Cold warriors
Iger versus Maslany, and the hierarchy of hate
American writers and actors of the silver and small screens are striking for better pay. A cynic might ask, if the studios’ intention was to rejuvenate trades unions, what would they be doing different in their handling of the standoff? Meanwhile, a visitor from outer space (or Europe) might ask, isn’t this a nice clean narrative of “the people versus the powerful”?
The studios—I’m not “in the biz,” as they say, so I’ll use “studios” colloquially to mean all the corporate players in the movie/TV production and distribution apparatus, which with the individual actors, writers, and workers, compose “Hollywood”—are undeniably the powerful. Individually, its leaders are a weathly elite. Corporately, these are some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world. The industry’s goliaths are Netflix (market cap $191 billion, 55th wealthiest company by market cap), Comcast ($186 billion), and Disney ($157 billion, 70th by market cap). Nor are its mid-tier players any kind of slouches; Sony ($113 billion) and Warner Brothers ($31 billion) have corporate peers like UPS, Conoco-Phillips, Union Pacific, and Boeing. Even at the bottom end, we find Paramount ($10 billion) and Universal ($1 billion).
By contrast, while there are some very high-profile exceptions, actors and writers are neither wealthy nor powerful. The average actor makes about $60,000. The writers, less. Given the industry’s concentration in Los Angeles (not the cheapest place to live) those numbers are worse than they look. And while there are many actors and writers who have amassed a cachet that borders on cultural power, the average writer or actor does not have millions of followers on social media platforms. Yes, they live on the coast in a bubble where everyone they know agrees with them, all the media they consume agrees with them, and they seldom encounter let alone consider alternative viewpoints, but in this regard, the average actor is not appreciably more encapsulated than is a shopkeep in the Bronx.
The public is capricious. Which side will capture sympathy? Following the Trump takeover, the GOP has realigned, moving from being “the party of the rich and powerful” in a populist direction, if not quite “the party of the people,” at least “the party of working-class whites.” The former was always a caricature, but the pre-Trump GOP was more sympathetic to concerns board room than kitchen table. Its absorption of a new faction, the Trumpists (reactionary populists), and their reinvigoration of the Buchananite and Paulite factions (the paleocons, isolationists, nationalists, etc.), with whom they make a controlling majority, has made the GOP more blue-collar-friendly. Something that might naturally align with striking workers, given a sufficiently vilified villain. And since Republicans have long hated Hollywood, you would think the studios would make a natural villain! The Valley versus Bel Air. Working folk against the ultra-rich, another unionized sector getting screwed by rapacious progressive elites. Right?
Nope.
There is no class warfare in America, only culture war. America’s division is tribe, not class. The mostly working-class and lower-middle-class (“LMC”) Trump Tribe that now controls the GOP hates Hollywood. But that doesn’t mean only the studios and rich executives running them, as class-based thinking might suggest. No, they also hate the (mostly) working-class or LMC writers and actors. The Trump Tribe thinks that Hollywood people of all classes (maybe excepting the workers, that is, gaffers, electricians, and the like, but definitely not excepting setdec and catering; basically, anyone whose job is at least one part art to two parts technical) belong to the Big City Tribe. And that tribe, the Trump Tribe believe, hates them. And they are right: If you want to know what Hollywood thinks of the Trump Tribe, cast your mind back to Don’t Look Up. It doesn’t matter that the average actor is LMC, or that most actors would earn more working at McDonalds than they do in their nominal job—or that many of them, on the side, do. What counts is tribal allegiance, and the writers and actors swear allegiance to the other one. (Those who don’t are exiled—The Mandalorian’s Gina Carano being only the most recent example.) Tribal solidarity trumps all—ba-dum-tiss. (Sorry. Had to.)
Into this fray stepped Bob Iger and Tatiana Maslany.
Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney. He returned to Disney last year having left Disney in February 2020. He will make “a $1 million base salary . . . according to public filings . . . [and he is] entitled to an annual bonus of up to $1 million, along with a long-term incentive award with a target value of $25 million for each year of his contract.” That’s not underwater-volcano-lair money (to put it into context someone did the math on Bezos a couple of years ago, and the Amazon boss was making a staggering $8,600,000 per hour) but it's still $2,739 per day or $342 per hour, which is a lot more than you make at Walmart. Iger was and is a man of the left. (His “predesuccessor,” Chapek, tried to play both sides of the fence and pleased no one.)
Tatiana Maslany is an actress who appeared as the title character in Disneys’ show She-Hulk. Like Iger, she is a woman of the left. Like Iger, she made a paycheck significantly fatter than any I’ve ever made; she made $450,000 for She-Hulk, which isn’t quite Iger money, but it’s more than you make at Walmart. (There are important differences, but none that are material for my point. The most striking is, of course, that Iger knows where his next paycheque is coming from and will not have to participate in the grueling, demoralizing, dehumanizing process—terra incognita to people who hate actors—of auditioning to get it. See generally Fischer, The Actor’s Life (2017).)
Back to the strike. As Variety reported, “Iger said that while he respects the right of the unions to ‘get as much as they possibly can in compensation for their people,’ they must ‘be realistic about the business environment, and what this business can deliver.’” And, comparing the striking unions with the directors’ union (with which a deal was previously cut), “[w]e wanted to do the same thing with the writers . . . [and] actors [as with the directors, but t]here’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing . . . .” An unimpressed Maslany told The Hollywood Reporter that she thinks Iger is
completely out of touch . . . with the workers who make his shows happen, who make people watch these shows, who bring viewers to him and him money. Having worked on a Disney show, I know where people fall through the cracks and where people are taken advantage of and it’s outrageous the amount of wealth that is not shared with the people who actually make the show.
The social media comments were strikingly one-sided and startlingly vicious toward Maslany and the writers of She-Hulk. Here’s a lightly edited selection:
“She’s out of touch. Her show sank and lost Disney money.”
“Didn’t she watch her own show? Didn’t she read the reviews?”
“Says the out-of-touch [expletive answering to ‘bad’] actress from one of the worst shows on Disney.”
“Madam: you starred in a worthless series that destroyed the character, written by cretins”
“Who’s really out of touch? It’s the people who write and produce garbage like She-Hulk!”
“It couldn’t possibly be the actors and writers whose idea of research is attending Hollywood cocktail parties who are out of touch?”
“If she acted as well as she gaslighted people she would’ve earned an Emmy.”
“A failed show’s actress trying to stay relevant!”
And my personal favorite:
“Another overpaid mouthpiece who provides no value to society except vapid entertainment . . . Her arrogance and sense of self importance and narcissism are only matched by her hypocrisy. If she is so concerned about the wages let her share her salary.”
And then there were a hundred minimum-effort comments celebrating gleefully that Iger will now “cancel” Maslany. Now, one can agree or disagree with Maslany, and one can think as one might of Iger’s arguments about the headwinds facing Hollywood. But these comments are, in a word, nuts. So what’s going on here?
She-Hulk proved to be (as does everything, lately) a lightning rod. (Which is a shame. I think fondly of Maslany, who amazed playing seventeen distinct clones in Orphan Black.) “It’s too woke!” the critics caterwauled. But the cast and writers were ready for that, clapping back, hard, that She-Hulk deliberately trolled the misogynists of “toxic fandom”—which is mostly just a way of dismissing the kinds of people who say shows are “too woke,” bringing us full circle.
“Wokeness” is the buzzword favored by people unhappy with the current slate of American popular culture (television, movies, novels, music, and so forth). The criticism has been that Hollywood “pushes” the “woke agenda” (or at least heavy-handedly favors “woke” viewpoints). This objection reaches fever-pitch where properties are aimed at children and the the rhetorical excess reaches the heights (or depths) of accusing the studios and writers of “indoctrination” and even “grooming.” But even in adult properties like She-Hulk, there are a subset of people in the political middle and on the political right who can’t or won’t shut up about “wokeness.” Hell, a whole category of grifting has been built atop attacking “woke” Hollywood, typically (though not exclusively ) by men with beards.
