Hollywood Woketopia Podcast

The Odyssey Proves Woke Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Every so often, a moment in culture arrives, a Sydney Sweeney ad, or Project Hail Mary. Every time, we hear that the Woke fever has finally broken. Hollywood cares about the people again. Right? The same reason Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee in 2028, the same reason the Democrats are still selling the lie that any kind of attempt by Republicans to even out the redistricting is “Jim Crow 2.0,” is proof enough that on the Left, Woke is not going anywhere. It is who they are now. Not all of them, but the most powerful among them. Early on, when Mark Halperin and others were insisting Gavin Newsom would be the nominee in 2028, I said there was no way the Democrats would get behind a white guy, no matter how passionately he genuflects to the Woke (“Anti-woke is anti-black!”). I know the Democrats. I was one. I helped build the modern-day party of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. I know what fires them up every day, and it isn’t just taking back power; it’s foisting their religion upon the rest of us. They think it’s the opposite, that it’s the Right that is foisting their “Christian Nationalism” upon them. While it’s true that a faction of the Right has unmasked to become the very thing Rob Reiner warned about in his movie, God and Country, they aren’t the majority. Perhaps that’s true on the Left. But look around. Their religion is the dominant culture in America. When news got out that Christopher Nolan had cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” whose face launched a thousand ships, it ignited yet another culture war. How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020. It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged. And if that weren’t enough, Nolan brought back Ellen Page from Inception, now recast as Elliot Page, the male, as an act of affirmation and yet another test. These are Orwellian 2+2=5 and force people to choose between ignoring it and going to see a big-effects movie in IMAX, or not buying a ticket and boycotting the film. Elon Musk took the bait, becoming the villain Hollywood needs, to turn seeing The Odyssey into a righteous and political act. You can see them now: the bearded male feminists buying tickets ten times in a row. “Take that, Elon Musk!” The ladies of Blue Sky will go in groups, then fawn over how beautiful Lupita Nyong’o is and overuse the male pronoun for Ellen/Elliot Page. “Wasn’t he great?” The game is becoming exhausting by now, as Hollywood demands the hard-working American public be impressed by them, lectured by them, and corrected by them. All audiences really want is the one thing Hollywood seems unable to accomplish: entertain them. It isn’t that Nyong’o isn’t pretty. She is. It’s that Helen of Troy was white, famously so, even if Greek. Nyong’o is a unique beauty, not a universal one, a reality the Left wants to force, because Hollywood doesn’t care about its audience. They want to look good. Probably the worst thing about the game Hollywood plays with the movie fans they helped raise is that Lupita Nyong’o is held out as a sacrificial lamb. She isn’t pushing any ideology, unlike Ellen/Elliot Page. They are putting her out there and expecting her to absorb criticism about herself, including whether she is pretty enough. I met her once, back in 2013 in Telluride, before her career took off. She was too young to know how to act like a celebrity. She was so nice, I was won over. She would win an Oscar that year and become a big star in Hollywood. Is it fair to put her in this position just so they can feel good about themselves? No. Does it change anything? No. There is still such a thing as truth and reality, even if that is the thing that is unfair. The Woke Code and the Hays Code The Hays Code [https://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/theory/1930code.pdf] (1930-1968) represented an era wherein decency and morality were mandated in all Hollywood films. The Christian conservatism/morality mandated by the Hays Code reflected less a separation between art and governance and more a united effort toward a utopian society of goodness, especially as we moved through the last Fourth Turning, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time where the world saw true evil in Hitler and Stalin, not to mention the nuclear bomb. That isn’t all that different from what the Woke Code is now. It’s roughly the same kind of thing: rigid rules to depict an ideal society. The difference is that Christian advocates have been replaced by progressive activists, and the villain is the white male patriarchy. What is different now, amid our current Fourth Turning, is that the Woke Code includes only half of America. To the Left, they would rewrite this narrative to say that Hollywood depicted mostly White America, and that is what has changed. But really, if you respond to the box office, as Hollywood doesn’t anymore, you will always default to the majority. It isn’t rocket science — beautiful, sexy women and masculine men and a great story. The end of the Hays Code was entirely due to economics. Television became so popular in the 1950s that there wasn’t much of a need to go to the movies if all you saw was the same kind of buttoned-up themes you could see on TV. That’s true now, too. Movies, then, had