Explicit

The Conservatization of Media

Published Nov 13, 2024, 8:01 AM

Woke AF Daily producer Andrew Marshello returns to the mic for a discussion about the direction American pop culture has been going ahead of the re-election of Donald Trump.

Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Me your Girl Danielle Moody pre recording from the Home Bunker on Long Island. Folks. As I've said, I've taken a few days off, but have left you with a few pre recorded episodes, and I'm excited to bring back to wokfkf's esteemed producer Andrew Marsillo to discuss how the media has been coming more and more conservative. We've watched it over the entire election cycle, but we've watched it over the last nine years and have seen so many different instances where the lies that we've been told about the liberal media, the liberal media doesn't exist. The liberal media is run by a bunch of very wealthy Republicans who care about access and who care about ads more than they care about any shred of our democracy. We saw that with the Washington Post, we saw that with the La Times, and we will now in a Trump world, continue to see that more and more. I don't know how the free press survives Donald Trump, and I don't know if it will, But what we do know is that the trends have been going towards the right for quite some time, so This is a conversation that I get into with Andrew coming up next, Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the front of the mic ahem, which is my fantastic producer Andrew Marcello, who you've heard from over the course of the last couple of months, getting us an insight into how the white male in cell aggression has been seated and built through the gaming industry. And now we're turning our attention to the rise in conservativism in pop culture as kind of a backlash to representation, to sexual orientation, gender diversity, all of these things that have grown over the last decade plus. We are now seeing a considerable pushback, both in policy and in pop culture. Andrew, talk to us about specifically what you have been seeing and noticing that kind of over the last four years, eight years that corresponds in pop culture to where we are seeing our politics drive off a cliff towards.

Thanks for that introduction. You're welcome, nobody. I appreciate you welcoming me back. It's hard for me to find a place to start, but I think I'll start where we're talking about pop culture and the thing that really strikes me when I think about this in my mind is the movies, and specifically Hollywood and blockbuster movies. The world of blockbuster films if you look back to the mid twenty tens and the type of super mainstream movies being released. The most successful among the most successful films being released, Star Wars The Force Awakens came out in twenty fifteen and grossed over two billion dollars worldwide, and I feel that Star Wars The Force Awakens is notable, not just because it would have done money anyway because it's Star Wars, but that's part of the point that I'm going to get to. Star Wars The Force Awakens introduced a new blackmail protagonist as well as a new woman protagonists, and the movie was successful on the back of that. The sequel, Star Wars The Last Jedi didn't do as well as a sequel, but it still grossed over a billion dollars worldwide and peaked at the number nine best selling, like the highest grossing movie of all time. So there was a minor backlash, a relatively minor backlash for people who saw The Force Awakens and went, WHOA, The main character isn't a white man anymore. It's a black Man and a White Woman. Oh no, but the majority of people still like Star Wars. Star Wars is still very popular and very profitable, and the subsequent movies, while not performing as well as the first Star Wars movie in ten years, still did very well and still have very much generated a profit and landed on the highest grossing films of all time. Then you look at Marvel and Disney as a whole, but you really look because Disney also owned Star Wars, and I think Disney is such a dominant cultural force, and I think actually a lot of my argument here is going to come around the Walt Disney Corporation. And there's a separate discussion to be had as should one studio and company really be this dominant in our cultural landscape. But that's not the conversation we're having right now anyway. Black Panther, remember by Panther twenty eighteen. A couple of years later. Yes, So we had Wonder Woman from DC and Warner Brothers, and that was a minor success. It didn't top a billion dollars, but it did almost as well as Batman versus Superman, and considering wonder Woman had never had a movie before, considering it was a woman led film, which in twenty seventeen, if you remember, was oh so risky, which is hard to even think about. You know, that was only six years before Barbie came out. And I don't think when Barbie came out anyone was saying like, oh my god, a movie led by a woman. And yet I'm bouncing around, But like I think you're starting to get what I'm getting at, which is, you know, Barbie made almost one and a half billion dollars worldwide, Black Panther made over a billion dollars worldwide, Captain Marvel made over a billion dollars worldwide. So these movies released largely in the late twenty tens. And then you have Barbie, which is sort of a vestigial production that took a long time from production to actually getting in theaters. Barbie started entering production in twenty eighteen. You have all these movies and productions from the late twenty tens where it's putting forward more representation for non white people and also for women, yes, particularly white women, but there was more than just white men leading the movies, on the posters, on the big marquee top name, and these things generated money. So what happened. So what happened?

You like, I don't I think that you lay out such a good case. We have all of these films that you've named that made extraordinary money at the box office. They also brought in a lot of conversation and controversy on social media as they were being developed, as people are watching them. Barbie, I think probably the biggest in terms of the right wing saying that young men shouldn't watch this. It's anti man. This is a man hating movie, kind of spewing the misogyny that they were talking about me in the movie that was laid out very clearly in the movie, and then you see it playing out in real life. And I'm just like, every time that there is a bit of progress, whether it's for queer people, for black people, for women, for non binary folks, anytime there is progress there, it is always met with backlash. But this backlash that we're experiencing also is connected to online bulok, which we talked about right The online and bullying to me is like not even that, it's like a euphemism to what you actually explained to us has taken place.