Our political lexicon is fluid and “woke” has proved especially hard to pin down. For current purposes, I will borrow and slightly modify the definition offered by Youtuber The Critical Drinker (AKA novelist Will Jordan, whose books I recommend). The concerns animating “the woke” are a desire to raise awareness of their social, cultural, and environmental concerns such that people who do not share those concerns will come to share them; encouraging other people who do not share their perspective to look at the world from a different perspective (namely, theirs) and change (conform); and pampering historically underrepresented groups with whom they sympathize. Thus, “wokeness” is to some degree the evangelical, proselytizing form of the Big City Tribe’s precepts.
For sake of argument, let’s divide pop culture consumers into two “teams.” These teams mostly overlap with the tribes, but independently and imperfectly. First, there’s the Blue Team, which broadly-speaking comprises people who are themselves more-or-less “woke” and who (because everyone likes to see themselves and their concerns reflected in pop culture) broadly approve of “wokeness” in pop culture. Then there’s the Red Team, which broadly-speaking is critical of the same. And the Red Team breaks down further into at least two factions: The “anti-woke neurotics” and the “wokeness skeptics.”
When some people criticize “wokeness,” what they mean is, “I hate this message and I hate the people messaging it.” This faction comprises those as to whom the “toxic fandom” label has traction. They’re the ones who didn’t like it when they made Starbuck a girl and Captain America black. Whose objection to The Last Jedi’s sidequest boiled down to, hey, no fair, no gurlz allowed in my boyz-only zone, and who always seem to find a reason to hate characters played by black and asian actors. They’re the ones who oppose diverse casting in a fantasy world because black elves break a suspension of disbelief that does just fine with literal fucking elves (as long as they’re white). They’re the ones who hated Loki because it “tore down” and “hated” the male character while focusing on female characters. They find woeness lurking behind everything they don’t like in movies, just as the Blue Team find sexism lurking behind every criticism of such. Call these the anti-woke neurotics.
For another faction, however, the objection to The Last Jedi’s sidequest is not that its politics were wrong, but that the sidequest is a long, nonsensical, needless sidequest full of ham-handed dialogue and clunky political messaging, all of which detracts from the story. Call them the “wokeness skeptics.” When someone like the Drinker criticizes Hollywood’s “wokeness,” he is targeting specifically (and rarely have I written a sentence to which the italics are more integral, so pay attention) the clunky insertion of political messaging and the subordination of everything else in the production to it, particularly the veracity of the worldbuilding and the honesty of the storytelling. (I am conscripting the Drinker a spokesman for this more reasonable faction, though I have to admit that his review of The Barbie Movie toed the neurotic line a bit too closely for comfort.)
The Blue and Red teams differ on the purpose of popular culture—the reason why we write novels and make movies and television. The Blue Team are intellectual kin to Angela Davis: Hollywood “can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also . . . it can propel people toward social emancipation.” The Red Team, by contrast, thinks that Hollywood is primarily for entertainment; escapism. If these are your starting premises, it’s no wonder that the Blue Team is blind to the wokeness-skeptics’ objections and the Red Team’s incapable of seeing anything but self-serving malice from the Blue Team.
Stripped of the buzzword, then, what we’re really talking about when we’re talking about Hollywood’s “wokeness” is using pop culture generally and storytelling particularly as a vehicle for activism. The Red Team thinks that abuse. The Blue team thinks it’s (at minimum) valid.
