You're Never Getting Cultural Nuremburg Trials

You won. Take the W.

The Right won. The Left lost. So what’s next?

What am I talking about?

Blending politics and culture is an alchemical act that should only be executed with great skill and care. There are shockingly few who have the skill or care, yet the number who think they have it is shockingly high. When this happens, you end up with a loud population of political activists parading as artists, and using a culture’s art as a rope in a tug-of-war with their ideological antitheses. Those who feel the effects of this war most acutely are the ones who care the most about art itself.

There’s a quote I heard from Anthony Jeselnik, but he attributes it to Robin Williams, so I’ll give them both credit for it: on the subject of comedy, Jeselnik and Williams say that real comedy is when you “get away with it.” Comedy relies on timing, but at its core it’s about surprise. You need to spring the punchline on your audience and it works best when they never see it coming. It’s like a magic trick, almost. They’re not meant to understand how it works and the result should stun them. Too many comics and artists focus on the stunning aspect, and so they go for a culture’s sacred cows, skewering them with zeal, and they call it art.

That’s not art. It doesn’t take any skill to skewer or offend; rather it takes malice, even enmity toward one’s audience. Offending is easy. Making someone laugh at something offensive is hard. Making someone laugh at something offensive when they don’t want to? That’s a rare talent indeed. Dave Chapelle can get a Christian and a tranny to laugh in the same set and about the same subject because he’s talented and witty and knows his craft. People pay good money to be outwitted, to be stunned, because without those things, they can’t laugh, and we all want to laugh.

Horror works by the same rules, you just swap out laughter for fear. It’s why great horror is psychological and tense and plays with your anticipation, while cheap schlocky horror is all about blood and guts and gore and jump scares. One of these things is hard to do. Anyone can do it the other way.

Art is the same way. Art is when you “get away with it”—when you make someone smile, or cry, or reflect, or do something genuine and enjoy it, and it’s just plain hard to do. Not everyone will, not everyone can. There’s power in it. And that power is what makes it a target for the politically-minded.

Politics is the science of manipulating will. Of accruing and directing social power. There is social power in art, and so the political creatures of the world will try to wrest that power and crowbar it into their own arsenal against their ideological enemies. Thus: culture war. Taking things that genuinely resonate with people in ways they can’t always quantify but also can’t ignore, and saying “Ah, well, you like [X] don’t you? [X] agrees with me. So you have to be on my side. And if you’re not, you can’t like [X].”

This is not a novel concept or even a particularly well-hidden one. The hell of it is, most people aren’t intellectually grounded enough to see the concept or resist it. Their interests lie in art and entertainment and diversion. Politics is an afterthought. For the political creature that’s even better; you don’t want them thinking about your craft too much. You just want the masses to do what they’re told. To associate the goodness of [X] with the imperative of your cause. Then you have power over the masses.

To simplify the playing field, let’s understand that The Left has a much better grasp of this principle, and The Right invests its energies in other things. I have my own theory as to why most artists are left-wing (they are) but I’ll save it for another time. It has a lot to do with why The Left can never correctly identify the mindset of The Right (they can’t) because they’re basically not speaking the same language. (The Right, meanwhile, can model the minds of The Left, but again, that is beyond our scope here today.)

Graham, what does this have to do with the culture war?

Without trying to pinpoint when exactly it started in American culture, there’s been a naked acceleration in the overlap of Leftist ideals and popular media over the last decade. Murphy Brown getting an abortion probably raised some eyebrows, and That 70’s Show whipping out a gay kiss in season 1 certainly garnered some backlash, but both of those things happened in the 90s. The slow boil continued. Shows have only gotten bolder in their liberal embrace of Lefty ideals, celebrities became more and more outspoken in behalf of their causes, candidate endorsements got louder, and the line between politics and culture blurred more and more. It practically disappeared when Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem because he wasn’t good without Harbaugh and was trying to save his job to protest police brutality against blacks. That was 10 years ago.

