Snow White And The Woke Hangover

Rachel Zegler was not the real problem.

I was watching a movie on Netflix awhile back that I’d never heard about. It’s called The Ice Road, with Liam Neeson, and was released in 2021. Anyone seen it? It’s not bad, actually, in spite of its meager iMDB rating.

This isn’t a review, and I won’t do any real spoilers, but there’s a character in it who, at the beginning anyway, really does not like white people. She’s an indigenous, First Nations woman who is not shy about expressing to the white men around her how much she thinks they all suck. And while I’m sure this posture was perfectly well suited to the year the film came out, it hasn’t aged super well since.

Kind of like in Black Panther, when Letitia Wright calls Martin Freeman a “colonizer” even though Wakanda was never colonized, and the United States never colonized any country in Africa. Like, why did she call him that? That was kind of a douchey thing to say to a guy she didn’t know, and who ended up being there to help her out.

But whatever. It was 2018.

In The Ice Road, this character’s attitude actually hurts the storytelling, and not because it’s offensive, or even just cringe. At one point, the audience is given the suggestion that this indigenous woman might have done something Very Bad. But since you know - I mean, to an absolute certainty - that this movie is not about to make its only indigenous, female character responsible for a Very Bad Thing, the plot turn doesn’t really work. The viewer is never left to wonder about this mystery, which is too bad, because it becomes pretty important later on.

I find this stuff ultimately easy to forgive. These films were made during a specific cultural moment, and that moment has simply passed now. You really can’t make films for a future cultural moment, so when all’s said and done, the best you can ever do is create something like a time capsule. This is true even if the film you’re making is set in the future, which is why the Nostromo in Alien has a computer that looks like it runs MS DOS. There’s precious little point getting upset about this kind of thing.

But the lid slammed shut so hard, and so quickly, on the “woke” era, that we’re going to be entering a very strange artistic period now. One I’ve come to think of as the “woke hangover.”

It’s structural. The length of time a film or television show spends in production before it’s shown to audiences is such that a lot of what’s coming out right now was simply made in a different epoch. The vocabulary and sensibilities woven through the dialogue in these pieces were part of a niche set of neologisms that Hollywood thought would live forever, but that have now wilted under the shadow of Donald Trump, free speech Twitter, and a globally resurgent right.

In my view, the best new TV show of this year was The Pitt, which saw legendary, small-screen doc, Noah Wyle, return to the emergency room 16 years after treating his last patient on ER. Quick gush: The Pitt is fantastic if you like the genre. The storytelling is done in real time, and it’s less melodramatic than its spiritual predecessor. If, like me, you’re an ER superfan, you’ll guess where a lot of the storylines are heading, but the dramatic tension works quite differently. We aren’t surprised by the emergencies bursting through the doors. We’re invited instead to anticipate them, right along with the doctors and nurses. There’s virtually no background music (which could be intrusive on ER). Here, our pulses are kept racing just by the skill of the actors and the quality of the writing. It all works brilliantly.

The only moments when I felt removed from the action were the ones featuring last year’s language. They say ‘unhoused’ a lot (that’s one’s nails on the chalkboard for me). There’s a fair bit of non-white characters lecturing white ones, especially white male ones, on their cross-racial care deficiencies. And in the way that ER often aimed its topical yarns directly at the hearts of Boomer liberals, The Pitt does the same thing but for GenX/Millennials. There’s gender stuff, trauma stuff, anti anti-vax stuff, and at one point, Wyle’s character gives an impassioned speech about young men taking their social cues from “toxic podcasts.” None of this really detracted from it, at least not for me. What it did was date it.

Perhaps no film is a better example of the woke hangover than the (I’m told) dumpster fire that is Disney’s new, live-action Snow White, a movie that has plumbed never-before-reached depths of cinematic unpopularity. If, according to iMDB, The Shawshank Redemption is the best film ever made, Snow White is now officially the worst, outbombing even Tommy Wiseau’s comically disastrous, The Room, and the British shocker, Sex Lives of the Potato Men, which I saw in college, and from which I have never recovered.

Disney, along with the bulk of the internet, is blaming the critical carnage on the film’s star, Rachel Zegler. And I’m sorry, but however annoying you find Zegler, the Disney Corporation should not be allowed to get away with offloading their shitty baggage onto a kid whose only crime was to promote their movie according to the values by which they made it.