Some people think art and agitprop are synonyms, but most people would concede that while art can be activist, it doesn’t have to be. And everyone can concede that activism is annoying. No, no, stop that: The counterexamples you’re thinking of are activism that you find tasteful and proportionate in service of a cause you find compelling. Think instead of activism you’ve seen in service of a cause with which you disagree; James O’ Keefe if you’re on the left, Greta Thunberg if the right. Or think of activism you’ve seen in service of a cause with which you sympathize but where you found it gross or disproportionate. Yes, activism is annoying. And when activism infects art, bad art can ensue, and when activism becomes paramount (chortle), bad barely-art will ensue; you don’t have to be a George R.R. Martin-style gardener to see that a good story can slip its leash and must be allowed to go where the story naturally wants to go. You, the writer, can’t artificially stop that just because you as the writer wanted it to go elsewhere, because that place is politically verboten, and when you do, that artifice will show.
The Red Team will need no additional example for the point that agitprop makes for poor art, but for the Blue Team, think of Ayn Rand, who wrote “novels” of thinly disguised polemic. You don’t find Rand unreadable because her prose is leaden (though it is) or because her philosophy is wrong (though you think it is), you find her unreadable because everything in her books is actuated by and subjugated to the advocacy beneath it. You can’t read Atlas Shrugged as a work of art independent of Rand’s (and your) views, and you’re not supposed to. By contrast, maybe The Incredibles has a viewpoint, a softly Randian message, as some critics claim, but you can watch The Incredibles without being in any way sympathetic to Rand or thinking once about Randian themes. The Incredibles is a much better movie than Atlas Shrugged is a novel.
The Red Team would say that it’s the activism to which they object, not Hollywood having a point of view with which they disagree. As to the anti-woke neurotics—I don’t believe them. But I do believe the wokeness skeptics. They say they object to ham-handed activism, and to Hollywood being pointy: Disrupting someone else’s thing to make a point about your thing. And true to that, their harshest objections come when Hollywood “subverts” established franchises. Fans identify with franchises; they invest of themselves, deeply. The franchise they love is their thing, and it becomes part of their identity, which is why Red Team fan negativity was so strong about The Rings of Power (literally rewriting the history of Middle Earth) or Star Trek: Discovery (literally rewriting the history of Starfleet). In some cases fans literally put indelible marks on their bodies, marks that say to the world, “I love Star Trek.” Are you surprised that they react badly when you change Star Trek, thus changing the message to the world that’s literally inscribed on their body?
(Yes, yes, I get it. They shouldn’t have gotten the tattoos, and you dispute their understanding of what Star Trek stood for. I get it.)
But while the Red Team gets especially incensed as to franchises, it’s not like they welcomed with open arms The 355 (not a franchise) or The Barbie Movie (technically a franchise, but not one in which men with beards had invested a lot) or Ocean’s 8 (sort of a franchise, but barely). At minimum, though, everyone feels ownership of their time, and they object to a bait-and-switch:Popular culture is entertainment, movie audiences are there to be entertained, and so, they would say, Hollywood, your role is to entertain us, and instead you took my money and gave me a two hour lecture on why I’m a bad person. People who take this view tend to be recusants, expressing exasperation that everything is political, nowadays, particularly the popular culture to which people go in order to escape politics.
The Blue Team disagrees with every bit of that premise. They dispute that popular culture is (or at least must be) entertainment. They dispute that it is a misuse of forum when, say, Bono starts talking about politics at a U2 show; to the contrary, using cultural power for social justice is at minimum a good thing, they would say, and they would prefer to argue whether it is merely a good thing or actually a responsibility of those so privileged to have a platform. People who take this view tend to express exasperation with recusants, seeing recusancy as a form of privilege. And because their objection to Ted Nugent talking politics isn’t to a singer talking politics but rather to his politics, it’s natural that they think other people are doing the same thing, and for that reason they tend to see no distinction between the anti-woke neurotics and wokeness-skeptics.
