Nobody is more certain of anything than
conservatives are that the whole world thinks exactly as them. We’ve seen it on
so many fronts of political issues and idiotic culture wars over this last
decade -conservatives, or those of a like reactive mindset, declaring with
confidence any outcome that suits their prejudices. The rise of Trumpism taught
them that fringe positions and complaints were a lot more popular than the
mainstream expected -which was true but clearly not to the extent that they
believe. There are so many other factors and nuances that have little to do
with broader conservative grievances and the picture painted isn’t actually as
accurate as they like to claim either (remembering that Trump only won a
popular vote once and by the slimmest of margins).
It is exhausting, yet it is an exhaustion
that has long spread to my space of interest, the movie space -an area where
conservatives, for as much as they decry Hollywood’s ‘liberal elites’ at every
opportunity, are desperate to capture and control. They are aware that movies,
and art in general, is a vital backbone of culture, and it is one that they
wish to define in their own image. So many voices within the conservative media
sphere in the United States have ambitions towards making inroads in the
entertainment industry -perhaps most obviously seen via Ben Shapiro’s Daily
Wire, Shapiro famously being a failed screenwriter as is the pattern of
many right-wing media figures of his generation and younger.
And yet, who actually watches any of the
shows or movies made for The Daily Wire? There is a dedicated audience
for sure, but not a particularly big one. And not one that has perhaps much in
the way of high standards of quality -so long as what is being served conforms
to their biases. I strongly suspect that a large chunk of the viewers of dreck
like The Pendragon Cycle, Lady Ballers, and Snow White and the
Evil Queen watch out of a sense of political obligation more than entertainment
value. And it is work not in any way interested in spreading beyond its insular
audience. Never has one of these reverberated outside that bubble due to
matters of quality, technique, or artistry -entirely independent of political
leaning. Because the talent just isn’t there. The Daily Wire especially has to resort most of the time to casting
its own pundits in these projects because few actors who have any kind of cache
will touch them with a ten-foot pole (apart from apparently Jonathan Majors).
But that legitimacy in the world of film
and television matters a lot to the conservative movement. Because it would be
validation of their beliefs that they own the culture, that their ideology is
indeed a reflection of the public’s. However they can construe that, they will.
There are often a myriad of reasons behind why a particular movie fails at the
box office, yet any time it is one from a big franchise or high expectations
and features a woman, person of colour, or LGBTQ person, they see it as a
victory. “Go woke and go broke”. It doesn’t help that within the larger culture
there have been a few instances in which a company or brand has folded to such
criticisms eventually and fired a person or made a vaguely regressive statement
of vision. Disney has had a few notorious moments of this. So too has
Paramount, which has been successfully captured for the right-wing by theEllisons.
And yet it is all an illusion, one that
festers very well in online spaces such as Elon Musk’s Twitter, but have little
to no real footprint in the outside world. The vast majority of people after
all, are not compulsively online -something the right has had a hard time
learning in the political sphere as well. Each time a movie decried as woke by
imbeciles has come short at the box office, it is for reasons entirely divorced
from ideology. Certainly, an unwarranted stream of hate due to identity
politics isn’t a good thing for the movie either -but it is not the core of
what went wrong. And most of the time, folks on the other side of the aisle
dislike the thing as well. An obvious recent example would be Supergirl, which underperformed not
because Kara Zor-El was bisexual and ‘unattractive’ to an army of basement
goblins but because it was rushed, it was about a lesser-known character with a
deeply boring villain, and bad word-of-mouth about these things got out ahead
of the movie. Also, the superhero genre is in notable decline right now outside
the biggest names in the game. Of course, sexism does play a role, and you
could argue it was significantly amplified here, but we have seen female-led
superhero movies such as Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and BlackPanther: Wakanda Forever turn into big hits -and those had fairly “woke”
politics as well.
The same holds true in the television
sphere. Enthusiasm for the Star Wars universe is beginning to run its
course as well -though we don’t actually know how popular or not some of those
shows are without Disney unveiling the numbers. But something like the much
hated The Acolyte not doing well owes just as much to its lack of a
tie-in to recognizable characters and contexts. It’s for that exact same reason
that Andor isn’t hugely popular, though it gets much more attention from
critics and its fanbase due to its level of quality. Same goes for the Star
Trek universe, where the show Starfleet Academy was heavily attacked
by conservatives -a show that did go out of its way to be diverse and
progressive in line with Star Trek’s general ethos. But that show also
had few connections to previous Trek entities in an era for the
franchise where the most popularly successful entries -Picard, Strange
New Worlds, and arguably Lower Decks are innately tied in to
franchise nostalgia. Also, it was a show experimenting in the coming-of-age
genre a la a CW Drama which was likely an alienating tone for some fans. The
point is that for each of these installments in popular media to be attacked by
the right they faltered for reasons beyond the culture war bullshit they got
attached to. There are a lot of reasons for viewers not to like or be interested
in a particular piece of media -it’s just that those who hate for the dumbest
of reasons tend to come off the loudest.
