Tag: go woke go broke

A Hot Take On ‘Woke’ Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Everything is fucked up in the world. What I mean by that is everyone seems to have an agenda whenever anything makes them uncomfortable. At the moment, there seems to be two types of movies — big budget “four quadrant” blockbusters….and woke movies.

The president of Hollywood.
For someone who is a storytelling snob, this really grates on my nerves. It seems impossible to find just “a good movie” that doesn’t seem to be some sort of preening pontification on the “woke agenda.” And I say this as someone who considers himself center-Left.

I’m all for art having “a message” but there is this thing called….subtext?…that too many earnest Hollywood people seem to have forgotten about. I mean, I hope to write a six novel project that pretty much is just one huge, long screed against extremism in general and MAGA in particular. But my goal is to do it all in such a way that you, the reader, won’t really realize what’s up unless you give it a lot of thought.

That’s the dream, at least.

I know why we have such a problem with over-the-top “woke” movies — the economics of movies are such these days that the only people willing to do passion projects are people who are members of the “woke cancel culture mob” who think you can only tell a story if all its characters are gay and / or a minority. (South Park has a good recent episode on this trend.)

I’m all for having representation in art. In fact, I organically have a lot of representation in my first novel. But at the forefront of my mind is TELL A GOOD STORY. If your message browbeats the audience to the detriment of your storytelling, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot.

And I know — I KNOW — that as a smelly CIS white male I’m opening myself up to a lot of hate by even bringing this up. But, I had to vent. I just would like to see modern interpretation of, say, a movie like The Big Chill or Time Bandits without the “message” of the movie making it unwatchable.

We’re Both Right: Why The Culture War Over Beer Is The Perfect Encapsulation Of How Dumb Everything Is In Modern America

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, here’s what’s going on. One of the rallying cries of the MAGA Right is “go woke go broke.” They point to how Bud Lite has lost, like, 20% of its market share for sending *1* promotional beer can to a trans “influencer” for an Instagram post.

And, yet, globally, I’ve seen evidence that overall, Anheuser-Busch has only lost 1% of its market share. What’s more, because of consolidation in the beer market,almost all of that lost market share is going to other beer brands, also owned by Anheuser-Busch!

As such, this is the perfect culture war battle — both sides are right and both sides are wrong — depending on how you look at things — if you ever get into any sort of argument over things.

In short — lulz, nothing matters. And everything sucks.

But I have to say — I am growing more and more alarmed at how Red and Blue are receding away from each other. Something’s gotta give. There is going to come a point where all these macro trends come to a head and God-only-knows what sort of fucked up things will happen.

The greatest country in the world is going to potentially imploded because of ‘vibes.”