But even among the Blue Team, there is recognition that subordinating storytelling to what the Drinker would call “The Message” yields artificial storytelling and thin characterization. Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega and The Great’s Elle Fanning are undoubtedly women of the left, but they are also what Private Eye calls “luvvies,” serious about drama and their craft per se, not as a vehicle for politics, and so they have pointed to the shortcomings of subordinating female characters to exogenous political agendas. Moreover, if you agree directionally with activism, it tends towards invisibility. If you’re antagonistic toward the recusants, decide to read a thriller and read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear and tell me that you don’t chafe at its unhidden didactic bullshit. Or decide to watch a movie and watch Sound of Freedom, or God’s Not Dead. You, too, will start chugging whisky and snarling in a Scottish accent
I tend to align with the “woke skeptics.” I watch (and, sometimes, tell) dramatic stories chiefly to live vicariously through people who aren’t like me, to experience things from another perspective. I watch comedic stories to laugh, stories of achievement for catharsis, and so on. While I bridle at reducing all this to the dismissive-sounding “entertainment,” I understand what the Red Team is getting at, and in my judgment they are mostly correct. But, I must say, I hated the actually didactic State of Fear a lot more than I hated the supposedly woke Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I certainly concede, however, that art can be a powerful tool for advancing political ideas and even complex philosophical theses. Tim Hickson, for example, has a fantastic video exploring the ideas Tolkien advanced about power in Sauron and the One Ring. But that example also underscores something important: The Lord of The Rings has many themes, many messages, and none of them are forced on the viewer, none are treated as more important than the story itself such that the story has to obviously bend to accommodate them, and, critically, you don’t have to agree with or even perceive the themes Hickson persuasively identifies in order to love The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is built around a very obvious analogy to real world events, and it advances a not-very-complex political thesis without much subtlety. Yet it never feels inorganic, preachy, or heavy-handed. If anything, the Kirk of Trek VI feels more organic to the Kirk of Treks II–IV than did the Kirk of Trek V. At risk of being gross, Trek VI digests its sources and then gives the gestalt to you as energy, whereas, say, Man of Steel chews lightly on its sources and then regurgitates them at you.
And art doesn’t have to send a message, least of all a political message, and when storytelling is placed in service of political agendas, it’s usually the storytelling that suffers. (After all, the fictional world is, well, just fiction, whereas The Message is important.) A common example is the so-called girlboss trope. Whereas traditional storytelling and characterization require that a character have flaws and they need to struggle in order to obtain (or attain) what they need, typically at some cost and succeeding only after failure or some humiliation, see Truby, The Anatomy of Story (2007); McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1997), the “girlboss”—exemplified by Captain Marvel, Wednesday, The Last Jedi, and, well, She-Hulk, and whose characterization is driven by exogenous political concerns—has no flaws. She has great power already inside her. She is already omnicompetent (or becomes so with minimal effort). Her only “need” is to escape the shackles put on her by other people, which she does by becoming a more authentic version of herself, administering well-deserved verbal or physical spankings (mostly, critics say, to thinly-disguised representations of people the writers hate). The result is flat characters with flat arcs to whom audiences who can’t and don’t connect. (This delights the filmmakers who can then create a whole secondary grift around complaining that their movie failed because of “toxic fandom.”)
Take five, everyone. I can’t resist pausing—again, it’s my goddam newsletter, write your own if you don’t like it—to say something in defense of Captain Marvel, which starred a droll Brie Larson as Carol (the titular captain who absorbs the power of Mar-Vell—yes, really). I will stipulate that it fits the parameters of the “girlboss” trope. But every trope is fresh the first time, and for me, that once was Captain Marvel. It’s not a great movie, but it’s at least as good as Thor 2, and it was better than anything after Endgame’s time-jump. All that to say that my own view is that, as with all tropes, the girlboss trope is neither good nor bad, it just depends what you do with it.