But think about how a bully succeeds a bully succeeds in an environment where they're acting out their behavior. Everyone can see them acting out their behavior, and there's not any sort of firm restriction of that behavior. Bullies only flourish in an environment where bullies are allowed to flourish and not in some way suppressed or had their behavior corrected. And unfortunately, I think we're now living in a sort of a culture where we're experiencing the consequences of bullies not being silenced. And it sounds kind of radical as a person to be like, we need to silence the bullies in society, but like even just telling someone to shut the fuck up is silencing them. And I think enough of these people who whine about out women in movies and black people in movies and seeing anything but a white person, like those feel like the dominant voices now, and that's scary, at least a dominant enough force where it's harder now to tell one person to shut the fuck up when there is half the room it seems to be that person.

That is the distortion, right, Like, that's the distortion and the echo chamber that the right wing has created on social media, on these platforms where we're not like I was actually saying this earlier today. I was saying, you know, I feel like I'm not sure if fifty percent of the population is actually magified and racist and as insane as the media and social media is telling me, or if it's just what I'm being fed, if it's just the algorithm that I'm being fed to distort me from reality. And so I say the same thing, just like in terms of what you just offered. It's like, is the pushback seeming like it's coming from thousands millions, coming from everywhere? Is that actually true? Or is this like the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain is fucking Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, depending on what fucking platform you're on.

I think there's two things there for me. And I was already thinking about the summer of twenty twenty three, because we've talked about this in private, and how the conservative backlash to things in the summer of twenty twenty three, the conservative backlash to non white male representation as well as the backlash to LGBTQ representation, it seemed to really take hold among corporations. More so in the summer of twenty twenty three, and you know, something demonstrable to that, so that people listening aren't just like, well, you feel that way, like, for example, companies starting to carry less pride merchandise starting last year and continuing into this year. You know, as much as we talked about corporate pride it, I feel that it's very palpable that there's less of that in the last two years. And I also am thinking about when Elon Musk took over Twitter. I know, we still call it Twitter. He has distorted it into literally a different site, even though it carries the same functions. And I think that does distort our perception because there is someone with a lot of money and unfortunately a lot of power and influence distorting the conversation and amplifying certain voices over other voices. But then on the flip side of that, to me, there is the idea that perception is reality. And I've read reports and again going back to Disney, Pete Doctor, who has directed some of Pixar's most successful films and now holds a higher creative position in Pixar, had said that they want to focus on quote universal stories, and part of that, apparently, according to them, came from a same sex kiss in the movie light Year, which did do poorly at the box office. But light Year was not a movie. It was a buzz light Year movie. It was a buzz light Year spin off movie starring Chris Evans who has star power and name pol The same sex kiss was not really used to promote the film. It was a very brief scene in the film, and there's no demonstrable evidence that the public has seen that a brief seconds long fame sex kiss between two women in the background of an animated film is what caused audiences to reject that film and not want to see it in the theater and latching on to that as well. If you remember, Pixar had recently released films such as Turning Red, which was about a Vietnamese Canadian girl, and Soul, which was about a black man teacher. So Pixar making these comments about what constitute universal stories when they're promoting a movie about a white girl, is it struck a lot of people a certain way? And I think it's this part of it, is this environment that it struck people in because people can feel, either consciously or not that representation in the mainstream media space and the Hollywood space is becoming more regressive. There was also a report recently about Disney doing test screenings for some of their films with essentially groups that I just described in my last two podcast appearances, the aggrieved white male audience who rejects anything that isn't white male representation. So when you hold test screenings with this specific, literal minority group of people and base your editing decisions and base your production decisions around a bunch of people in a room going.

Like any it's not late men, I want to see myself on the screen and nothing else, then.

That's what you're going to get. And the fact of the matter is, now we have these studios, and we're aware of the fact that these studios are catering to this small, loud minority of people who are boosted by people like as we previously discussed, Steve Bannon and Elon Musk.

But what these businesses are going to find, because all they care about at the end of the day is making money for their CEOs and their shareholders, right, And what they're going to find is what every fucking Harvard Business Review article around diversity has found, which is that diversity is actually great for your bottom line that targeting and creating content for one particular group as opposed to all groups isn't going to serve you in the long term. So do you see that throughout history? Again, we have these moments, these touch points where we're seeing progress, right, whether we see it in you know, in representation, in our elected officials, you see it, you know on the screen. There is always pushback, But at the end of the day, to me, business has always seemed to move forward because at the end of the day, the money is what's doing the talking. So their progress continues to move forward. But are you saying that you don't think that that's going to be the case.

