Go on youtube and search about Disney’s latest failure Elemental and you get all these insane videos about “Woke Disney” made by people who talk exclusively about the “woke mob”.
Ever heard of Yellowflash, Clownfish TV, and those other reactionaries? I first heard about them during the Vic Mignogna drama. (whether those accusations are true or not is another discussion, but it made reactionaries insane).
Because wokeness has lost all meaning aside from a far right snarl word.
The problem with Disney’s “woke” art isn’t that they’re actually woke, it is that it’s trash. Good art DOES discuss leftist talking points. Good art DOES appeal to disenfranchised minorities. Good art DOES try to inspire social improvements. But it doesn’t become good art by just ticking these boxes. The baseline expectation of any moviegoer, no matter to which groups they belong, is to at least see a good story with good characters told via good directing, supported with good music and good animation or acting; and you only get those things by taking the time and spending the money for someone to sit down and put the necessary work in. We all know many renowned leftist artists who did that, such as Brecht, Eisenstein, Lucas, Roddenberry, Tarkovsky, or Miyazaki.
If you go to see good movies, you will notice all of them have one thing in common: You can feel the massive amount of time and painstaking labour that went into them. If you analyse them closer, you will see that behind every frame, every object, every line of dialogue, every musical chord lies a careful decision to put it there in order to move you and make you deliberate the film’s core themes. Doing this is both an art and a science, it is a slow and methodical process, and getting it wrong is easy and costs much more at the box office than just letting a generic remake flop somewhat.
It is because of this business logic that Disney’s recent productions are all pumped out within the span of months and its workers are overworked and underpaid. It is so afraid to risk its bottom line that it censors its writers and directors to take the most conservative and uncreative positions they possibly can, that everything they churn out follows the same formula, and most people simply don’t want to go to the cinema to watch the same film twenty times in a row. Making “woke” stuff is just about the only thing they have going for them, and therefore they have to resort to such methods to market their horseshit. For instance, you didn’t go see “The Little Mermaid (2023)”, their 21st live-action remake of an 18th-century story that has already existed in animation since the Cold War, but this time it has a black person in it? Racist! Sexist! Ableist! Way to kill the career of an up-and-coming actress, you scumbag! Of course, people don’t really boycott the film because they actually are any of these things; they boycott it because it’s lazy, lackluster, and an obvious cash grab by a dystopian multi-billion dollar conglomerate. But of course, some people don’t like to be insulted by a faceless PR machinery and go to the cinema to feel a little better about themselves, and at the end of the day these people generate tons of revenue.
It’s becoming a war cry for the extreme reactionary elements in the United States, an imaginary enemy they can rally against. “Wokeism” is a completely made up ideology that does not exist, will never exist, these alt-right clowns only pretend it does for their own organizational benefit and profit.
Conservatives have successfully gained control of the critical levers of political power in the US, so now they’re focusing taking control of the culture as well. They will fail in that. But, in the meantime, they’re going all-in on culture war, because they’ve gotten most of what they want politically and economically.
Given that these extreme reactionaries have such differing opinions on how and what to do, yet still manage to oppress people so quickly, I wonder how we’re not managing to organize ourselves
I have thought about this idly a lot and I wonder if the crux of the matter isn’t violence. Reactionaries are indiscriminately violent. They will use violence against their enemies, themselves, everyone; it doesn’t matter to them. They are all singularly united on that front, without question. This is, as history makes evident, not sustainable, but I really do think that’s the heart of it. In the imperial core, at least, any progressive movement does not appear to have this, nor even a hint of response to it, lacking any sort of vanguard. We are not unified on method, to speak nothing on goals, but even the most heinous skinhead thugs and the most timid of right-wing decorum-obsessed politicians have the same means to any end, and it is a simple one: violence.
Look at the view counts on those videos, then look at the length, then look at the number of ads they put in them.
It’s a grift, they do a low effort rant video that requires little to no editing and make bank.
It’s the buzzword du jour of a buzzword-rich reactionary political movement. Before that it was “SJWs” and “cultural marxists” and “political correctness”, and so on.
Woke is the status catch all for all things that fascists and conservatives don’t like.
Communism? Woke. Trans people? Woke. Muslims? Woke. Anti-Racism? Woke. Affirmative action? Woke. Healthcare? Woke? Minorities in movies and video games? Woke.
It’s the most meaningless bullshit phrase you’ve ever heard.
It’s a dogwhistle for everything that goes against the current status quo. Everything I don’t like is woke.
My city (with a right wing gov) upgraded a normal car road into a bicycle road in which bicycles have priority. They can’t be overtaken by cars anymore, for example. People from the beginning started calling this leftist woke nonsense.
Infrastructure is woke.
Not even, woke is just anything a democrat (or an actual leftist, they don’t care the difference) likes, that a reactionary doesn’t like. That’s how a Disney movie can be woke, along with what you said.
Hating Muslims is so early 00s, now trans people are the new boogieman. These people with hate in their hearts are like monsters.
They also still hate muslims too
oh for sure. it’s just less prevalent. you don’t hear ‘enlightened centrists’ or whatever calling to shutdown mosques like they were 15 years ago or sum shit, it’s on the back burner
“Woke” was originally a word in the US black community to refer to people who were class conscious. Specifically to be aware of cooptation and trickery by the bourgeoisie and police. Ironically, like a lot of black slang, it was coopted by whites and its meaning was changed to suit their interests.
Due to the association with activists, it came to mean progressivism, then liberalism, and by that point had fallen out of favor by its original users. Now it just means “thing me no like” for conservatives.
“Wokeness” is simply the term to be used by reactionaries against anything that attempts to promote a deconstruction of a social hierarchy regarding gender, race or sexuality. It’s just a rebranding of a very old thought, this time attempting to frame commercial failures as the result of popular will backing conservative ideas.
Three and a half million families are evicted from their homes every year in the US, six hundred thousand people lay homeless in the same country while there are sixteen million empty housess, and the greatest concern for these people are that a mermaid or an elf in some TV show or movie is played by a black person.
“Woke” is just a conservative brand of thought-terminating cliche, a meaningless term that allows them to lump together all they don’t like and avoid actual analysis and discussion.