I think a better example would be Wonder Woman. During World War 1, Diana (the titular woman who is wonderful) emerges from a secluded tribe of warrior women who have known little of the outside world for centuries. Her avalon-like society being steeped in mythology, Diana concludes that men are warring because they have been tricked by Ares, the God of War. She believes that by “defeating” Ares, she will restore peace, and thus sets out to kill General Ludendorff, who (obviously) is Ares incarnate. Her training makes her a powerful but not unstoppable foe. When she accomplishes her goal, there is a lovely, sad shot of her: “Ares” has been defeated (read, Ludendorff’s dead at her feet) yet nothing changes. The fighting continues. That would have been a terrific way to bring the movie to a close. But it would also portray Diana as naive—which is not very girlbossy. She would learn a hard lesson about the real world rather than being vindicated in what she alone knew and maintained in the face of skepticism from other, much more XY characters—not very girlbossy. So, instead (sigh) we had to endure a long CGI fight scene in which the literal Ares literally comes down and literally fights Diana, who of course was right all along.
In some cases, when storytelling and agenda entwine, both storytelling and agenda suffer. CGP Grey made what is by my lights his worst video a few years ago, The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant. Grey’s narrative was a howlingly, clunkily-obvious metaphor that did nothing to augment his argument and by raising my hackles made me less receptive to his message. Fables are for children. But, that’s interesting isn’t it? Fables are opinionated, pretextual stories. No one minds that when they approve of the message. But it’s also true that even when they agree with the message, sapient adults chafe when addressed with fables, which feels condescending and belittling. We’re back to the point raised earlier: The Trump Tribe feels condescended to and vilified by by the Big City Tribe, and they are right.
And they are particularly right as to She-Hulk. The head writer said in as many words that they set out to stick a finger in the eye of the anti-woke neurotics—that they were “utterly delighted” to “troll the trolls,” whose “toxic reaction[s]” were “predictable and boring.” . The story just linked adds that “the primary ‘villain’ of the series is a collective of men who have gathered via the [internet] site Intelligencia to bring down [She-Hulk], who[m] they accuse of gaining her powers unfairly . . . in addition to many other excuses meant to justify their misogynistic behavior towards She-Hulk.” Maslany leaned in. She said, “[a]s a cast, it was delightful sending each other these troll responses, like '. . . give them a week and then they’re going to literally see this pop up verbatim in the show and become the villains of the show.'” And, “[t]here’s so much resistance to a woman just existing in that space of superheroes, . . . [I] anticipated it. It’s why I also feel it’s important. There’s such an entitlement to space held by certain people, and to even exist as She-Hulk is like a fuck-you, and I love that.” Co-star Jameela Jamil (fond of us as The Good Place’s Tahani) piled on. They weren’t just sticking the knife in the trolls and grifters, they twisted, with glee. They said everything short of “Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.”
From the standpoint of people who hated She-Hulk and felt pricked by Maslany personally, I suspect that a feeling of seldom-achieved payback is driving the nasty comments. And to a point, turnabout is fair play; Maslany flipped them the bird, very consciously and deliberately, and given the chance to do so, they are flipping it right back. But I find it interesting that the responses to Maslany didn’t just lash out at her, they took Iger’s side in the larger dispute. Think about that: It’s not that they’re siding with someone of their tribe against someone of the other tribe, or simply expressing contempt for someone who contemns them. This is incredibly distasteful. I guess it really does (depressingly) come down to, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, today. The Trump Tribe hates the rich and powerful progressive elites, and they especially dislike the Hollywood studio elites. But there is a hierarchy of hatred, and there are short memories, and right now, they’ll side with Iger (even though he’s of the other tribe) against Maslany (also of the other tribe) because he happens to be currently inflicting pain on Maslany, who previously inflicted pain on them. Recent scores, I suppose, must be settled before old scores.
§
Cornucopia
An underwater waterfall. Fascinating.
SpaceX reports to the FAA on what went wrong with the recent Starship launch.
What does the Pope have against Opus Dei? I’m not a fan of Opus Dei, but I would imagine that what he has against them is the same thing he has against any rival power center. Don’t seek complex theological explanations for simple power politics.