Guys, this girl is 24 years old. Disney - fucking Disney - does not let 24-year-olds write or produce $200 million films. Zegler is being made into a scapegoat. And I, for one, am not here for it.

I was a theater kid. If you were too then you know how it goes when you’re making art with a team.

It took them years to create this movie. Years, during which they’d all have been talking to each other excitedly about the updates they were giving it, how they were “fixing” the old one, and how everyone was going to love the new recipe. Rachel Zegler did not arrive at these ideas by herself. They were intentional, much-discussed, and deliberately undertaken by people with infinitely more power than she.

Just as an example, if the producers and executives hadn’t wanted to *fix* the prince by making him less stalkery, deemphasizing his love story with Snow White, and making him…not a prince at all, guess what. They could have just not done that. Do you really think a company that regularly vies for the top spot in rankings of largest media corporation on earth takes its marching orders from woke cast members?

Disney would love for this catastrophe to be Zegler’s fault. It would take an awful lot of heat off them. But she was just trying to sell their movie - a movie that, until right before its release, they probably thought everyone would eat up.

I wrote recently about Disney’s multi-decade war on fairy tales. How was Rachel Zegler supposed to know that folks would finally get tired of that war minutes before she set out on her press tour?

Look, I hated cancel culture when the left was doing it, and I’m not going to have any more patience for it now that the right is test driving its own version. I get no thrills at all from seeing a talented young girl tossed under the wheels of a bus she was never driving in the first place.

BuT i DoN’t LiKe hEr ViEwS oN IsRaEl.

So don’t fucking listen to them. Who cares? She’s an actor. And again, a kid. You’re probably never going to hang out with her, and your adult ass does not need to be hurling profanities at somebody who was 15 when Donald Trump became president. You certainly don’t need to be sharing gross memes about her body hair, you fucking creeps.

I didn’t especially love listening to Gina Carano’s political views either, but I still liked her as Cara Dune, and still think they should invite her back on The Mandalorian now that woke is [God, I hope] over.

Pick a lane, people.

If reports are true - I haven’t seen the film, and I’m not in a hurry to - Zegler isn’t even really the problem with it. She’s supposed to be pretty good, actually. My understanding is that people aren’t wild about the new music, and the fact that the dwarves look like something out of a David Cronenberg fever dream.

Granted, it was a controversial move to cast a non-white actor to play the eponymous role. But we’ve been down this road already with The Little Mermaid, and at the end of the day, and again, who cares? I find it annoying in the extreme when studios race-bend their characters, act like they did nothing noteworthy, and just reflexively accuse critics of racism. I mean, I hate that shit. But this actually doesn’t matter that much, and certainly not to children, for whom these movies are mostly made.

Like, would I cast a black Snape? Probably not. But I’m enough of a Potterhead that if the guy’s good, and if the new series is too, I’m not going to punish myself by boycotting it. Jesus. That would make me exactly like the wokesters. I just heard that apparently, black Snape isn’t happening. Or maybe it is again. It seems to go back and forth. Whatever, my point stands.

My strong suspicion is that we will see a harsh clampdown on actors sharing their political views while promoting big-budget films. It may already have happened with Pixar’s box-office bomb, Elio, which apparently lost actors and writers over the studio trying to de-wokify the story’s more stridently leftist elements.

This stuff was safe when everyone could be assumed to be a leftoid identity zombie (or at least, afraid of them), but times have changed. Disney just had its hand slapped quite harshly, and nobody’s sure of anything now. That’s probably for the best. I’d like to keep art and politics as distantly separated as possible. Not only do I hate being pandered to, or away from, I have never understood the impulse to deny art to people who disagree with me, or to use art to alienate them.

But I bring this up because the woke hangover may just be starting. Think how many films are still in production, that can’t be rewritten or reshot, and that are still going to have shit about “white privilege” and “fragile masculinity” or whatever in them.

Woke was a very specific flavor, and a taste that few honestly acquired. It’s going to be annoying for a while, because the cultural winds changed so rapidly, there won’t have been time for the virtue signallers at Disney (or elsewhere) to fully scrub their work of this crap before releasing it.

But for real, if you’ve got your cannon loaded up, aim it at someone who deserves the barrage. That’s not a young actor on the cusp of a bright career. It’s the cowardly corporation who wound her up, sent her forth to do exactly what she did, then turned on her when it blew back on them.

Fuck Disney.