Wokeness and Brokeness: Casuality and Causation

Recently taking up the matter of the claim summed up in the phrase "Get woke, go broke"--and in its seemingly more popular form, "Go woke, go broke"--I had two principal claims of my own to make, namely that it can be very difficult to argue for or against "Go woke, go broke" because of all the disagreement about just what the word "woke" really means, all the things it is likely to entail, the difficulty of assessing the commercial success or failure of particular pop cultural products on the basis of the limited public information available about them, and the greater difficulty still of explaining that success in terms of a particular factor, correlation not being causation.

Still, to say so does not address that matter raised by that difference between correlation and causation, which is how or why wokeness should lead to commercial failure if indeed it does. The question is, for me, a little more interesting because of just how very little serious attention commentators pay to how people actually experience cultural works. (Consider, for example, how our clichés about audiences identifying with characters serve us poorly when we consider a great many types of cultural product, like action films, which seem to me to engage audiences in a very different fashion.) In trying to do at least a little better I think, a good starting point is something that people too little acknowledge, namely the difference between art and entertainment, and how with popular culture especially what may for the artist be art is unlikely to find much of an audience--indeed, unlikely to even be given a chance for an audience--unless it succeeds in entertaining in some degree. Also too little acknowledged is the reality that the enjoyment of entertainment is essentially selfish, to such a degree that if we disallow selfishness in such matters we are, as a practical matter, disallowing entertainment. People taking in an entertainment expect it to make them feel good. To turn around a phrase of Ian Wattt's, they do not come to have their imaginations disciplined, but rather flattered, and the more outrageously the better--and certainly not insulted or otherwise offended. There is also no question that what will please one audience will often fail to please, or displease, another--that entertainment can on that level be very zero-sum--and that those who criticize wokeness criticize it for being displeasing in these ways to whatever groups they claim to belong to or represent.

Of course, entertainment productions are prone to be large, complex, variegated--as a feature film tends to be, its two to three hour running time, with its numerous characters, numerous scenes, numerous lines not necessarily all one thing from the above perspective--and neither are the reactions to those films. One may get a film that entertains significantly but still happens to contain material which insults, offends, or simply disciplines an imagination rather than flatters it. But how do the offended react? Do they ignore or tolerate the offenses, perhaps taking them as "the inevitable" in the existing milieu as they focus on the work's more pleasurable aspects (they don't care for the "gender switch" of the protagonist, but what can you do these days and anyway it's still a pretty good spectacle, and there were some funny lines, and yeah, they guess they had a good time), or do they punish those who have offended them? I suppose the answer to that depends on just how badly they get offended here--what they refuse to take as simply "the inevitable."

Still, even that doesn't settle it, the issue of course being whether offense amounts to very much, especially at that blockbuster movie level which gets most of this kind of attention. After all, if someone has seen a movie and been offended by it they have already bought a ticket--one of the very few they are likely to buy in a given year--so the studio has got most of what it wants regardless of whether they were pleased, and the cold hard cash they forked over almost certainly count for much, much more than any revenge they might exact by badmouthing the movie on the "dead Internet." Indeed, to the extent that anyone ever sees it their badmouthing may actually help the film's producers by keeping the conversation about the movie going and thus on people's minds, and even eliciting counter-responses which may be more favorable, so that they bring on praise as well as dispraise. Even those who don't disagree with the negative assessments may wonder hearing them "Is it really that bad?" and get curious--perhaps not curious enough to see it in the theater, but catch it on streaming, and so still fork over their money (less money, but not nothing), all as if they see it and decide "It's not really that bad," their lowered expectations perhaps making them the more amenable to the movie, and they may in fact say so online, not much of an endorsement, but hey, people are still talking about the thing, which is all to the good from the standpoint of keeping the money coming in--making a genuine hit's profit still fatter, or at least bring a failure closer to the day when it finally breaks even and begins to earn something, however small.

Very well, one may say, the studio wins that round. But what about the sequel to that movie? What about the next movie from that actor, or director, or studio? Those who disliked the last thing may stay away. But there is no guarantee that they will, not everyone so very careful about such things as "armchair movie executives" may be inclined to believe. Actors' names aren't what they used to be, directors' names still less so, while "Disney" apart I doubt any studio has very strong associations with the public for good or for ill. Meanwhile strong reactions, even negative ones, are better than no reaction at all, and still something that publicists can and do work with in an age of cynical "rage-baiting," the more in as much of the public swallows the bait. Indeed, the piece of vanity that desire to be "part of the conversation" is reducible to in most cases seems to frequently override the desire of many to punish--and so here they are, paying their money for their ticket yet again, while their being part of the conversation by badmouthing that next movie online again serves the same purpose (because, yeah, that'll show 'em). Meanwhile if they resist it may be that others to whom they are close don't. They really don't want to see this movie, but their significant other, who may have very different tastes than their own, does--and expects to see it with them. (Indeed, it seems to be the conventional wisdom in Hollywood that on date night it is women's rather than men's tastes that determine what they see at the multiplex, with all that implies about the limits to male distaste inhibiting Hollywood in its offerings.) Or perhaps their kid wants to see it, and foisting the task of taking them to the movie proves beyond them. And so off they go, paying their money for a ticket--tickets for a whole family possibly--yet again in spite of their preference, while if their spouse liked it or their kid liked it they may be paying for it again on streaming, or physical media, or even merchandise costing more than everything else as their home rings with the film's signature song. (Oh no, not "Let it Go!" again!) The result is that short of people becoming very careful consumers of pop culture and very determinedly staying away when they have reason to expect that they will not like what is presented to them--not allowing oneself to be rage-baited, eschewing the usually vain delusion that what they say online will have the effect they intend, and adamantly refusing to sit through a movie they are very likely to hate in a way that may not be so easy to insist upon barring solitary singleness--the connection between a part of the audience being offended and causing those who have given the offense financial pain may be much more tenuous than some imagine, such that displeasing part of the audience may count for much less than what the disgruntled hope, provided that the producers do a good enough job of pleasing another portion of the audience. Greta Gerwig's Barbie seems exemplary of that, a significant portion of those who saw the film absolutely hating it--as, due to the film's having got a very favorable response from others who saw the film (such that they were outraged, outraged I tells ya when Gerwig did not get a Best Director nod) the movie was the box office champion of 2023 in North America.