to break out of the Hays Code and become much more subversive, leading into the 1970s, which saw some of the best films ever made. While it’s true that The Odyssey will be eligible to win Oscars under the new rules, it’s also true that the criteria could have been met in a way that didn’t make audiences play this same exhausting game that has alienated them from everything Hollywood puts out. The casting of Nyong’o and Page is less about Oscars and more about status. Perhaps Nolan was under pressure to cast a non-white woman as Helen, or maybe he wants to be seen as a good person using his wealth and fame to make change, as the most famous white male directors reach for things money can’t buy, like Martin Scorsese making Killers of the Flower Moon, Steven Spielberg making West Side Story with a real Latina, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Peak Woke Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another. No film has better exemplified Hollywood in the Trump era than this one. It says it all. ICE as the Gestapo, check. America is run by a cabal of wealthy white Nazis, check. A woman of color must save herself, check. All of it is held together by a hapless white man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who represents the film’s beating heart. He’s the only good white guy, which is how those in Hollywood who make these kinds of choices would like to be seen. One Battle is actually a movie about them. Had Nolan cast a blue-eyed blonde woman as Helen of Troy, all hell would have broken loose. When you go against the rules of the Woketopia, you aren’t just getting hit on X with lots of angry tweets by loyal fans who continually feel betrayed; they bring out the big guns - agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker, for instance. If you obey the rules, then you are praised. The problem is that it all feels so artificial, so pre-planned, so inorganic. I used to write the Oscars report for Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center (who fired me after they found out I voted for Trump), counting the number of female nominees and winners. The statistics were always grim. Every year, it was bad news. As things began to change for women after the Academy announced its DEI mandate in 2020, that change was forced. If before merit had made too many white men winners, now we were seeing something a little closer to gender parity. So then the line moved back, then it became not just about women but women of color and trans women. Now, it’s all about Marxism disguised as art. If life isn’t fair, movies will make it fair. It isn’t just because the Oscars have it written into their new rules, and it isn’t just because activist groups like GLAAD breathe down the neck of every Hollywood studio, counting heads and making reports. It’s that this is a deeply felt belief system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I have no doubt The Odyssey will make money. It’s a Christopher Nolan film, after all. Who doesn’t want to go see a giant visual effects epic filmed entirely on IMAX? If you can ignore the elephant in the room, the performative casting, you might have a great time. But if you were hoping that Woke is over, well, I think that was its own Hollywood fairy tale. It’s why Kamala Harris was the nominee in 2024 and why she will once again be the nominee in 2028. This is how the ruling class in America wants to be represented. They want to force change, and they do that by elevating minority groups to high-status positions as symbols for the mostly white people who run things. Culture, like the Democratic Party, will have to be built anew. That, more than anything, explains why AI is about to completely consume the business, becoming the counterculture revolution Hollywood never saw coming. They can do it all and more without the millions of dollars necessary to mount a production. AI artists don’t have to be held to the same rigid standards. They can be purely about bringing in eyeballs by showing what people most want to see, rather than what Hollywood wants them to want to see. In other words, they can make the women as beautiful as they want, and no one can cancel them for it. I spent my life in movie theaters gazing up at the big screen and watching some of the best films ever made. The only way that makes sense is if you are escaping real life and finding your way into a fantasy world, and maybe for the Woke, seeing Lupita Nyong’o cast as the most beautiful woman in the world is its own kind of fantasy fulfillment. After the movie comes out, we’ll have to see whether it works or not. At the moment, it feels like just another test to decide who gets to stay and who has to go. Get full access to Hollywood Woketopia at www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe [https://www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

John Carpenter The Master: Halloween and The Thing

