired with their stay-at-home social media videos from their mansions. What’s more, their smug COVID preaching cast doubt, for many, on other messages they were spreading. In a time of expanded representation, essential workers noticed the lack of working class characters onscreen. Therapy-speak pop reached a fever pitch around this time.

As I’ve written before (and cited numerous times), by 2023, legacy media stopped worrying about being woke. The Dylan Mulvaney fiasco ended it for advertising campaigns while, later that year, Hollywood found itself at odds with the social media youth after October 7.

So when I wrote that “Fandoms are actively avoiding movies they think are hurting their favorite brand,” I didn’t mean to be critical of Furiosa necessarily. I have no doubt that it is, as one commenter said, “auteur-driven.” But I wasn’t discussing why it wasn’t good or why people who saw it didn’t like it, but why people didn’t show up. A Mad Max film without Mad Max as the main character may work once, but twice? We all know that if, instead of it being Furiosa, it was, say Mad Max’s Return, it would have been the first Max-centric film in almost 45 years, which would have made a much larger splash, prequel or not.

Either way, Furiosa being good is irrelevant. Timing is much of an issue as anything else. As I wrote in the comments:

Think about Westerns. By the '80s, Westerns were extinct (ironically in the cowboy Reagan era). Doesn't stop Silverado from being great or even Heaven's Gate from being an unfairly maligned classic. But Western fatigue explains why they stopped coming.

All trends go to waste. The indie ‘90s devolved into an avalanche of Tarantino clones. The New Hollywood ‘70s devolved into the “sad ending = great film” formula. But these were artistic movements. Woke was a political movement, which will always have a shorter shelf-life, as unconcerned with good aesthetics as almost all propaganda movements are. I lean socialist, but Socialist Realism is terrible.

Wokeness does not just suffer from being a very literal form of propaganda. It also reads as corporate, HR legalese. There is no feeling anymore. As

Ross Barkan

recently wrote, “I am optimistic, too, the romantic turn in the culture will gradually reinvigorate the broader arts, whether it’s literature or music, where too many gatekeepers and practitioners have forgotten how to surprise and challenge their audiences.” When the woke era had movies like Moonlight and shows like Transparent, you were overcome by the expression of feelings that had been hidden for so long. Now, it’s less about how the artist feels and more about how you’re supposed to feel.

I will close this out with a clip of Patrice O’Neal — a black truth-teller who was not woke, but always had his eyes open — on “Opie and Anthony.” He introduced a concept that has never left me: legislating feelings. Social justice works when you try to limit the actual oppression of others. But silencing a bigot for their opinion, for their repulsion, is not woke. It’s weak. It comes from fear of argument, discussion, and real emotions, ugly or not. Fear of discussion is more dangerous than fear of the other.

1. The year of the infamous envelope mix-up, when La La Land was initially announced. It was like they announced the winner, then looked at all the outraged #oscarssowhite tweets and changed their minds.

2. Us is the better film but doesn’t get as much attention because it’s about how blacks hurt each other.