The Death of Woke Hollywood and the Impoverishment of Our Culture

Something more than a presidency was inaugurated on January 20th. We are witnessing a full-scale cultural swing away from the progressive policies and agendas that have defined the operations of major American institutions for the past decade, from education to government to media to entertainment. 

Recognizing that public opinion has shifted tectonically, leaders in these industries are hastening to align themselves with the new paradigm. Many corporations are scrapping their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Universities are conducting some soul-searching and dialing back their political activism. Tech magnates like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have suddenly expressed an intention to make their platforms more balanced and unbiased. And all federal DEI offices are closing as of this week.

Hollywood may be slower than some industries to recognize the change of cultural tune, although we already see signs of a course correction. The media surrounding Hollywood certainly recognizes the end of an era in entertainment. “Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?” runs one December 2024 headline, and this not from some staunch conservative outlet but from, of all places, The New York Times. In the column, Kabir Chibber makes some observations that would never have graced the pages of the Times just a few years ago. 

Chibber argues that the diversity-obsessed pictures of the past decade form their own peculiar and slightly embarrassing period of cinematic history—one on which the curtain has gone down. With barely suppressed sarcasm, he writes, 

Looking back, you can see a period when identitarian politics were in cultural ascendancy. . .What was particular to the Hollywood of the 2010’s was the way these politics fused with the industry’s insatiable demand for sequels, spinoffs and reboots, giving us a curious and mercenary new invention: the inclusive multimillion-dollar blockbuster. (The BIPOCbuster, if you will.) It’s the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.

The Telegraph, too, asserts that the age of politically-charged movies is ending. “Last time the US elected a certain Ronsealed former TV-show host as head of state, Hollywood overtly sided against him, styling itself as the pop-cultural wing of the resistance,” Robbie Collin observes. “A fat lot of good that did. Popular studio franchises grew shrill and hectoring, and the publicity tours to promote them even more so.” Filmmakers became unable to separate a shallow, narrow political narrative from the serious business of making art. Collin notes a few recent pictures, such as Twisters, that he considers a breath of fresh air due to their nonpolitical nature, and he even claims that “2024 was the year in which Hollywood began to move into its post-woke era.”

There’s no question that Hollywood is struggling financially, with Disney in particular releasing flop after flop, partly because of its overzealous adoption of wokism. And the one thing studio executives love more than politics is profits. The financial success of less politically engaged films such as Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, Twisters, and Inside Out 2 forces studios to reckon with reality: moviegoers are tired of being preached to at the theater. And if there are economic incentives to make non-woke movies, studios will start making more of them. That trend will likely continue to shape the face of the industry in the coming years. For better or worse, entertainment must conform to demand or face extinction. If there are economic incentives to make non-woke movies, studios will start making more of them. That trend will likely continue to shape the face of the industry in the coming years. Tweet This

But the film industry has a deeper problem than just pandering to progressive agendas, and it will take more than abandoning outworn politics to revive the film industry. It’s as if the race-swapping, gender-swapping, and sexual-deviancy-affirming act was a facade to cover the industry’s imaginative bankruptcy—a great, big, CGI-generated placeholder for a film’s “message,” when all that’s really there is a blank green screen. Most mainstream films have come to lack any artistic, religious, or philosophical substance, and the DEI preaching was a desperate attempt to give some grounding to movies that would otherwise be overblown, artificial, and meaningless fluff. (Of course it was a failed attempt.)

This also helps explain the relentless barrage of spin-offs and sequels in the past decade, alluded to by Chibber. Ross Douthat has argued that the ceaseless rehashing of the same tired franchises and TV shows is a symptom of a deeper cultural stagnation, decadence, and decay. Douthat defines decadence as “economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” It’s hard to think of a better definition for modern Hollywood than that. 

Today’s filmmakers have enormous budgets, all the latest gadgets and gizmos, all the high-tech equipment, and endless computer wizardry to produce sleek, glossy, larger-than-life images. The only problem is that those images are not only larger-than-life, they’re lacking in life. These colorful yet stale movies are like a death mask, covering the features of corpse-like culture with the appearance of life. Original and innovative film ideas of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s have decelerated into behemothic, lackluster franchises that just retell the same stories again and again—with lower quality each time.

The reality is that we’re living off of borrowed cultural capital, and it’s running out. The popular art we’re producing is like a feeble plant trying to draw sustenance from highly impoverished soil. Our cultural soil is as dead and degraded as the literal dirt in our massive corn and soybean fields.

How do you make good soil? You put dead things in it. And you give the dead matter time to decompose and percolate, to form the basis of new life.

The same holds for cultural soil. We need to re-fertilize our cultural soil with the long-neglected treasures of our Western heritage, classic works that are old enough and wise enough to form good soil, to be able to support new creative life. I’m not talking anymore about movies from the late-20th century, which is, culturally speaking, yesterday. I’m talking about classic imaginative works going all the way back to Homer’s Iliad.

The problem is that writers today are simply uneducated in this original source material. They have not encountered the riches of our Western heritage—the true, deep, timeless works and ideas that nourished our society for so many centuries. You cannot write philosophically dense and artistically profound works if you have no knowledge of philosophy or the great works of poetry of the past. 

Screenwriters need to be trained in—steeped in—the classics, both literary and cinematic. It’s not enough to know the “Save the Cat!” Beat Sheet forward and backward. Formulas like that are means to help tell a story, but they do not account for the substance of the story itself. Art must comment on the human condition, which you cannot do if you have no understanding of the human condition to begin with. 

First, writers must learn about humanity from “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, and only then might they, very cautiously, try to enter into that great conversation with their own piece of art. They should be reading Shakespeare before they ever pick up Snyder.

A story that merely hits expected plot points but with no philosophical underpinning is something artificial, transitory, substanceless—like fast food. And just like eating too much fast food makes us sick in body, consuming too much artificial storytelling will make us sick in our souls.