That's what's raising the red flag for me. And I think that's part of why I'm focusing so much on Disney and why I started with those box office grosses, because you have these franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, and I know Pixar isn't a franchise, but at the same time, when Pixar releases a movie, people regard it as a Pixar film, so kind of in a way, like a twenty four, they're a brand. So all these sub brands for Disney were profitable, demonstrably so with broader represent and yet somehow these counter cultural forces who are against representation and are for regression. I do I fear, I will say, mm hmm. I fear that those voices have taken hold at those companies. And I don't want to point fingers because I don't know what's in people's hearts. I feel like, though there are some people high up at these companies who are sympathetic to those kind of attitudes, and that that level of sympathy actually does blindside these probably men again don't want to assume, but it blindsides them to their profit making. And I mean that doesn't scare me because I no longer own stock in Disney mm hmm. But that scares me because money is power in this society. And I do remember, like when Wonder Woman's coming out, there was a lot of from people who were happy about just the movie's existence of like, oh, we can have a superhero that isn't a man in movies. This is where it was at in twenty seventeen if you don't remember, uh, And it was like you got to show up for this movie, you got to support this movie. I think part of why Black Panther did so well, not just because it had a phenomenal marketing campaign and a lot of star power behind it, but there was also a groundswell of like within I observed as a white person, within the black community, there was a groundswell of like, well, we got to support this movie. This is we've got a movie, this is our time, We've got to go support it. So people are talking with their money. Marginalized people who are getting represented talk with their money, and white people who like the properties and the majority of audiences are not. I really do believe the majority of white audiences are not this regressive minded and are happy to watch movies that aren't just themselves reflected because at their core, they still love good stories and all that other stuff that you see at the movies and spectacle and every anything else. So I hate to like counter your optimism, but the part of why I wanted to have this conversation is because I am pessimistic about it. I'm pessimist, and maybe it'll change when when the box office results come in, and if an entire slate of all white Marvel movies and all white Star Wars movies and all white Pixar movies come back in two three years, because that's how long stuff moves in Hollywood. And we see that that didn't do well, and that, you know, Captain America, Brave New World with Anthony Mackie did better than whatever thing they dredge back up Robert Downey Junior from because to replace Jonathan Majors, who should have been replaced. But like that, just look at that alone. They were building up Jonathan Majors to be their next big villain. He gets canceled again, rightfully, so and they say, well, you know what, we'll just go back to the style here. Yeah, yep, yeah, you know.

I like to have optimism around this because I think that there have been, you know, all of the films that you've named, and there are more that have centered the stories and lived experiences of people of color. And you see that whenever that happens, this small set of white folks like lose their mind. Right. I can remember the Cheerios commercial with the interracial couple several years ago that caused like a fucking frenzy, do you know.

And so there was that beer commercial with oh my god, I forget her name, but like that was part I think of the backlash in the summer of twenty twenty three.

Right, So I think that it's what is important. I think the message that you say that you're sending is that people need to show up to support these films that feature diverse characters, people of color as like the main characters, in order to continue to send the message, because without that, the default will always be white men. The default will always be to return to what has always that, what has always been. And I don't understand how you do that when the demographics of this country and like the world continue to get increasingly black and browner. So I'm not I'm not quite sure like how that ends up being good for your bottom line. Like taking something like it would have been one thing, I guess, and this is and I want to give you your your final thoughts. It would be one thing if you had just continued on the same kind of white supremacist path of there being no disruption at all in the content that we see on television on streaming with introductions of people of characters and stories focused on communities of color. If that had always been the case, it's just been white. But to inject it and then to go back I don't know if people still show up, even if they are huge fans of a particular franchise, because I think that you're signaling to them that you don't see them and you don't care about them. Those are my thoughts, what say you?

And thinking about that, I had been looking at, you know again, the highest grossing movies and the number two highest grossing movie of all time, which was number one until they put Avatar back in theaters was Avengers Endgame, And part of the whole hype cycle around the final Avengers movie was the release of movies such as Black Panther and Captain Marvel. So you watch those movies as a fan with the knowledge in your mind that, Okay, the next Avengers movie, Black Panther's going to have a big role, Captain Marvel's going to have a big role. And so at least a percentage of the people who went to see Avengers Endgame went to see it because they were that they were going to see Black Panther again and see Captain Marvel again. So you regress from that and you release an Avengers movie that's whitey whitey white again. We'll see what happens. Will the same amount of people show up. I don't know, will Disney go, oh crap, we were making more money when we were putting out diverse productions. I guess we'll see. One more thing that I want to just consider thinking about when this is going to air, is I do have a concern in my mind that some of this is going to be influenced by the election. I think some of the people who hold power and wealth and influence at the top may see an election of Kamala Harris. A nation electing Kamala Harris may take that differently than a nation affirming Donald Trump and affirming the legitimacy and continue political existence and continued lack of criminal consequence for Donald Trump. So I think that is something that's going to have influence over things as well. And again I've remarked, Hollywood moves slowly. We won't see the results from this manifest for another two three years, I believe, but I'm hoping my the best I can hope for is that this is a rut in our road toward progress, at least in the mainstream media space, at least in the Hollywood space, because the last two years have been very disheartening.

Yeah, yeah, Well, we will leave it there today. Andrew, thank you so much for making the time to kind of walk us through this on Woke AF because the reverberations of like this, anti DEI, anti diversity, anti blackness, anti queerness doesn't just stay in our poll's see. It spills over into everything and it's really important for us to keep an eye.

Out on it. So we appreciate you. Thank you very much.

That is it for me today, dear friends on woke a f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.

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