When I look back on the best horror movies, I do so with sadness and a sense of mourning for what once was and may never be again. Just take the year 1982 when so many great movies hit theaters, like E.T., The Year of Living Dangerously, and Blade Runner. But one movie that didn’t do so well at the time has now become one of the greatest horror movies ever made: John Carpenter’s The Thing. The Thing holds its place in cinema history because it is heavy on mood and suspense, driven by the ominous music, some composed by John Carpenter and the rest by Ennio Morricone. It’s also the suffocating atmosphere of men trapped in a compound surrounded by nothing but snow. And then, a dog shows up. It isn’t really a dog, of course, it’s one of those things. But who could resist a dog? Not these men. And so they let it in and, in so doing, write their own death sentences. Yes, every single one of them will die by the end of the movie. But it is how paranoid they become, how tricky the monster is in hiding inside of them, that makes this movie still so watchable. And of course, there’s the star of the show, Kurt Russell as MacReady, who must outwit, outlast, and outplay the thing. Russell is surrounded by a talented ensemble, with no weak links in the bunch. David Clennon as Palmer, Wilford Brimley as Blair, Keith David as Childs, Richard Masur as Clark, and one of my personal favorites, Donald Moffat as Garry. I remember when it came out and how everyone was comparing it to 1979’s Alien, which was also about letting a monster into an enclosed space as it becomes something that can’t be killed, peeling them off one by one until only Ripley and Jonesy remain. But The Thing doesn’t offer any such salvation for its characters; they all have to die because one of them might be The Thing, even when there are only two remaining characters left. We never find out if either of them is The Thing. But killing them all off was a daring choice back then, when audiences wanted uplifting conclusions. The Thing made just $19 million, which was nothing compared to E.T.'s $350 million. On such a low budget, the visual effects are still legendary, crafted by Rob Bottin, then just 22 years old. Carpenter builds suspense in The Thing by making us uncertain where anyone is at any given time. Like Alien, the computer is also a big warning sign for these doomed men. It tells them the bad news that this Thing could wipe out the entire human race. They know they can’t save themselves because they have to sacrifice their lives to save humanity. Like all movies and horror movies especially, they had to be for everyone. They had to depict a time and place we all knew. They didn’t take a side politically most of the time. You didn’t have to belong to a certain group of people to get the movie. You were immersed in the story because they actually wanted people to come see their movies. They weren’t made for critics or for awards. They were made for audiences. Every time I watch The Thing, it feels like the first time I’ve ever seen it. Since I already know how it will end, I enjoy the getting there, how Carpenter sets up the story and makes us get involved with the characters - even if we don’t always know who the good guys are and who might be one of those things. The Thing is top-tier Carpenter, though he’s made some great ones, like They Live, Christine, Escape from New York, and The Fog - but around Halloween, there is only one movie one that everyone has to watch. And it is THE movie. Halloween is not a complicated story. It’s guided by the mood of the place, of the spooky nature of Halloween itself, and the masked villain who can’t be killed. So immortal is he that he would be the subject of 12 more movies, though none coming anywhere near as good as the original. What is Halloween about? It’s about cinematic horror and the power of the image, but Carpenter also clearly sees it as a film about fate that brings together Michel Myers and Laurie because she, as played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is the embodiment of innocence. She’s a good girl. She does her homework. She babysits and isn't a frivolous, easy, good-time gal like her friends. Michael Myers is pure evil. He was born bad. How great is the film’s opening, when we see Michael stalking his sister and witness his first kill? Who is this killer, we wonder, and when the mask is ripped off, we’re shocked to see the face of a confused little boy. From then on, we’re to fear this supernatural, evil entity that has returned to Haddonfield, which is supposed to be in New Jersey but is also rumored to have been filmed in South Pasadena. All the characters in Halloween are pretty great, but what stands out to me most is John Carpenter’s score and Dean Cundey’s hand-held Panaglide cinematography, which makes us feel like we are right there in the town. We can almost smell the coming of fall and feel the leaves crunching under our feet, the cool night breeze of late October. It’s this Carpenter movie that best captures the mystery of Halloween. There is a guy roaming around in a mask on a day when lots of people are wearing them. He is the ultimate evil, but how could they know that in this sleepy town? All Jamie Lee Curtis can do is survive. As with The Thing, there is no need to belong to a specific class, gender, or ethnic group. It is a story set in a town somewhere in Illinois. The only thing that matters is that we believe it. We don’t watch the characters wondering about power dynamics or representation. We watch the characters because we are invested in the story. Halloween proves that great movies can be made as long as everyone on board is committed to the story. The budget was around $1 million, with Carpenter earning just $10,000. It went on to make roughly $50 million, which was a lot back in 1978. The film