Disclaimer: the featured image of the Trojan Horse popcorn bucket was likely AI-generated, and was taken without permission from a site that itself seemed likely AI-generated. I’m still anti-AI but will hypocritically use it when it feels thematically appropriate for a topic about things that are manufactured and soulless.
This post is solidly in “if I’ve figured it out, everybody else must have figured it out long ago” territory. But I keep seeing online reactions to the not-even-in-its-opening-weekend-yet box office of The Odyssey, and I’ve been getting concerned that maybe people aren’t aware that they’re stuck in a repeating cycle?
The story is that the latest Christopher Nolan summer blockbuster movie, which has been advertised as a can’t-miss epic for at least a year now, and which stars every famous person working in movies today1Except Pedro Pascal, somehow. I actually had to triple-check imdb to confirm that he wasn’t in it, because it sure seems like he should be in it, right?!, has somehow, against all odds, already made hundreds of millions of dollars. This is despite all of the very real controversy around the movie, which has had lots of people very vocally griping about its woke casting choices, and calling for a boycott.
So today, I’m seeing a lot of takes of the “ha ha, showed them!” variety, along the lines of “go woke, make over $150 million domestically before the opening weekend.” I even saw a couple of comments suggesting that maybe, we’ve finally seen the end of the nonsensical controversies and boycotts on social media.
Which makes me wonder if we’re really aware of how drummed-up culture wars are designed to work, and what constitutes “victory.” We all understand that the point of a boycott against a destined-to-be-huge movie isn’t to tank the movie, right? It’s to make everyone pay attention to people who deserve to be ignored.
Back when I first saw the phenomenon, with Lady Ghostbusters in 2016, I assumed that the whole thing was manufactured by Sony to keep attention swirling around a movie that otherwise would’ve been quickly forgotten.2I still don’t hate it, to be clear. I just don’t think it did anything interesting with the idea, and just cast very talented people in gender-swapped roles. Now, I’m not quite as cynical, and I’m assuming that studios more tolerate it, in a “no such thing as bad publicity” sense, than actively encourage it. Because I’ve seen how organically it builds.
When you’ve got adult men getting themselves worked into a furor over a Mattel-produced movie about a kid’s toy, your natural inclination is to point and laugh at them. And then if you’re of a certain mindset, spin it off into a larger discussion about gender roles and far-right demands for conformity and so on. So when Barbie did phenomenal box office, a lot of people interpreted it as a victory for normal people over the very vocal right-wing dipshits.3Some people took it a step farther and said it was a mainstream endorsement of what the movie says about feminism, gender, and toxic masculinity. I’m not sure I’d go that far. I’d say it’s just evidence that if you constantly market the hell out of a fundamentally inoffensive movie filled with several of the most beautiful people in the world, audiences are going to want to see it.
But of course, the “victory” is theirs, because you wasted your time listening to the inane ravings of a bunch of morons who would otherwise have been ignored. They’re not wanting the movie to fail; they’re banking on its success, since they can ride the coattails of the studios’ marketing to get their stupid message to as many people as possible. And even if you think they’re idiots and completely dismiss whatever it is they claim their stupid message is, they’ve “won” by inserting themselves into The Discourse without deserving it.
One might say that it’s a bit like sneaking a bunch of your most asinine warriors into the walls of The Discourse, hidden inside something disguised as a prize.
“We showed them, proving once and for all that movies with men and women of different ethnicities can be successful!” is lowering the bar to an idiotic level. It’s not actually progress, it’s just moving the starting line back another few hundred feet, to make it look like progress. We haven’t actually advanced, we’ve just moved the line back to include people in the race who failed to even qualify.
To be clear, the reason I now suspect it’s “organic” is because I find myself falling for it so often. With The Odyssey, as soon as I heard that someone was complaining about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, one of the most legendarily beautiful women in the world, as one of the most legendarily beautiful women in history, I had to point and laugh at the absurdity of it. Even knowing that I was helping hold up a microphone to let more people better hear the rantings of a lunatic.
So this is just a reminder not to read too much about ideology or culture into the financial success of a movie that was all but destined to be a financial success, and which had already sold out the most-expensive IMAX screens long before any reviews had even been made public.
And a reminder to all of us that as we’re taking our victory lap around the track after whipping the troglodytes online, to look down and make sure that we haven’t been running knee-deep in bullshit the whole time.
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