Then we hit the late 2010s, and the culture war entered its Full Swing era. Call it “Peak Woke.” Every movie had to have a gay character. Then it had to have a white character apologizing to a black character for Not Understanding^TM. After that it was the transgenders. The most brazen phase was when major IPs got bought up by corporations that wanted to turn them into megaphones for Approved Ideas. Marvel heroes would have to look into the camera and find some clever way of saying that Black Lives Did Indeed Matter, that Love Was Love, and so forth.

Legacy characters were replaced with gender-swapped versions, or race-swapped, and you were socially rebuffed for the misdemeanor of noticing (or the felony of not preferring it.) Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Halo, The Witcher…find an IP with a lot of established lore that was ripe for a screen adaptation, and you’d find an IP that was about to have that lore washed in favor of Party Talking Points. It happened over, and over, and over again, across several major studies and throughout their whole catalogue of IP. The rightsholders effectively went to war with the dedicated fanbase.

The fanbase just wanted art. They put up with art-shaped politics for a while. Perhaps even longer than they should have. And then finally…the fans stopped showing up.

The Culture War Terms of Surrender

Marvel movies used to be a license to print money, until they weren’t. Star Wars was the biggest property on the planet, until it started to hemorrhage cash. These two are the biggest and easiest example to identify so I won’t run through the entire laundry list of what’s happening with them all, suffice it to say that with these two properties, the “comedy” was gone. The “art” had left the building. The studios were no longer “getting away with it.” Nobody was showing up to pay money for this stuff. It wasn’t art. It was just crap. Politics (and yes, Lefties, it was political, and you won’t heal until you admit that) had made the art unviable as a product to half of the audience.

Marvel released several movies that nobody liked and nobody talks about with any fondness. Star Wars had a terrible sequel trilogy and their solution was to double down with an announcement of a Rey sequel (is that still happening?) They fired Gina Carano over a tweet and lost a huge PR battle over that one. Season 3 of The Mandalorian really sucked as a follow-up to 1 and 2. The entire catalog of Expanded Universe novels was wiped away so The High Republic could take priority—a line that disappeared almost as quickly as it crashed onto the scene, and featured a very elevated number of characters on the rainbow spectrum. In attempting to capture new audiences these studios alienated their core, and often for political reasons.

Now both of these studios are begging the alienated audience to come back, but here’s the thing—they can’t do it by standing up on a pedestal and saying the things that the most extreme members of that audience want to hear. The studio heads aren’t going to shout through a megaphone that they should have casted ScarJo to play Mara Jade, that the sequel trilogy was a mistake, that Rey isn’t a real character, and that someone is going to use the Force to go back in time and change it all. They will never openly admit that Gina Carano’s firing was a mistake. They’re not going to admit that season 3 of Mando sucked. Sam Wilson isn’t going to hand the shield back to Steve Rogers and say “You made a mistake, it should never have been me.” On and on and on.

They know they lost the culture war. What will it look like when they do surrender?

Oh, I don’t know. They’ll probably bring back Steve Rogers and Thor—and they won’t make Thor a laughingstock in the film. He’ll probably even get a front-and-center role where he gets to be serious, militant, and take initiative. They’ll use multiverse handwavium to merge the Avengers with other properties that have been in the wind, like X-Men and such. They won’t have any cast members saying anything stupid in press clips on the Internet about how Doctor Doom is a metaphor for Donald Trump. I’d almost guarantee they’ve been coached, even warned against that.

And that’s just to get things started. They’ll hand the mantle of Black Panther back to a male heir of Wakanda, which they just announced at SDCC. They’ll keep Ryan Coogler in the director’s chair because he keeps making money and the black audience shows up for his films. Then they’ll take it a step further and hire Shawn Levy to direct a Ghost Rider film, since he printed them a billion dollars with Deadpool & Wolverine. Who will play Johnny Blaze this time?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe Ryan Gosling? The guy with a cult male following that borders on the religious? An actor who is rumored to have wanted the role for a long time, and has been fan-casted in it for years? The same Ryan Gosling who is in Star Wars: Starfighter in 2027?