is extremely violent as Michael Myers goes on a killing rampage, and for many in today’s fragile America, it might not have even gotten made, especially since serial killers were on the rise in the 1970s. Sooner or later, someone would complain about violence in the movies, but audiences couldn’t get enough. Of course, it’s common knowledge by now that scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis made her cinematic debut as a nod to Carpenter’s idol, Alfred Hitchcock, who depicted Curtis’ mother, Janet Leigh, being likewise hacked with a big knife in Psycho. Carpenter shows more, of course, than Hitchcock did, but nowhere near as much as filmmakers show in film and television today. But the best horror movies don’t rely on graphic violence but on mood, suspense, and time and place. Time and place are what Hollywood is missing now. Everything looks like this mythic land they built inside utopia, where everyone is equal and everyone is represented. They depict the America they wanted to exist, and do so out of fear. It is pure dogma made for the religious and the devout. Maybe Hollywood always depicted an America that wasn’t real, but it should at least be one we recognize —one that feels rooted in some kind of truth, even if that means it doesn’t reflect an ideal utopian vision of society. All that matters is that we believe what we’re seeing on screen. And this time and place are ones I remember from growing up in the 1970s, before all Halloween costumes were known brands, and when people still handed out homemade treats. You don’t want to be always looking back at the past and remembering the good old days, but that gets harder and harder to do now, because movies don’t seem to be getting better, and it’s doubtful there will ever be any as good as Halloween. Get full access to Hollywood Woketopia at www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe [https://www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Video: Halloween Horror -- Why The Shining is Still So Good

It’s October, and it’s time to celebrate the best horror movies, at least in my opinion. I’m not the expert when it comes to horror. I have a few dozen I really love, but at the top of that list is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In 1980, just the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining scared us. Everyone was talking about it. I was just 15. What did I know about movies? I didn’t know the name Stanley Kubrick, let alone Jack Nicholson. I don’t remember when I first saw The Shining, but it was probably not that year. By the time I did see it, I was already fully immersed in the lore as everyone was going around bending their finger and pretending to talk like Danny talking to Tony. They were repeating Redrum, Redrum, Redrum. And of course, “Here’s Johnny.” What stood out to me when watching the movie finally was how smart Danny was to backtrack in a snowy maze to throw his father off track. All these decades later, The Shining remains one of my favorite movies, and I watch it at least once a year, usually in October. The film has not lost a step in 45 years. Those who love it, obsess on it. Every detail is picked apart and dissected. How did he do that? How has it held its shape and magnetic force decade after decade? What is it about this movie set in this particular place in this hotel that so fascinates us? It isn’t the book so much. It isn’t Stephen King’s imagination that we love. It’s how Stanley Kubrick brought it to life and the unusual, hammy, unforgettable performance of its star. Do we see ourselves in Wendy? Do we imagine what if? Do we secretly desire to be trapped in that hotel all winter with all of that food in the freezer, the giant can of fruit cocktail, and no one around for miles? Does it sound like a dream or a nightmare? Would an only child want a whole hotel to himself to roam the hallways and dig into the mysteries? Or is it that other layer, with the “shining” itself, the magical power the boy has, the one that Hallorann has? I always knew the author of the book, Stephen King, wasn’t a fan of the movie. He said he liked some of it, but he felt Kubrick turned it into something else. He’s right. None of what most people remember about the movie, from Redrum to Here’s Johnny to the twins, “Come play with us, Danny…” is in the book. The book is good in its own way and probably scarier and less funny than the movie. Stephen King has always been what we now call “woke.” He has always been aware of social justice and injustice, and he has woven it through his stories. His wife, Tabitha, was famously a feminist who has been schooling him ever since. That’s why the lead in his book, The Shining, is such a strong — albeit slightly annoying — female protagonist. There is more to the story of the hotel itself in the book, including why it’s haunted and why it wants Danny due to his special powers. It’s also, I think, a scarier book because at the end, Hallorann (who isn’t murdered by Jack, as in the movie) is almost seduced by the evil of the hotel to kill Wendy and Danny, but he fights it off. I think that’s how it ends, though it’s been a while since I’ve read it. Rewatching movies from the past is a reminder that movies didn’t use to judge or categorize characters in terms of their identity. Scatman Crothers is Halloran, and he is just Halloran. Wendy is just a mom. Danny