The Disaster That is Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’
/“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” – my motto for the last 8 years, borrowed from Rudyard Kipling.
This past weekend the esteemed New York Times Magazine ran a piece titled “Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?” written by Kabir Chibber.
The article caught my eye because as long-time readers can attest, I have been writing critically, and seemingly endlessly, about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ for the better part of eight years now. If Cassandra and Nostradamus had a child prodigy whose sole gift was the ability to clearly diagnose the excesses of Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ as it was happening but to be ruthlessly ignored/punished for their correct prophecies…that child would be me.
I would link to the articles to prove my bona fides as a critic of the ‘Diversity Era’ but there are so many of them it would be ridiculous to even try. If you type “woke” into the search bar of this website your computer, and your brain, may explode at the avalanche of articles that confront you.
I don’t know, and don’t really care, who this Kabir Chibber is…but to quote John McClain from Die Hard…”welcome to the party, pal”…even if it is 8 years too late.
Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ essentially started in 2015 with the mathematically ignorant protest movement named Oscars Too White. In the wake of that nonsense came the calamity that was Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton, followed by the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter and the rest.
Hollywood, and some audience members, went into a tailspin of emotionalism and lost their minds in a hysterical fever of self-righteousness in the wake of these events. This hysteria forced them to embarrass themselves by seeing racism and sexism everywhere, and by steadfastly ignoring quality in favor of diversity when it came to cinema, and by also being deathly allergic to reality.
Examples abound of how asinine and insane the ‘Diversity Era’ has been…here are a few tips of the very crazy iceberg.
The ‘Diversity Era’ made the middling Marvel movie Black Panther into a Best Picture Academy Award nominee, and had middle-aged white women giving black power salutes in theatres like they were Huey Newton.
It turned mind-numbing mediocrities like Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig into award-contending auteurs and made the mundanities that were Peele’s Get Out and Gerwig’s Lady Bird into Best Picture nominees. Hell, people were furious when Gerwig wasn’t nominated for Best Director last year for the insultingly awful Barbie. Oh yeah…and it made Barbie into a box office blockbuster too.
Ava DuVernay, one of the truly atrocious filmmakers of her time, becoming a Hollywood power player due to DEI is one of the signs of how widespread and potent the ‘Diversity Era’ disease really was.
Disney lost its fucking mind in the ‘Diversity Era’ and essentially sabotaged its two largest cash cow franchises, Marvel and Star Wars, on the altar of wokeness by going Girl Power crazy and replacing all their white male leads with women, women of color or people of color. Ironically, no white guys were allowed in the ‘Diversity Era’.
Marvel went from being the biggest box office behemoth of all-time to being a franchise in free fall, all because executives in the C suite wanted to signal their virtue by getting rid of their white male leads.
The post-Endgame Marvel lineup looks like it was assembled by an HR department at a Seven Sisters liberal arts school. Thor was replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther was replaced by Lady Black Panther, Iron Man was replaced by black Lady Iron Man (Iron Heart), Captain America was replaced with black Captain America and Shang-Chi – a second rate character if there ever was one, got his own movie, as did the female fronted and directed Eternals – one of the worst films of the last decade. All of these movies were absolutely abysmal by the way.
Star Wars was turned into a girls and gays franchise over these last 8 years with the Rey storyline and the incessantly PC narratives and casting of their television series like Ahsoka and The Acolyte. Again, white guys need not apply…in either the creative process or the viewership.
Film critics across the mainstream media sacrificed their credibility and integrity on the altar of the ‘Diversity Era’ too as they bent over backwards to pretend to like sub-par movies just because they were ‘diverse’, and/or had a female or person of color director and/or star, and they continuously handled all ‘diverse’ projects with the most patronizing of kid gloves.
The list of Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards in the recent past highlights how deep the ‘Diversity Era’ hysteria went. It all started with Moonlight, a story about a gay black boy - directed by the entirely forgettable Barry Jenkins (a black man) who hasn’t done a damn noteworthy thing since, winning Best Picture in 2016 over La La Land as a reaction to Trump’s election.
In the following years we’ve had Nomadland – a story starring the insufferable Frances McDormand about the wandering underclass in America that somehow manages to celebrate the corporate behemoth Amazon, winning Best Picture and Best Director because it was directed by an Asian woman, Chloe Zhao.
