Movie Wokeness Is Marketing to a Non-White Male Audience

Computing Forever has a comprehensive review of the various movie franchises that have been infected by woke-ness, diversity, feminism, misandry and other things off-putting to Men Who Want To Watch Movies.


His take is that these changes is deliberate political-inspired posturing by the Hollywood studios, which have become infested by manginas, allies, and LBGQTI supporters. I mean, other than the Warshowski’s.

(These guys made The Matrix)

I’m not so sure. There’s a veneer of Woke-speak in the marketing, and remember that actor/ess interviews are part of the marketing. The veneer isn’t the wood. The wood is surely at least two things: first, Hollywood blockbusters are primarily made for the Chinese and Indian markets, rather than the domestic US market; second, White Men Who Want To Watch Movies are now only twenty-five per cent of the population of the USA, and the prime age range, which I understand to be 18-30, has been, I suspect, deserting the movies in favour of computer games, and box sets or streaming, for quite the time now. Hollywood used to make movies for White Men, because there were enough of them to make a decent audience. Now there aren’t.

So Hollywood makes movies for White Women, diversities in the USA, and the Chinese and Indian markets. (The James Bond franchise had been taking into account the quirks of local markets since forever.) No more evil slanty-eyed Chinese or dumb Black criminals, unless they are cool super-villans. (That explains why nobody complains about the portrayal of Mexican and South American gangsters: psychopathy is super-cool.) No more Uma Thurman. Women have to be “real” and sassy, or strong, or hot messes. These groups are now the primary market.

Who gets to be the Bad Guy, the Dope and the Loser? The one group who isn’t paying dues to Hollywood. The White Man. He has to be the dupe, the dope, the clown and the clueless. Ain’t nobody else left.

Hollywood has learned a lot from Chinese movies, though it has yet to incorporate a love story and a dance scene into a Fast And Furious to keep the Indian audience happy. What it doesn’t know how to get right is Having A Hero / Major Character Who Isn’t A White Man (or Denzel Washington or a Lead Girl In A Sci-Fi series). I don’t either: it’s a tricky balance of ignoring the gender and colour of the Lead, but somehow building in both to the character and plot, without it interfering with the way the character functions. At the moment, NWM Leads have to flaunt their NWM-ness at the audience and lord it over the WM supporting cast, because Hollywood thinks that’s what the White Women + Diversities want to see. And maybe Hollywood is right. I don’t know: I haven’t seen the research.

Meantime, the Fast and Furious franchise is stuffed to the gills with WM leads. After the cars, WM leads are the whole point of F&F. But then F&F really is made for the Chinese, who don’t go for any of this woke stuff. And look at (some of) the box set series. The ones I have, from Sons of Anarchy, through House, to Elementary and The Shield, have strong, white, male characters who take no shit from anyone. Not All Box Sets Are Like That (Game of Thrones!), but some are, because if the producers get it right, the WM audience will buy in bulk.

The old-school feminists understood that the masculine world is a shifting, elusive and fluid thing. They knew that whenever they managed to get into some male bastion, the men had somehow gone to another bastion somewhere else. What they didn’t know was that the only reason they got access to the old bastion was that the men were already leaving. I can’t help feeling that’s what’s happened to a lot of pop culture: WMs have mostly abandoned it, because there are new and more interesting things to do. As a result, it has been turned into an audience-delivery mechanism for advertisers. The WM stragglers are complaining, but the stragglers always will.