I came of age in Ronald Reagan’s America. The Hays Code had loosened its grip on movies throughout the 60s and 70s. Hollywood felt threatened enough by television to give audiences what they couldn’t get anywhere else, graphic violence and explicit sex.
But by the 1980s, a new Conservativism had taken hold and with it, a “greed is good” mentality that helped Hollywood abandon quality for blockbuster entertainment.
Hollywood couldn’t afford to alienate a large swath of the American public and still be a thriving business. So movies had to be for everyone, or at least the mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly Christian majority. It was always a fine line studios had to walk to ensure the big numbers.
This was much easier when branding came into play after movies like Jaws, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings franchises built Hollywood’s empire, the one that is now collapsing.
They created an entire industry, a fantasy world, for mostly male audiences, which meant they never had to grow up. We called it Fanboy Nation.
Oscar voters and cinephiles had a niche market, especially for them. Call it the custom meal in the First Class section of the airplane, while in Coach, let them eat superhero movies. These two industries ran on a parallel track for 20 years until COVID hit. Hollywood was making ungodly sums of money on their branded franchises, not just here but globally.
Then, as you can see, in 2020, it all came to a screeching halt. From Box Office Mojo
Hollywood Destroys Its Own Brand
Hollywood decided that its image mattered more than even its own profits. They decided to spit in the face of the generation that helped them build their empire by faithfully turning out and buying tickets. They decided franchise movies could only be made if they were WOKE - race or gender-swapped.
It’s as if McDonald’s suddenly decided they would only serve the public food that was good for them, healthy, and sustainable. How long do you think that would last? Giving people what you think they should want instead of what they do want leads to bankruptcy in a free market capitalist industry, whether Hollywood or fast food.
As Gen-Z came of age and the social justice warriors took to the internet to proclaim loudly that the Great Awokening was here, Hollywood decided they could no longer afford to be publicly humiliated on social media.
In 2020, COVID meant no one was going to the movies anyway. Everyone was online, watching streaming content, so why not use this moment to implement real change? All of a sudden, audiences started to notice that everything Hollywood put out looked like Woke M&Ms.
Wokeness flattens out storytelling because it demands you say only one thing, have only one message to deliver again and again, and must adhere to the philosophy of the Woke - white, straight people bad, people of color and queer people good.
But more than even that, many Hollywood movies have become flat-out unwatchable, and much of that has to do with how weird Hollywood has become and how disconnected all of them are from the struggles of daily life. Not only don’t they make movies for everyone, they don’t even know how.
Bad Weird, Not Good Weird
I grew up in the movies. I have drawn much of my life experience from them. I was a Jaws kid (see the Netflix series Voir, which has my story featured), but even into adulthood, there was no place I’d rather be than in a movie theater.
In 1985, Top Gun was the number one movie, but that was also the same year as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, subversive art that upended the status quo. But now, there is no such thing as “normal” American life, at least not where Hollywood is concerned. So many Gen-Z have come of age in a virtual space, and the movies they were raised on were mostly fantasy.
The idea now seems to be to shock the Right-wingers to generate some controversy for a numbed-out Weimar-Germany-esque Left. If they can get Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, or Megyn Kelly to call them out, then they get to cosplay oppression. They have all of the power and all of the money, and no one is oppressing them anymore. Yet, oppression defines who they are. Thus, entering the shock zone feeds the beast.
But in so doing, they’re freaking out a whole generation. As it turns out, Gen-Z, like most people, does recognize normal. Or at least, they know it when they see it. Hollywood is becoming more and more cringe by the day, in the parlance of the times.
Take the movie Poor Things, which is up for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture. It’s about a pregnant woman who leaps to her death. With her baby still alive inside of her, a Dr. Frankenstein-like figure rescues her, implants her baby brain into her adult body (like, why not just save the baby and raise it), and suddenly, she’s a nymphomaniac who can’t get enough, yes, even with the toddler's brain.
Poor Things, like Barbie, theoretically exists as yet another feminist screed (is that all there is?), but really, it’s more like Deep Throat meets Maxfield Parrish. All of that would be fine except that they insist this movie is “important,” and if it’s “important,” it’s open to scrutiny, like why are we watching a woman with a child’s brain obsessed with sex before she can even walk?
The movie’s message is that women would behave that way if not for the Patriarchy. Um, sorry, no. Not true. Little girls are curious about almost everything except sex. I can’t believe I even had to write that sentence.
I feel like the Gen-Z lament in meme form:
Like seriously, why? There are so many movies with lots of sex in them, like 9 1/2 Weeks or Betty Blue. They existed at a time when porn was contraband. If you wanted to watch it, you had to rent it at the video store once theaters on Santa Monica Blvd. no longer offered porn films.