Then we had the embarrassingly bad CODA win because it was directed by a woman, Sian Hader, and was about deaf people. This was followed by the egregiously overhyped Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won because it was about an Asian family and was co-directed by an Asian man. Quality, talent, craftsmanship and skill be damned…diversity for the win!!
As for the details of Chibber’s article, what infuriated me about it was that it acts like the insanity and inanity of the ‘Diversity Era’ only now has become obvious, and that it was impossible to recognize while it was ongoing.
Chibber opens his piece writing, “Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization”
My question is…why on earth would anyone listen to a writer like Chibber who was completely blind to what was occurring for the last 8 years WHILE IT WAS ACTUALLY OCCURING. Contrary to what Chibber thinks, eras are not only apparent in retrospect. I am not a genius by any stretch, but apparently, I am extraordinarily good at my job…you know how I know that…BECAUSE I WAS AWARE OF THE ERA AS IT WAS HAPPENING! Unlike Mr. Chibber.
Chibber goes on to describe the Hollywood formula during the ‘Diversity Era’ as being “the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.”
I wrote that exact thing over and over while it was actually happening over the past 8 years and I lost jobs, clients and friends because of it. Telling the truth in hindsight takes no courage. Doing it while the battle rages, takes not only a keen eye and perception but gigantic balls of steel. Mine are apparently the size of fucking Jupiter while Mr. Chibber is a eunuch.
Chibber then writes of the ‘Diversity Era’ and its excesses that “The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed.”
Bullshit. The moment was glaringly obvious when it was happening but as Mr. Chibber and his ilk in the establishment media proved over and over again that it is difficult to see things clearly when your livelihood depends on you not seeing it. To quote Orwell, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a struggle”. Well, Chibber and his pampered set are incapable of struggle, while I was born to thrive in it.
The funniest thing Chibber writes is an admission of something I have been writing about so often even I am tired of hearing myself. Chibber writes in regards to the end of the ‘Diversity Era’, “At least we no longer have to pretend to like something because it has the right politics, or because the people most vocally against it are Nazis.”
So just as I wrote for these long 8 years, critics, pundits and creators were pretending to like things simply because they had the “proper” politics and because they hated the people who disliked those projects. You think I’d be more comfortable being right considering it happens so often.
The movie studios, particularly Disney, literally turned that formula of having the “right” politics and the “right” enemies of those politics into their business model.
Amazon has done the same thing, just look at the catastrophe that is the Rings of Power series with its diverse, and dreadful, cast, and how Amazon uses the Disney model of making all criticism of their projects into claims of racism and sexism.
I have to admit, I have found Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for wokeness, political correctness and diversity uber alles over these last 8 years to be extremely depressing.
Cinema and television have never been at such a low point creatively in my lifetime, and it is all because of the woke, PC, diversity and inclusion agenda which rules our current era and cares not a bit about quality, but only about signaling virtue and having the proper politics.
I hope cinema as an artform can make a comeback in the coming years and decades, but I’m not optimistic. The signs all point to movies going the way of music…in other words, losing ever more artistry, creativity and cultural power through corporate and creative malfeasance.
As for Mr. Chibber and his article…it is the height of irony that a “person of color” like Mr. Chibber, who got the ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood completely and utterly wrong while it was occurring, is now hired to write an article about it for the lofty New York Times, while I, a brutish white man who was 1000% correct in every way about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ from the jump, can’t even get a respectful comment in the comment section on an op-ed published by the fierce gatekeepers at the Old Grey Lady.
It seems Mr. Chibber’s insights on the excesses of the ‘Diversity Era’ forgot to mention the fact that he’s one of the big beneficiaries of it, as he’s proven through his ignorance of, and blindness to, the ‘Diversity Era’ that he is just another mid-wit DEI hire who in a saner, less hysterical time, never would’ve been chosen to write for the New York Times because he brings zero insight to the topic and is intellectually incapable of producing even one original thought.
Don’t kid yourself, Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ isn’t over by a long shot. And even if the hysteria is ebbing a bit, that doesn’t mean the damage done to the art of cinema, and the business of entertainment over the last decade isn’t indelible and won’t have long term consequences. It will…and not for the better, no matter what Mr. Chibber and his kind may claim to think.
©2024