Conservative bro pundits say no
Watch out, guys, don’t let women get away with anything. One minute it’s saying something, the next it’s your balls in a pickle jar.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is attached [sic] to direct an upcoming “Star Wars” film, making her the first woman to helm a film in the iconic franchise—but right-wing critics are blasting the movie as “woke” after Obaid-Chinoy said it’s “about time” a woman directed a “Star Wars” installment.
Hell yes, what business does a woman have saying women should participate in the common culture?
Obaid-Chinoy, a filmmaker known for directing feminist documentaries, was announced in April 2023 as director of an upcoming, unnamed film set in the “Star Wars” universe and starring Daisy Ridley—who portrayed protagonist Rey in the sequel trilogy of the main “Star Wars” series.
Obaid-Chinoy will be the first woman and the first person of color to direct a film set in the “Star Wars” universe.
Some right-wing pundits criticized Obaid-Chinoy, deeming her comments “woke,” and resurfaced remarks she made at a 2015 Women in the World summit in which she said she likes to “make men uncomfortable” through her art.
Shut up guys. Men make women uncomfortable via the movies they create all the time. Some men make some movies that are about nothing else. Lots of men love to make women uncomfortable.
Conservative pundits criticized Obaid-Chinoy’s comments, including Benny Johnson, who claimed the “Star Wars” franchise is “doomed.” Pundit Matt Walsh posted a video of Obaid-Chinoy’s Women in the World summit interview, stating the film is “destined to be Disney’s biggest flop yet.” “It’s like they ENJOY losing money,” the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok posted in response to Walsh.
Blah blah blah. Women are supposed to make dinner and spread their legs. Men are supposed to make the culture. It’s God’s plan.
The film may well be a flop — the last trilogy eroded a lot of good will among moviegoers, so a “Star Wars film” isn’t an automatic draw like it used to be, and while I don’t hate Daisy Ridley’s character, I also don’t find her terribly compelling.
But let’s remember that conservative pundits also assured us that Barbie was going to be a massive flop.
Also, I would take objections to an artist saying she makes men uncomfortable more seriously if they weren’t coming from the kinds of people who drink coffee out of mugs labelled “Liberal Tears” while watching stand-up specials and listening to podcast by male comics who brag about how they offend women and minorities with their brave, “tell it like it is” routines.
Yes, this is what I mean when I say that the word “woke” is so overused that it means absolutely nothing but is mouthed with contempt towards anything “leftist.”
Mike, one might even say that such people are engaging in a sort of virtue-signalling.
Or perhaps “contempt signaling”.
Either that or a reflex.
I agree with them that it will probably be terrible, but “wokism” ain’t the culprit…
And yeah, “Barbie” is probably the best film I’ve seen in ages that wasn’t “Oppenheimer”… Probably better than “Napoleon” which was decent.
From the WP article (see link below.):
In my own recent experience, it has become a fashionable ‘conservative’ or right-wing term of abuse to direct against their political opponents.. However it has its other and arguably more revealing side. Because its antonym has to be ‘unwoke,’ which means ‘asleep.’ Conciously or otherwise, what its users and devotees would clearly prefer is a world of obedient zombies. And as I see it, there’s no way out of that fix for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke#:~:text=Woke%20is%20an%20adjective%20derived,and%20denial%20of%20LGBT%20rights.
‘Some right-wing pundits criticized Obaid-Chinoy, deeming her comments “woke,” and resurfaced remarks she made at a 2015 Women in the World summit in which she said she likes to “make men uncomfortable” through her art.’
Real little snowflakes, aren’t they, these ‘right-wing pundits’? Just as ‘woke’ (in their own usage of the word) as the sort of people who create curricula designed to make university students feel ‘safe’, or students who complain about not feeling ‘safe’ when faced with something in the curriculum that challenges them.
Universal wokery!