Can this man possibly save two franchises? I don’t know, but I will be at both of those movies! I was at The Mandalorian and Grogu and it was a good movie—a retreat to form, where the creators looked at what they did in seasons 1 and 2 and stuck to that model, instead of any of the sloppy storytelling that fans disliked in season 3. If they really wanted to bring those fans back, they’d let Jon Favreau move forward with this Rangers of the New Republic project, and bring back Carano as the lead character…but that’s just fan speculation, and maybe we shouldn’t get greedy.

Then again, why not? It worked for the X-Men. Channing Tatum’s Gambit was pulled out of development hell, shoved into the MCU, and now gets trailer time in Doomsday. Jean Gray and Rogue aren’t even in this movie, and Gambit finally is. Fans want that. They’ve wanted it since he was left out of the 2000 film. A studio that really wanted those fans back would probably make such overtures to them. We’re starting to find ourselves in an age where these things are possible.

This is what a culture war “victory” would look like; the politics would retreat, and movies/shows/comics would get good again. I’ve had a pull file at my local comics store for almost three years, and 85-90% of what I’ve bought there has been good-to-great (with a few excellent pieces at the very top.) Movies are good-to-great again. It’s fun to go to the theater and see stuff. Projects are announced that have me genuinely excited. Isn’t that the objective?

Or is the ultimate goal to storm these studios and string up the executives and hold their feet to the fire until they admit that they mishandled your favorite franchise for a couple of years? Because you’re never going to do that and neither are they. So what are you going to do?

Reward and Abstain

In love and war, it is wise to have both eyes open. If the culture war truly is a war on any scale (and I think it’s a fair assessment), then we ought not be so naïve as to think that what has been done before cannot be done again. Maybe the studios are just resting up and licking their wounds and regathering their strength until they can reboot Firefly with an all-transgender roster of Inara Serra variants from the multiverse. (That’s more or less what The Right thinks Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is, and it’s on track to make a billion.) It’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Hell, Amazon just announced a Blade Runner series with a transgender activist in one of the lead roles. Successful indie author Rob Kroese, who has Blade Runner on the highest tier of his favorite sci-fi franchises, is rightfully wary of what the show will do to a property he loves. Amazon already has a bad track record of stuff like this, just look at how it handled Rings of Power or Wheel of Time. Studios are going to do studio things and even though fan-baiting is a low-class tactic, they do it because it gets people talking online. It’s the marketing version of offensive “comedy,” of schlocky “horror.” It’s like mooning the crowd at your high school graduation: easy to do and it gets a reaction out of people.

It doesn’t translate to artistic efficacy or box office returns.

Here’s my suggestion: starve these things when they rear their heads. There’s an entire internet industry that farms outrage for clicks and engagement, and it doesn’t care where the attention comes from as long as it gets the attention, because that can be monetized. Where there’s money, there is social power, and once you’re concerned with social power, you’ve stopped really caring about art. And you’re right back where this whole mess started.

Don’t share the trailers. Don’t even link to the news sites that blab about this stuff. If a studio is wrecking an IP you like, ignore it. Let the traffic die in your driveway. They can make hay out of bad press but there is no way for them to spin zero press. When they make something good, reward it! Talk about it, go see it, whatever! That’s the only metric that matters! When they make something bad—or even if it just looks bad to you—don’t give them the satisfaction of impressions. Take it from an indie author: being ignored is more demoralizing than being disliked.

At least my haters care enough to feel something.

Conclusion

I reiterate my thesis from the title: large IP holders are showing fans of art that they have—for now at least—won the culture war. They are retreating to their previous positions. They are creating the things that we used to enjoy. Do you want them to do that? Or do you want them to grovel and apologize for the very specific and personal way in which they hurt you?

Because they’re not going to do that second thing. Ever. They don’t care. They don’t even care if you’re mad at them. They’ve shown the one thing they do care about: being ignored. Being unwatched. When they don’t get a response out of you, that’s when they go back to the drawing board.

Reward the things you want. Ignore the things you don’t. Quit worrying about the political power of art; those who do were never there for the art to begin with.