But we got a fierce rebuttal recently to
that notion that where media is concerned there is any connection between the
online conservative ecosystem and the real world. And that is the reception to
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. In
case you missed it, the movie has been the target of a months-long rage
campaign and loose boycott on the internet ever since photos surfaced that
depicted among other things Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as
a then unnamed character assumed by some to be Achilles (a figure who dies
during the Trojan War before the story is set). Spearheaded, or at least
popularized by Elon Musk -a pathologically insecure trillionaire with nothing
better to do with his time, the issue around the casting of this movie became
the latest culture war flashpoint, and an unavoidable one. Legions of
commentators who had most likely never picked up a copy of Homer's epic poem
raved and railed about historical authenticity to this fictitious story, mocked
the idea of a black woman playing a figure renowned for her beauty, and of
course criticizing a trans man for simply daring to exist. Conspiracy theories
accompanied this that Nolan was pandering to 'woke' politics for an Oscar (the
two he has already received apparently not being enough), the integrity and
faux concern for Greek representation was dragged in, and the 2004 movie Troy -which has never been a particularly
beloved film and is famously wildly inaccurate to The Iliad- was suddenly being evoked as a bastion of classical
fidelity. It is all just regurgitated racism and transphobia, poorly disguised
and excused combined with that resentment again towards a Hollywood not bending
enough to a fascist view of art and the world.
In all this noise a common refrain grew
that the movie would be a catastrophic bomb at the box office. The right had so
mistaken their outrage campaign as indicative of widespread opinion that
seemingly everyone appeared certain the movie was going to tank. This in spite
of Nolan's long record of box office success, the fact that the film had been
selling out IMAX pre-sale tickets for months, and that most forecasters taking
into account the film's budget estimated it was highly likely to break even,
especially in non-U.S. territories where Nolan's films have also been highly
profitable. Critical reception in advance of opening weekend was highly
positive, but this only further fueled the narrative of its failure, this breed
of conservatives having long derided the critical community (and critical
thinking in general) as partisan or bought-out (I went into this nonsense morein a previous essay). No matter what, in their view, the movie was destined to
be a trainwreck -Musk again pushing this delusion with the most surety, as is
perfectly on brand. Nobody is better at being very wrong very dramatically than
Elon Musk.
As is more than apparent at this point
though, The Odyssey is well on track
to be not only a hit but an enormous hit. It raked in 124 million its opening
weekend in the U.S. and has not seen a significant drop in the weeks since,
with some analysts saying it is likely to cross 1 billion before the end of its
theatrical run. Not only that but the reception of most audiences is seemingly
in-line with critical consensus -and it is getting great word-of-mouth buzz. It
is a good movie on a grand scale and the attention it is receiving is
appropriate to that.
And it is fraying the minds of all of those
who tried to turn the movie into a culture war touchstone and were so invested
in it being a flop. It is a very entertaining thing to watch, especially all of
the grasping at straws and conspiracy theories naturally arising from this
crowd to this eventuality: that studios are buying out tickets for empty
theatres (but without the receipts that show up when Angel Studios has done
exactly that), that leftist activists are watching multiple times in a single
weekend to drum up numbers, and of course consistently shifting the goalposts
of how much the movie actually has to make to turn a profit (hint: it’s much
less than most are suggesting and has by now already been achieved). Some can
indeed see how pathetic these excuses are -Ben Shapiro rather sheepishly
conceded the movie’s quality and even its conservative thematic attributes.
Others are still in denial, most especially -guess who- Elon Musk, who has
channeled his rage about a movie on a subject he pretends to care about into a
vow to either give Mel Gibson a billion dollars to make an “accurate” version
of The Odyssey (an amount of money he is unwilling to spend on important
causes) or just get Grok to generate an A.I. slop of The Odyssey before
the end of the year. On that note he’s not the first: there is apparently an
A.I. version of The Odyssey set to drop in some fashion before the end
of the summer -its makers are talentless hacks but at least don’t appear to be
motivated out of spite. None of these are going to have any impact though, and
perhaps knowing that is what bothers Musk and these other trolls so much.
Because a rather dramatic curtain has been pulled back on how influential the
right-wing culture war grift actually is.
Fundamentally, the public does not care how
woke or not a movie is. And that does go the other way as well, at least in
western countries. A movie with an all-white cast is at no more an advantage
than one that is more diverse -and that is its own issue. But outside of these
perennially online conservative ecosystems, identity politics do not factor
into general interest for a movie among the actual public. In a story of a
scope like this, nobody really cares that a trans person is on-screen, and
nobody really cares that a black woman is Helen of Troy. It’s why the
conservative backlash is so strong towards mainstream movies that have even minimal
representation, such as those that come from Disney. They have to manufacture
that the existence of a woman or person of colour, or LGBTQ person is a
problem, because they know most audiences won’t see it that way -and that it is
a tool to simply normalizing the diversity of people who exist around all of
us.
Meaningless drama though this whole
situation has been, it is a useful barometer for how much pull in culture, and
pop culture especially, the online right actually has. They are not any kind of
cultural arbiters in touch with where the average person is. In the real world
people are not concerned with the kind of petty posturing and infringements on
white heterodoxy that these fascists are. It's why on a macro level the most
extreme facets of Trump's second term in the United States have been
extraordinarily unpopular. Most people, even those with some issues of bigotry
be they personal or systematic, do not care so strongly about the mere presence
of those who are different.
I don't mean that as a comforting thing
-it's not ideal that a lot of regular people are generally apathetic about
matters of diversity, representation, and rights; but it is a sobering thing
for the modern conservative movement, which seems to depend a lot on people
caring passionately about such things that don't directly affect them. With
luck, the scope of this episode ought to be a canary in the coal mine for
future culture wars, but conservatives -especially those entrenched in online
bubbles- are not known for learning from mistakes. It is an indicator at least
to the rest of us though that the emperor has no clothes -there is no
connection between these loud agitators and the public at large. The culture
war has always been a manufactured fiction. Just as The Odyssey is. Only The
Odyssey actually has value.
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