is just her son (with a supernatural ability). Jack, a stand-in for Stephen King in the book, is played by Jack Nicholson almost for laughs. That was Kubrick’s gift as a director - he could introduce absurd humor even if none existed in the source material. The film isn’t a feminist screed, as there are evil forces in the hotel that take the shape of women, like the old lady in the bathtub and the twins. They don’t have to say anything about women or society. They can just exist as characters in a story. Watching frail and scrawny Shelley Duvall crack her husband over the head with a bat is spectacular. Had they cast her with a stronger, more formidable actress to match the character in the book, they would have lost the character’s seemingly helpless quality. She is so small and the hotel is so big. That alone tells the story of this movie. We don’t think she can defeat her husband, and yet she does. Everything about the movie is about showing the audience what it would be like to be stuck there, with all of the great things and the terrible things about it: you go stir crazy and try to murder your wife and child. Could you escape? If so, how? Once you decide that everyone in the movie must make a grand statement about an entire population or gender, everything else the movie offers vanishes. When they tell you how to think and what to think, you don’t wonder. You stop asking questions. You don’t go deeper into the film. There is no denying that it was a story conceived in the 1970s and released during a time when the country was changing and the pendulum was swinging. That might also be why so many of us ‘70s kids had the nightmare dad image stuck in our heads, since so many of our families had broken apart, marriages split up, and mothers were left to fend for the kids without them. Whatever the dynamic at play, it has never alienated any generation over time because it wasn’t trapped in time. Kubrick was not trying to convey any message beyond the story of these three people trapped in a haunted hotel and how the mother and child barely escaped. The Shining is pure cinema, from the saturated color of red, to the way the camera glides across the soundstage, to the hotel being surrounded by acres of white snow, to the fact that no one can get to them, and no one can get out. It is the imagery of Kubrick’s masterpiece that stays with us. He created an atmosphere that never feels artificial and yet, in its own way, feels entirely artificial. He wasn’t the easiest director to work with, according to Shelley Duvall. But he was the kind of director that Hollywood no longer produces. They’ve become too fragile to function. Everything must go down easily. Their horror is increasingly grotesque and graphic, but their messaging must always be on point. Much of what makes The Shining effective is how sound and music merge, allowing the dialogue to be minimal and much of the story to be absorbed through the senses. He wanted the viewer to feel the movie, to sense it, to taste it, to hear it — wheels on carpet, the distant sound of long-dead party goers, the hard hammer on the typewriter, and Jack pounds out All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, also not in the book. So, when we rewatch The Shining, we aren’t so much watching to relive the story as to experience the movie with all our senses fully engaged. In that way. We feel like we’re a part of it, too. We are Wendy and Jack. We are Danny. We are Hallorann. And maybe we are the hotel. Maybe we are taking human behavior and turning it into our own entertainment for our own purposes. The Shining is a great movie because Stanley Kubrick was a genius. He was fearless in what he sought to show us about human nature, as all great directors are. We don’t have films like this because we don’t have audiences like this. The Shining is a great way to remember some of the best Hollywood has ever produced, and a great way to kick off the month of October and the Halloween season. Get full access to Hollywood Woketopia at www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe [https://www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

One Battle After Another: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good Warner Bros. has almost single-handedly rescued the movie business this year by making original films that people turned out to see, and they made money. F1, Sinners, and Weapons are all in the top 20 highest-grossing films of the year. Now, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with a hefty price tag of $140 million, just hit theaters. Can it make back its money? Probably not. Even if it does fail at the box office, it won’t be allowed to fail. It will be lauded with film awards, maybe even Oscars. Is it a good movie? It’s well-made. Is it funny? At times, yes. Some of the action sequences are great. The cinematography, the acting, and the directing are all top-notch. But as one of the audience reviewers put it on Rotten Tomatoes: One Battle After Another is a film for a very specific type of person, and that type of person just happens to be our elite ruling class, who somehow see themselves as oppressed because they borrow oppression of marginalized groups that they speak for in their films, their TV shows, their books, their late-night comedy, and their media. PTA is a great director, but he’s never been my cup of tea. I