"Go Woke, Go Broke": A Few Thoughts

A while back I was surprised to find myself named in the footnotes of Wikipedia's page on the phrase "Go woke, go broke" and the associated controversy. This is not because I played any part in the controversy, but (so it seems given the citation) because one of my working papers simply happened to conveniently sum up the phrase's origin in its references.

Still, I have been meaning to say something about that controversy for a while--specifically the way that the argument can go back and forth without end simply because of how people throw the term "woke" and its derivatives around without any thought for meaningful denotation so that we can argue forever over whether a particular piece of pop culture really is "woke"; because whether a particular piece of pop culture has been a "hit" or became a "flop" can be a tricky thing to work out; and because even if we can identify a work as woke or non-woke, and a hit or a flop, we are still stuck with the problem of proving causation rather than just correlation, because films can and do flop for so many reasons.

After all, where definitions are concerned it is standard to say that "wokeness" denotes alertness to social justice--but those defining the term rarely go further than that as they ignore how far from self-evident a thing social justice can be, given different conceptions of the matter, and that when we speak of wokeness we are usually talking about a specifically postmodernist understanding of justice. Emphasizing consciousness, purity, guilt, trauma, sin, it is oriented toward the subjective and ideal and psychological rather than objective appraisal of the material, toward race and gender rather than class and its socioeconomic concerns, and takes a sympathetic attitude toward the identity politics of the marginalized, especially their "symbolic" concerns. The result is that in its stress on intangibles, foregrounding of subjectivity, and involving a vast number of different causes and claims and ways of advancing them, which do not all have the same charge--not all wokeness equally troubling for those leery of it. Thus not only can we agree or disagree about whether something is particularly "woke," but not all wokeness is equally controversial. (Having a film with a female or ethnic minority protagonist is much less controversial than a film where a female or ethnic protagonist replaces a protagonist who is not that through a "gender swap" or "race lift," while even that is less controversial than, for example, foregrounding LGBTQ+ representation. Meanwhile there is greater public sensitivity regarding material aimed at families with children than material aimed at adult audiences, the threshold of controversy rather lower.)

At the same time there is the matter of how particular works do, and why, with movies particularly conspicuous--partly because the number of major feature films is relatively small and easy to keep track of, and a fair bit published about their commercial performance. Yet that information is typically far from complete, often flatly inaccurate--, and not always easily contextualized. Even movies that make money can be thought disappointments were they expected to make more money than they did. (Thus did some look askance at a Marvel movie that did not make the billion-dollar mark for a period--even as short of that they turned enviable profits.) At the same time even movies that lose money may be thought successful if they launched something bigger. (Looking at the figures for Batman Begins I suspect the movie lost money on the theatrical run, at least--with production and marketing costs of perhaps $250 million and the studio getting maybe half of a gross that did not go too much over the $350 million mark. But I don't remember anyone calling it a flop at the time, all as the success of the franchise it launched more than made up for it.)

Meanwhile figuring out why a movie did or did not do well may be the toughest part of the analysis. The factors that go into a film's success or failure are usually numerous, and by no means all of them have to do with the content of a film itself, with the timing of a release, the quantity and quality of the publicity effort, the friendliness of a corrupt, fickle and quite stupid entertainment media, and the competition it faced at the box office in the relatively brief period in which it was in theaters to name only the most obvious. Moreover, we only know so much about how audiences react to film generally, let alone to particular films--often, for all the supposed investment of the business in "market research," no one bothering to seriously investigate very basic matters as I am reminded whenever I look at anything relevant, or simply read a review and think to myself of just how unbelievably out of touch the "professionals" can be with the public. The result is that in explaining anything of the kind one goes out on a limb--is much more likely to be advancing a hypothesis that fits the facts rather than proving anything conclusively--with the reduction of the whole matter to a single factor (like wokeness) likely to be a case of gross overstatement.

Of course, all that said I do think that it is possible to make meaningful claims on this score. Certainly it does not seem implausible to attribute at least some of the troubles of Disney's two big animated releases in 2022 (Lightyear and Strange World, together claiming the #1 and #3 spots on the year's list of the biggest flops as they posted a combined loss over of $300 million) to what critics would call their wokeness--score one (or two) for the supporters of the "Go woke, go broke" position. But one should also acknowledge that movies which were undeniably woke (like the Barbie movie that drove Ben Shapiro to apparent apoplexy that he for some reason insisted on recording and posting for the whole world to see) have also been undeniable hits (it's very hard to argue with the hugely overperforming Barbie's estimated $400 million "studio net") in a reminder that, perhaps rather than speaking of wokeness broadly, it may be more useful to speak in more precise terms of the politics that make for box office poison, or box office gold.