By Ross Douthat
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Let’s not talk about Snow White, the Disney
artistic dud and box office disappointment. The only interesting thing about
the movie is the political conceit that gave it shape, the theory that the
American cultural inheritance can be ideologically cannibalized indefinitely,
so that a company like Disney can keep getting rich off its own past while
making “equity” rather than truth or beauty the measure of all things.
Guess what? It can’t. While Snow White was meeting
harsh reviews and audience indifference, my New York Times colleague
Ezra Klein was interviewing the Democratic pollster David Shor about the 2024
election, and both were marveling at the indicators that young people are
moving right, with Gen Z “becoming potentially the most conservative generation
that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”
This is not just a political fact; it’s a commercial one
as well. Throughout the first Trump presidency, as the Great Awokening rolled
over Hollywood, movie big shots could tell themselves that by disappearing
potentially problematic tropes and genres (romances in Disney movies, romance
generally, traditional male action heroes, broad and potentially offensive
comedy, historical dramas with too many white people), they were just pivoting
to where the younger generation expected them to be, and keeping themselves
viable in the age of endless TikTok and YouTube competition.
But if the younger generation isn’t actually defined by
its super-progressive elements, if Generation Z is recoiling from the woke
maximum, if young men especially are never going to show up for woke cinema,
then as of 2025, commercial self-interest should be dictating a real pivot. And
certainly Hollywood has executed pivots in the past: You need only contrast
1970s cinema with the movies of the 1980s and 1990s to see how a political vibe
shift can alter cultural production.
So, if studio heads had any sense, they would be studying
that not-so-distant past. The formulas involved are not very complicated, and
don’t require some kind of stark return to 1950s values. The Disney renaissance
that began with The Little Mermaid, for instance, was achieved through
the straightforward idea that you could take traditional fairy tales and adapt
them with light-touch rather than heavy-handed modernizations. (Beauty and
the Beast, too, managed to give Belle an extra dose of female agency and
use its villain to satirize machismo — but all within a still deeply
traditional fairy-tale structure.)
Likewise, it shouldn’t be that hard to recover the spirit
of the action movies of the 1980s and 1990s; the most successful Hollywood
action blockbuster of the post-Covid era, Top Gun: Maverick, did just
that. The action vehicles of the Reagan era already had plenty of minority
stars and active female characters; they just weren’t imprisoned by the
schematics of diversity. You could have a female action hero, but it had to
feel earned — which is why the best examples were in sequels: Linda Hamilton in
Terminator 2 and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, where you could see
the unusual pressures that made them so violent and tough.
More important, alongside action heroes who weren’t as
omnicompetent as John Wick or Jason Bourne, you could have a strong female lead
who wasn’t a Strong Female Lead™ — who served as a complement and counterpoint
to the male star, such as Bonnie Bedelia’s corporate mom in Die Hard or
Sandra Bullock’s harried commuter in Speed, in a way that made the
action movie feel like a slice of life rather than a dose of total unreality.
Finally, any aspiring vibe shifter should study the lost
art of the Hollywood comedy. As the conservative cultural critic Peachy Keenan
noted recently, you know we’ve reached levels of severe comedic deprivation
when a movie like the Best Picture–winning Anora gets widely described
as a “screwball comedy.” It is a genuinely funny film — I laughed out loud more
than I usually do at the movies nowadays — but it’s funny inside a frame of
realism; its humor is in the service of a gritty drama. It’s not funny in the
same sense as Tootsie or Mel Brooks or Ivan Reitman or the Farrelly
Brothers, or the Vince Vaughn–Owen Wilson run, or Bridesmaids and The
Hangover from 2009 and 2011, respectively — the last hits of their kind.
Comedy, especially, requires a real political shift to
recover, since it thrives in all the touchy areas of human life: ethnic
differences, class differences, sex differences, all the embarrassments that
surround cultural and physical embodiment. And a pessimist about the future of
the movies would say that it isn’t just wokeness that’s rough on comedy; it’s
the general retreat from embodied existence that characterizes digital and
virtual life. You aren’t going to leave your house to go to the movies to laugh
along with people suffering real-world pratfalls and embarrassments and sexual
humiliations if you aren’t willing to risk experiencing those things yourself.
That’s the dark scenario for cinema, and indeed for
humanity. But even if that’s where we’re headed, a Hollywood vibe shift would
be a way for the industry to go down fighting — whereas every new movie like Snow
White is an act of premature surrender.
No comments:
Post a Comment