don’t think I’ve seen any of his movies more than once. He has a cult-like following of film fans who adore everything he does, and this movie is no exception. Shot in large format Vistavision, the film looks great. It mostly keeps things rolling, so that the lengthy runtime, over two hours, speeds by. That’s if you like the movie. If you don’t, you’ll be bored by the one-hour mark. The best thing about it is Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Bob, the ne’er-do-well ex-revolutionary raising his daughter Willa (Chase Infinity). The plot is more or less about a group of radicals (think: ANTIFA) who shoot up an ICE detention facility before going on the run after shooting a cop. The main radical is Perfidia Beverly Hills (an excellent Teyana Taylor), who is sleeping with both the racist ICE agent, Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, and Bob. She gets pregnant and assumes Bob is the father. But when the revolution calls to Perfidia, she abandons her baby, leaving Bob to raise Willa. All of this would have made for a much better movie had they stuck to it, but instead, we have to follow Lockjaw, who now wants to join an elitist group of white supremacists, and because he once slept with a Black woman, he has to find out if Willa is his biological daughter and, if so, wipe her off the map. Meanwhile, loser Bob is in a race against time to find his daughter and save her now that the underground has taken her off to a hiding place. Yes, that’s the plot, for better or worse. Mostly worse. The Bad It may be that what we call “woke” storytelling is now here to stay, and that there will never be a return to the way things were before. Those rules mean only white people are allowed to be evil or bad guys. All people of color and LGBT individuals must be portrayed in a positive light, for instance. Teyana Taylor in this film seems to be headed in a complex or negative direction, or at least someone who is not admirable. But if you know the rules of Woketopia in movies, you know how her character will turn out in the end. There is no way they will allow her to be seen as bad. That means, at least for me, I already know what the story will be about and how the movie will end just based on the casting alone. One Battle After Another checks every box, up to and including Leonard DiCaprio de-centering himself from the narrative, as all white men must. They’re not allowed to save women anymore. In the Left’s America, and in the film and television shows they produce, each of us is judged by our identity group - skin color, gender, or how well the film panders to the marginalized groups. That is what seems to decide good and bad now. And I don’t know if that will ever change. It must be present in every movie. It’s in F1 and in Weapons. Every time you see a sampling of intersectional characters, you know they are only there because they are mandated to be there, not necessarily because it fits with the story. That is why the critics are so over the moon. To them, it is everything they are and everything they believe, a validation of their mass delusion that Trump didn’t win a fair election in 2024 but rather he and his Nazi army stormed DC, and they’re all trying to survive in a racist/fascist nation. They really do believe this because they have locked themselves away from the rest of America, and no one in the media will ever tell them the truth. What would be funny is if someone made a movie about that, their collective delusion about being oppressed as the side with still so much wealth and power. They just don’t like sharing this country with people who do not agree with them. Coming the closest is Ari Aster, who made the film Eddington that satirizes the awful year that was 2020, and does so by pointing out how different real life was from virtual life, where a Civil War rages on. One Battle After Another aims to be satire, but it mocks the Left with the lightest of touches. There is one scene where one of the progressive activists is mocked by saying he doesn’t feel “safe,” and we sympathize with Bob’s frustration as he screams at him. He just wants to save his daughter. He doesn’t care about the rest of it. But the movie cares. The Ugly One Battle After Another reminds me of the agitprop B-movie Billy Jack, which was released in 1971, the same year as Dirty Harry. One Battle is better made, for sure, but it’s the same idea. We don’t have a Hollywood that would catch the wave of the way America was changing in 1971. Dirty Harry was popular because America was tired of the hippies. They were tired of crime. They were ready to move in a different direction. There’s a reason Dirty Harry has stayed with us all of these years, and Billy Jack has faded. That’s probably because Clint Eastwood became a formidable force in American film. But there might be something to the idea that Dirty Harry was a Trump-like figure back then, someone who didn’t exactly fit in the progressive Left culture but who somehow found a way to resonate, though people today would call it “racist.” Either way, I wish we had a Hollywood now that would make movies for audiences rather than movies for critics. The critics don’t seem like they assess movies so much as they use film and writing about film to push their social justice agenda outward. There aren’t many areas on the Left anymore that don’t. It’s one thing to abandon