The Sunday Telegraph

Hollywood has become a bastion of hypocritic­al progressiv­ism

The industry is far more interested in lecturing consumers than producing high quality films

- ZOE STRIMPEL

IAll this heavy-handed playing at identity politics is destroying Hollywood and setting the stage for worse and worse movies

met a female banker last week and she described the persistent­ly sexist behaviour of men in her industry –those who felt compelled to act in an aggressive­ly condescend­ing manner towards her. I asked why they’re like that. “The movies”, was her response, a lifetime spent watching films like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short.

It rang true, a reminder of how incredibly powerful Hollywood is. Whole generation­s behave in certain ways because of films they watched growing up. Women imbibe many of their ideas about romance and love from Hollywood movies, and some men do too, and these end up impacting their entire lives.

Given its power over us, it is unsettling to watch contempora­ry Hollywood succumb to odiousness and toxicity. Its crimes are manifold.

First, even leaving Harvey Weinstein aside, they just don’t seem like very nice people. Most seem greedy and litigious and quite obnoxious, despite enjoying riches and fame unimaginab­le to almost everybody. Last week’s Oscars shenanigan­s, in which Will Smith went up on stage and slapped the comedian and presenter Chris Rock, for making a joke at Smith’s wife’s expense, was a new low.

But then there’s the moral hypocrisy. The MeToo movement revealed that there is also mercenary sexual rot and occasional misogynist­ic violence at the heart of Hollywood, but it hasn’t stopped film-makers lecturing us, the consumers, more incessantl­y than ever.

Indeed, Hollywood no longer seems to see its job as creator of the very best entertainm­ent, but rather as an agent of moral reprogramm­ing. Last week, Disney epitomised that moral superiorit­y. Executive Karey Burke, the mother of a trans child and a pansexual child, upped the ante on gender politics, saying in a companywid­e Zoom call that Disney must be more inclusive.

The call was part of Disney’s chilling-sounding Reimagine Tomorrow campaign, in which executives vowed that by the end of this year 50 per cent of characters should be from “under-represente­d” groups (whatever that means, given that some of the groups they include - like trans people – represent a very small percentage of the world’s population).

The enforcemen­t of the doctrine doesn’t stop there: those visiting the Disney theme parks – probably the closest to pure heaven I got as a child – will no longer be addressed as “ladies and gentleman” and “boys and girls” but rather as “dreamers and friends”. “Princesses” is out too, of course. God forbid a child be addressed as either one sex or the other; it might trigger them.

But just as Hollywood’s post-MeToo attempts at feminism, including the hiring of “intimacy coordinato­rs” for sex scenes, smacked of performanc­e over substance, Disney’s doctrinair­e approach to morality sits oddly with some of its own actions.

Most infamously, its live action 2020 version of Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang, the province in which Uigyhers are being systematic­ally killed in what is widely thought to be genocide. Yet the credits thanked eight government bodies in Xinjiang, including the security bureau in Turpan, and the “Publicity Department” of CPC (Communist Party of China) Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Committee – the very people authorisin­g some of the most egregious human rights abuses of the 21st century. Disney claimed it was not responsibl­e for the credits, saying the decision was taken by local contractor­s. But it was hardly a good look.

How can an industry as steeped in double standards as this make anything good, let alone great? In 2019, tree-hugging celebritie­s arrived by private jet and superyacht to attend a Google Camp focused on climate change. Hollywood ostracises those accused of racism, but in the film Mank it cast Gary Oldman, on record with an antiSemiti­c rant in 2014 (he later apologised to offended Jewish people), as Herman Mankiewicz, the Jewish producer of Citizen Kane. And the anti-Semitic ranter in chief, Mel Gibson, is still merrily making films for giant studios.

All this heavy-handed and hypocritic­al playing at identity politics at the cost of actual integrity is destroying Hollywood and setting the stage for worse and worse films coming downstream.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the Academy, the outfit behind the Oscars, set out a bizarrely rigid set of rules, stipulatin­g that minorities must win a higher percentage of Oscars, and that a certain number of behind-the-scenes production top jobs (director, cinematogr­apher etc) must go to minorities. “Minorities” included LGBTQ people, disabled people, anyone from an ethnic minority and, weirdly, women. It seemingly has nothing to do with getting the best people and making the best films, and everything to do with the obsessive box-ticking that has become the contemptib­le hallmark of the identity politics age.

Hollywood has always had its own ugly inner demons as well as showy outer morality. It introduced morality clauses in 1921, after Fatty Arbuckle was arrested on accusation­s of rape and murder, but rarely used them. It was racist. It was sexist, and these things appeared in its films.

Yet its main business was still making great movies, and indulging wild and expensive bursts of creativity. It made the movies that shaped our whole perception of the world.

Now, as it spends more and more of its time educating us about the environmen­t, gender politics and critical race theory, we can expect a noxious influence on impression­able minds, and many more shoddy, dreary films.

 ?? ?? Influencin­g minds: Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that has allegedly helped shape the aggressive sexism of men in banking. Now Hollywood has moved on to gender politics
Influencin­g minds: Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that has allegedly helped shape the aggressive sexism of men in banking. Now Hollywood has moved on to gender politics
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