Lest we forget, poor Travis Bickle taking Betsy to a “dirty movie” in Taxi Driver.
Because porn is freely available online, Tik Tok is full of half-naked people luring viewers into “Only Fans,” sex becomes like a drug - but that also means when people sit down to watch a movie, they don’t want yet more sex shoved in their faces.
Not everyone thinks Poor Things is too weird, mind you. Plenty of people loved it, even a writer at the Spectator:
It is weird, no doubt. But it is the sort of weird we can do. And not so weird that I had to Google it afterwards. It has a simple narrative – a journey of self-discovery – that’s not a headscratcher at all.
What she means is that she could at least understand it, compared to so many films Hollywood makes now that have no plot. What’s hard to understand about a soft-core porn film? Nothing.
The Coen Brothers made some of the best films in film history, but Ethan Coen’s solo effort, Drive Away Dolls, apparently isn’t one of them. Two gay women on an extended sex romp has earned the film a catastrophic audience score from Rotten Tomatoes of 36%.
It’s like the living embodiment of the Kristen Stewart Rolling Stone cover.
They’re not hot, sexy women eager to please the male gaze - they seek only to defy it and appeal to the small minority of people on the planet who fall into the category of “queer.” And if they’re covered in Queer ethos, anything goes because the activism, the oppression, the suffering is baked into the cake - so the weirder it is, the more empowering they believe it to be.
You end up asking who this movie is for. I can’t bring myself to see it because Hollywood has become too weird even for me, someone who loves David Lynch, John Waters, and Ken Russell movies.
After the gay community criticized Hollywood for being too homophobic to show graphic sex scenes, every movie about gay people is now required to go the extra mile to disprove they weren’t homophobic, so there are a few movies, and HBO shows where sperm is presented and then must be licked off (All of Us Strangers, The Last of Us) or drunk from bathwater (Saltburn).
Somehow, everyone pretends this isn’t happening, even those of us who lived through the era where you couldn’t show full frontal nudity or certainly not bodily fluids, know that it’s just too much.
Films from France or other countries that are more free with sex scenes don’t feel the need to gross-out their audience with a woman’s menstruation — yes, that happened more than once last year.
Have these people lost their minds? Are they so numbed out by SSRI’s they can’t tell what is too weird anymore?
Normal is In, Weird is Out
At a time when the dominant culture has become too weird for America, so many of us are desperately seeking traditionalism or normalcy, which explains why they manifested an entirely different movie called Barbenheimer last year, one that looks straight out of 1955. That also explains why Top Gun Maverick landed in a way few films have. It wasn’t just the nostalgia, it was how “normal” it was.
The ache for “normal” explains, more than anything, the Taylor Swift phenomenon. We’re living through the end of the Madonna era, where overt sexuality shocked the majority, and into the Swift era, where the majority — not just in America but worldwide — craves normal.
Taylor Swift seems almost messiah-like in her whole approach to normalcy. She doesn’t feel the need to preach politics all that much (every so often she does). She’s mostly fully clothed and doesn’t seem inclined toward overtly sexual moves. Her music is dreamy and sweet, in a 1950s kind of way. The polar opposite of the centerpiece of last year’s Grammy Awards, wherein Sam Smith performed what looked like a Satanic live sex show.
The Biden Administration and the Democrats are counting on Taylor Swift as their key to winning in 2024. The thoroughly corrupt and biased media has done a good job of amplifying the conspiracy theories on the Right. But any thinking person knows that going to war on a whole generation of girls over Taylor Swift is an extinction-level event for the Right.
To understand the Swift phenomenon is to understand that much of America, Hollywood included, has become too weird for them. If you want to own the future, be the normal they seek.
Make Movies Great Again
We can have a Barbenheimer every year if Hollywood does its job and stops asking for absolution for its sins of wealth and privilege. The problem with streaming platforms is that they’re all under the purview of the Big Tech Oligarchs, the richest men in the world whose image is the only thing they can’t buy. They want more subscribers, not to sell more movie tickets.
But in so doing, think of all of the people left behind, all of those who turned out to push Sound of Freedom into the top ten last year, beating Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
It isn’t just Hollywood that has suffered in the wake of whatever madness we’re living through. It’s all of us. We have to be able to sit under the same roof and unite in storytelling. It is our only hope as a people and as a nation.
It’s like the scene in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, you want to do mankind a favor? Tell funnier jokes.
And so it goes with Hollywood. If you want to make the world a better place, make better movies and make them for everyone.
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Hollywood is Officially Too Weird for America