half the country and make culture and art only for themselves. It’s another thing to turn normie America into The Enemy, which One Battle After Another does in its one-sided view of the border crisis, in its obedience to portraying the white people as bad (except Stoner Bob) and the marginalized people as good. For ten long years, the Left has been demonizing and dehumanizing not only the Right but the silent majority as “racists,” which has distorted their worldview and wrecked their ability to tell good stories for everyone. But it’s even worse than that. If half of America is their enemy, how can they possibly expect them to buy tickets to see their movies? If you are a working-class American who is worried about the border and so you voted for Trump, this movie will tell you that you are a “racist” going along with crimes against humanity with mass deportations. If you are an ICE agent, a cop, or a soldier, you are the Gestapo in this movie. Here is a good rundown by Chris Gore and Alan Ng for Film Threat. This isn’t a movie that will incite more violence against ICE officers, but it is a movie that celebrates those who do as heroes, and it affirms the mass delusions of the Left better than probably any movie ever made. No wonder they are euphoric. This is their Ben-Hur. Ultimately, I have to wonder about the collective sanity of the Left. Is it that they will only feel safe if they somehow cancel half the country? Do what with all of those people they see as their biggest threat? You know, their fellow Americans? Throw them into gulags? Perhaps worst of all, the way critics and the media responded to the film made me realize that movies, like everything else, are weapons in our ongoing Civil War. This one would count as a “win” for the Left because they know it will hurt and anger the Right. If the movie bombs, which it might, it counts as a win for the Right, and the cycle continues. Just as Billy Jack reflected a part of America in 1971 that America would ultimately leave behind, while Dirty Harry became a part of its future, with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, One Battle After Another could end up being the definitive portrait of the Hollywood Woketopia that so many have already left behind. That makes it an odd legacy for Paul Thomas Anderson, who will forever be seen less as the auteur he once was, and more as someone who spoke for a generation trapped inside a Doomsday Cult. // Get full access to Hollywood Woketopia at www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe [https://www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Hollywood Needs a DOGE

This is another terrible weekend for Hollywood at the box office. They have shrunk their audience dramatically. They can’t fix the problem because they can’t even name it. As I look around at the trades, I still see the same thing: On X, they think Hollywood is to blame for sending movies to streaming too quickly and for ticket prices being too high. Nope. That’s not the reason. People will crawl across cut glass to see something they want to see. If you build it, they will come. Look at how expensive Disneyland is. Do you think their amusement parks aren’t selling tickets? No, people pay because they know the experience will be worth it. The problem is that Hollywood doesn’t want to build it. They want to build utopia, or woketopia, just like the Democrats, and therein lies their problem. If the Democrats are less popular now than ever, that goes double for Hollywood. They are one and the same. Hollywood, like our government, is no longer working for the people. At the very least, they should respond to the market. But that hasn’t been true for a very long time. No one really talks about the elephant in the room - how Hollywood lost its audience and why no one goes to the movies anymore, or at least not enough to keep the industry thriving. But every weekend, it’s more bad news. Says Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro: [https://deadline.com/2025/03/box-office-novocaine-1236326472/] If Snow White [https://deadline.com/tag/snow-white/] pulls off a $50 million-plus opening, that’s a respectable bump for what is a barren desert of a business right now. Current estimates show that this weekend is in fact the lowest grossing at the domestic box office year-to-date with around $54.7M for all films, lower than Super Bowl Weekend ($55.8M). How is that possible during a spring break with kids off? How is it possible? Hollywood doesn’t know how to tell stories for a country it no longer knows or understands. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that Hollywood, like the Democrats, despises the majority of the American people. How can they tell stories for people they can’t stand? And why would they expect those Americans even to want to see their movies? They tell stories for themselves. They use Hollywood as yet another propaganda arm for their singular ideology. And to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege. The same people in power now have always been in power, and those are mostly white men. The only people who have paid a price for what Hollywood has become are all of us, the ticket buyers. Get full access to Hollywood Woketopia at www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe [https://www.hollywoodwoketopia.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]