The new Amazon Prime TV series “Fallout,” based on a video game because why not base a show on a video game, is interesting for a number of reasons. It looks good and it’s entertaining, but how it handles wokeness is especially fascinating. It may indicate a new direction for Hollywood after a decade of woke garbage that drove many shows and famed franchises – grrrrl power/non-binary “Star Wars” anyone? – into the dirt. “Fallout” is baseline woke, but does not put wokeness front and center. It’s not centered on the chick experience, or the trans experience, or the BIPOC indigenous Zoroastrian experience. It’s pretty much about cool stuff like mutant monsters, killer robots, and a nasally-challenged Walton Goggins – and no, he is not “differently abled.”
It’s trying to thread the needle, being fun (and therefore unwoke) while still sending the woke soke signal, and it sort of succeeds. Unlike so many other shows, it’s not intolerable. This might be an indicator that Hollywood is slowly learning that to go woke is to go broke.
We can only hope.
“Fallout” is about the aftermath of a nuclear war in a kind of alternative 1950s America. There is a lot of Fifties kitsch, and it’s interesting to look at. There’s action and cool visuals. But it’s not woke in the same way we’ve seen it in Hollywood entertainment in recent years. Yes, it has a baseline of wokeness. There’s some sort of minor trans character referred to with the “they/them” nonsense occasionally, but it’s not really up in your face. I’m not sure how fastidious about made-up pronouns people would be when they’re trying to find food to eat and dodging mutant monsters. There’s also the general diversity angle. Everybody is super diverse, even though the 50s weren’t exactly known for their mixed-race vibe. You have got at least one of everything – black, white, yellow, brown, as well as relatives of Elizabeth Warren, and there’s probably one of those tribesmen from New Guinea who ate Joe Biden’s uncle in there somewhere too.
All the actors are fine. It’s just you get the impression that you always get when they’re trying to teach you to be a better person somehow by casting the rainbow of races. What’s galling is the underlying assumption that somehow, we’re going to have our bourgeois minds blown because an important character isn’t a Mitt Romney clone. Perhaps they never heard of Denzel. Whatever. I don’t need any lessons from Hollywood about anything. I watched “Quiet On Set,” the new documentary about how the Nickelodeon kids were abused, and the last thing I need is moral instruction from Tinseltown’s resident perverts and weirdos.
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But that’s the extent of the wokeness. It’s just kind of there in the background, but not really shoved down your throat the way it is in too many other entertainment products. For instance, there’s no fake grrrrl power. One of the lead characters is a chick and, amazingly, she’s not magical. She can’t take on a 220-pound guy without getting her butt kicked. I’m sick of waif warriors. I like everything about “Shogun,” which is the new show about ancient Japan, but there’s a tiny woman in there who occasionally turns into a super-trained samurai warrior for no apparent reason. That’s jarring and annoying, but that’s low-grade wokeness. What we’re seeing now is a baseline of wokeness, like in the current movie “Civil War,” where there’s a little bit of wokeness but it’s not the main point.
It’s intolerable when the wokeness is the main point. I just won’t watch it. At all. In fact, I’ll go out of my way to mock it to keep others from watching it. And that’s how most normal people seem to feel. Wokeness is not just annoying. It’s bad art, and with what we’re paying for entertainment now, count me out. And count out a lot of other people, too.
Has Hollywood learned its lesson? Not totally. It desperately wants to be woke. It loves the feeling of righteousness it gets by injecting wokeness into the things we watch. But it also desperately wants to be watched. Sometimes they forget that’s the purpose of shows and movies – to get eyeballs. There is a movie that came out just a few weeks ago called “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” which is apparently as dumb as its title. As I understand it, the basic premise is that white people are the devil. Sounds fun. Where do I get my tickets? Of course, it was a huge flop, earning an anemic $2,480,645 after a month of release. And it serves them right.
Wokeness is unsustainable. Eventually, the wokesters will run out of other people’s money. Maybe that’s happening now. We’re seeing a bit less of it. We should encourage this trend, and punish the shows that If some show gets too woke, turn it off and tweet about it. Stop giving money to people who hate you. They’ve got to learn, and pain is a great teacher.
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