In recent years, both the news and entertainment media have found themselves impaled on their own swords, victims of an ideology that never quite understood the concept of moderation. While the wokeness in media has left countless viewers scrambling for the remote like it’s a game show buzzer, it’s the entertainment industry that might just be nursing the deepest wounds. Sure, news shows can adapt quicker to changing tides — an epiphany, a new anchor, and they’re back in business. Films and books, however, are like ocean liners slowly turning course, meaning the industry’s embrace of all things woke has left it in quite the cultural bind.
Consider the literary world, where our novelist faced a rather familiar storm. The book industry’s gatekeepers aren’t the average Joe or Jane but more likely a brigade of ideologues ready to reject anything not dyed in the wool of progressive orthodoxy. So what happens to a writer whose thrillers don’t reverse reality, where female characters have more depth than a teaspoon of trendy rhetoric? Enter the book reviewers armed with “down with the patriarchy” placards in one hand and their Goodreads logins in the other. They craftily weave their critiques, less about the plot and prose, more about testing how well characters fit a feminist mold.
This brings us to the core of the conundrum. Yes, there are female characters aplenty in these novels, each representing the vast spectrum of human complexity. Some strong, some flawed, some navigating uncertain waters and some with a grip tighter than Captain Hook’s on his pirate hat, and yet, all remarkably realistic. It’s a literary tableau that fires up the woke warriors, not because of a lack of representation, but perhaps due to an abundance of reality. Let’s face it, true feminism isn’t about crafting women in the image of some utopian ideal now is it?
Peering closer at the entertainment industry’s dilemma, one can’t help but wonder if the larger audiences are growing weary of wokeness as their visual diet. Movies, unlike news shows, demand more than soundbites and slogans – they demand storytelling that resonates beyond the lectern. Films have characters, plots, and narratives that need to engage the audience, not preach down to them. It seems the only people not caught onto this are those setting sea on these ocean liners of entertainment.
Perhaps change won’t come at the speed of a streaming service update, but the signs are promising. Aficionados of genuine storytelling and character depth – audiences with a penchant for a little reason with their fiction – are beginning to flex their muscles. Slowly, the entertainment titans may find that sticking solely to wokeness is about as appealing as a sequel without the original’s flair. While they steer through these stormy cultural waters, let’s hope for a course correction that celebrates characters as they are, not just how some think they ought to be.