Disney has developed a bad habit over the last few years of basically stunt casting directors who at the end of the day aren’t qualified to make the kind of big budget movies they’re being put in charge of. I don’t think it’s unfair at this point to suggest that internalised DEI, or ‘wokism’ is part of the driving force behind this and it’s really starting to bite them in the ass.
Remember that joke about how we’ll know we have achieved equally between the sexes not when we* have the first women president but when we have a woman president who’s as bad a George W Bush**, well it seems like a lot of big entertainment companies are working hard to get us to that end point before we’ve even achieved meaningful equality. They’re hiring people who are often shown to be out of their depth because they want to be seen hiring people with the right skin colour, gender (their term not mine), sexual orientation, or political beliefs to make content that at the end of the day, just isn’t very good or popular a lot of the time. I know good/great isn’t always popular/financially successful on realise, sometimes it takes a few years for a movie or TV show to come to be seen as a classic, but when something is both bad and a flop and all the makers can do is praise the skin colour, gender identity, or general queerness of those involved in the making of said content then I think the corporations are doing more harm than good for the groups they’re trying to uplift.
*By we I mean Americans.
**I feel like this part could do with an update.
VF,
The problem I have with the argument you’re making is that it seems to assume that failures of women and minority directors are because they’re “stunt casting” or “too woke,” while failures of white male directors are just ordinary failures, not to be held against their race or gender.
Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t particularly well-regarded. (And the folks who do praise it seem to like it mainly because it reversed or undermined some of the things Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi.) But even people who don’t think J.J. Abrams (a white male) is a good director generally don’t claim that his failures reflect on his race or gender.
The “go woke, go broke” crowd — and I’m not including you in this — have an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If a film by a female or minority director fails, well, it’s because they went woke. If it succeeds (like Barbie), well… mumble mumble mumble that doesn’t count because reasons.
If Obaid-Chinoy’s Star Wars film is a commercial and critical success, nobody’s going to say “well, I guess stunt casting and going woke are good!” They won’t even say “gee, maybe I shouldn’t be so quick next time to dismiss a new director as woke stunt casting.” They’ll just move on to predicting the next “failure.”
Weep, dudebros. The good news is that women are directing more major, critically-acclaimed movies than ever before.
The Washington Post’s pick for 10 best films of 2023 included five directed by women. (OK, actually 5 out of 11: Barbie and Oppenheimer tied.)
Barbie was the highest grossing movie of 2023. Not just in the U.S.; globally.
I’m hoping that “female director of a major motion picture” follows the same trajectory as “black NFL quarterback.”
Back in the 1970s and 80s, NFL quarterbacks were almost uniformly white. (There were some rare notable exceptions.) I don’t know that anyone today would bother to deny that the reason was racism, but at the time, there was no shortage of people who would insist that black athletes just mostly weren’t cut out for the position for … uh, reasons.
Then you had a period where the exceptions were becoming more frequent. But each one was still very much “a black QB,” and discussions about those players often came back to race. Every black QB was seen as a standard-bearer for black QBs (and black athletes generally), with their successes and failures somehow a reflection on the entire category. There was still a tendency to praise black QBs for their “athleticism” and running ability, while white QBs got praised for their grit and leadership and smarts.
And, of course, there were complaints that people were pushing too hard to have more black QBs in the league. As late as 2003, Rush Limbaugh felt comfortable announcing on ESPN’s football studio show (during that brief lamentable period when he was on ESPN’s studio team) that Donovan McNabb was what I suppose today would be called a “woke diversity hire”:
ESPN initially defended Limbaugh, but a week later he resigned. I’m pretty sure that in the 80s or even the 90s, the outcry would have been much less.
Today, black QBs are so common in the NFL that the race of a QB is rarely mentioned. That’s certainly not to say that there isn’t racism in the NFL, but the success or failure of any particular black QB seems to be treated as just an individual matter rather than representative of some broader phenomenon.
What is the difference between the Hindenburg and Rush Limbaugh
One is a flaming Nazi gasbag and the other one is a zeppelin.