The Intensity of the Reaction to Greta Gerwig's Non-Nomination for Best Director

In light of the earlier hoopla for Barbie I was surprised when Greta Gerwig did not get a Best Director nomination for helming the film--and then completely unsurprised by the extremity of the "We was robbed!" reaction from her supporters.

This was in part because we see this kind of thing every year, for multiple films, if not always at the same level of volume and intensity. And that makes it worth saying something about that reaction as an example of a tendency I have written about in the past, namely just how disproportionate the volume and intensity of chatter about pop cultural product can be.

It seemed to me writing then that four factors were specifically noteworthy, namely

1. The Frame of Mind of an Audience Looking for Entertainment.

2. The Ascent of "Fan" Material in the Marketplace.

3. The Marketing of Popular Culture.

4. The Media's Obsession With Itself.

Spelled out in brief this means that:

People take their entertainment in a state of emotional vulnerability (they are sitting down to relax, letting their guard down, generally expecting to be pandered to), with all that means when things do (as when they are absolutely pandered to) or do not (as when they are slapped in the face instead) go the way they would like.

It is also the case that much of popular culture is connected with franchises whose members are more than usually emotionally invested in the material coming to the movie--to the point that one can say that they feel like they "own" it and are owed something by those who would create something out of it--amplifying their reaction to what is done with it, negative reaction included. And,

Finally a self-obsessed media relentlessly exploits controversy, and with it provocations and other expressions of ill will, in promoting its products, and itself, doing everything to feed a frenzy which eventually feeds on itself. (We see this even in such things as the way that people constantly use box office data to try and prove that the public is on whatever side of the argument they happen to be.)

Still, relevant as all this seems there is the plain and simple fact of what so much of the pandering and the offenses and the controversy has to do with these days (and certainly had to do with in the case of Barbie), what Richard Hofstadter called "status politics." Centering on issues of group status within society at large in ways not allowing of redress in any practical, material, way status politics (in contrast with "interest politics" where people have problems that are in a technical sense redressable) tends toward lingering on bad memories, bitterness, etc., and all that easily follows from them--not least a tendency to accord immense symbolic significance to minor matters, see offense anywhere and everywhere, make accusations accordingly, and treat any objection to one's behavior (that they may be acting unfairly toward others, for example) with complete contempt. (Postmodernism has, of course, reinforced this with its worship of "subjectivity," which basically means that people feel their selfishness and prejudices are sacrosanct, and no one can have a valid opinion contrary to their own--their "subjectivity" the only one that matters, or even exists.)

Certainly going by how many have viewed the film, from all sides of the culture war, as all but designed to stoke such politics; and certainly the way the movie was promoted, and large portions of the media embraced it; only encouraged this. The resulting, extreme, success of the movie at pushing "hot buttons" made the movie a hot button topic itself, and how the movie has been treated by the Academy (even if this remains to be fully seen) itself a status politics issue, with all the intensity that this prompts. That is to say that for status politics-minded "supporters" of the movie Gerwig's not getting nominated becomes about much, much more than one director not being up for one prize in one particular year. It was for them a test of the Academy's readiness to recognize equity across gender lines among filmmakers, and more fully display its respect for their understanding of social justice more broadly; and the Academy's declining Gerwig the nomination, even as they accorded the film so many other honors (in part, perhaps, because the movie having a Best Picture nod without Best Director or Best Actress can make the Best Picture nomination look like an empty gesture toward big movies, as with the one for Top Gun 2 last year), a refusal to do all those things in their view. Of course, even understanding the reasoning here not everyone will see it as valid--to regard it as plausible for them to attribute so much meaning to one prize--but again, such differences in attitude are in the nature of such politics.