PicoBlog

Quick update for you free subscribers: I’m dropping the price of this blog to the minimum allowed by Substack—$5 a month, $30 a year. If you read this, you appreciate the content, and you’re in the place to do so, I’d appreciate you considering this. This blog isn’t gonna be daily forever (the school year is indeed a thing), and if I had my way it’d be cheaper than that, but if you’re in a spot to think about supporting, I appreciate the thought. That’s the only thing I’m ever advertising to you all on here—promise. Alright, on to what you’re actually here for.

Anyone who’s following this blog knows that I have a very love-hate relationship with the word “woke.” On the one hand, there is real wokeness out there and it belies the reality of a truly ideologically extreme movement. On the other hand, GOOD. GLORY. Segments of conservatives have wrapped their brains into pretzels trying to find wokeness in EVERYTHING. We’ve been over this many times: everything from Grove City to Chick-fil-A to gender transition surgery for 15-year-olds is apparently woke. Unreal. I’m all for fighting over definitions—democracy is indeed about disagreement, not agreement. However, let’s not pretend that crappy definitions have zero effect. When everything’s woke, that means that conservatives (or more accurately, the non-woke) have to fight against everything and everyone that’s not in Imaginary Conservative Lockstep. And for those of us engaged in the war of political content creation, it leads to a fundamentally unrealistic narrative of what culture war actually is or how it works.

Let’s start with the phrase go woke, go broke. You’ve probably heard this term from people, and it’s used as a maxim to warn about the looming risk of the Conservative Resistance: you go woke, we boycott you, and you lose money, so don’t go woke. It’s been brought to bear in lost revenue from the Bud Light and Target Woke Snafus, as proof that corporations need to be conservative (or at least conservative-friendly) or incur a financial loss. To a point, and we’ve talked about this, it’s normal behavior and even effective—so long as the companies you’re targeting are actually out of line and not just normal conservatives caught in the crossfire. But there comes a point where it goes off the rails on the go-woke-go-broke crowd: where do we draw the limits of what’s actually woke?

For a perfect example, might I direct all of you wonderfully cultured people to Barbie. Yeah, that not-Oppenheimer film. Described by one reviewer as “a delightful and empowering animated adventure that will enchant audiences of all ages,” Barbie hit theaters several days ago and it’s racking up the money big time. And then conservative reviewers descended to talk about the film’s wokeness.

Here’s the deal: I haven’t seen Barbie, and as such I’m not offering any opinions on the film’s value. Let the record show that Barbie is currently polling at 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, even as some conservatives lambast it as woke, feminist, pro-trans garbage. I’ve only really heard positive things, even from conservative friends, but opinions aside, it is abundantly clear that the film hasn’t exactly been a flop. And herein emerges the problem with go-woke-go-broke.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Barbie is woke, whichever definition you want to use. If Barbie’s woke, being woke worked: the film made $155M in its first three days. There is the possibility that Barbie’s not woke and that conservative pundits are cranking out outrage porn, but believing that premise forces you to believe something different: there are prominent American markets for both political and non-political films.

And for people who want films to be politically conservative, that’s a shot to the heart of the idea of the exhausted majority. Let’s take a movie conservatives loved: Sound of Freedom. I’ve seen it, and it’s neither woke nor innately Qanon-ish. Yet the response has been political—the success of Freedom is seen as a victory for the non-woke in America. Several days ago, Freedom broke 100M in revenue and is holding third place behind Barbie and Oppenheimer. It’s a successful non-woke movie.

There’s a large faction in America willing to plunk down cash for a political movie like Freedom—but there’s also a large faction in America willing to plunk down cash for Barbie (and there’s overlap in that Venn diagram). Trying to brand every film that’s not as conservative as Sound of Freedom as woke, while peddling the go-woke-go-broke narrative, leads you to really shaky ground when those other films gross millions.

The nature of America is that there are lots of people willing to pay lots of money for lots of things with lots of messages. That’s the reality of a diverse nation—and shifting definitions of “wokeness” have to compete with that reality. When those definitions get silly enough, as we see, they really aren’t up to par.

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