Hollywood’s great unwokening has been unleashed
Robbie Collin14 December 2024
Here is the plot of one of the more popular studio movies released in 2024. A lissom New York liberal academic and a chiselled Red State outdoorsy type find themselves improbably brought together in the workplace. After a brief period of friction, they start to get along: romance blossoms and common ground is found. She shares his yearning for the American heartland; he learns to embrace his secret scholarly side. Together they don’t just make a beautiful couple, but a vision of a nation strengthened by difference. Anything else? Oh, yes – lots of tornadoes.
This summer’s Twisters might have played like a throwback to the 1990s, but it could also prove to be the year’s most commercially prescient film. Last time the US elected a certain Ronsealed former TV-show host as head of state, Hollywood overtly sided against him, styling itself as the pop-cultural wing of the resistance.
A fat lot of good that did.Popular studio franchises grew shrill and hectoring, and the publicity tours to promote them even more so, giving the populists an easily mockable enemy against which to rally. As for audiences in Europe and elsewhere, we found ourselves caught in the middle of a national domestic, in which ideological point-scoring took precedence, no matter how witless or cheap.
What was so striking about Twisters, though, was that the progressive talking points you might have been braced for in a film about extreme weather – the perils of climate change, perhaps, or the gullibility of good old Republican-votin’ country folk – were nowhere to be found.Instead, the film hymned ordinary human ingenuity and courage, and emphasised the necessity of co-operation in extremis. Very aptly, this squally blockbuster sensed which way the wind was blowing – and with the then impending presidential election shaping up as a sequel to 2016’s, suggested an alternative, conciliatory tack.
Loath as I am to give the w-word an airing, there’s no avoiding it here:2024 was the year in which Hollywood began to move into its post-woke era, though some parts pivoted more nimbly than others. The contrast between the old and new approaches was never more vivid than in Disney’s Moana 2 and Universal’s Wicked, the two family-friendly musicals currently duking it out at the multiplex. Both centre on – and are arguably primarily aimed at – young women. But their heroines could hardly be more ideologically opposed.
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Finally Hollywood got tired of losing money and hating America