Film schools across the country have gone woke, according to a report from TheWrap, which ensures movies will continue to suck for generations to come.
“How Some Film Schools Are Getting More ‘Woke’ – and Why Professors Find It ‘Kind of Wonderful,’” reads the headline. Here’s the bad but not unexpected news:
Proper context is key to teaching all kinds of “classics” that have come under greater scrutiny in the last decade or so. There was a time when it was not unusual for cinema studies programs to routinely include films such as D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Woody Allen’s 1970s comedies and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” as vital examples of cinematic ingenuity, especially within montage and genre definitions. But given the thorny reputations of those (and other) filmmakers, plus the controversial nature of their work, is there an inherent backlash to teaching these filmmakers nowadays?
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“It’s not so much teaching new or different films for this new generation of viewers, but a ‘reframing’ of the canon,” Carman said. “Or rethinking how film noir can be understood as ‘femme noir,’ given the preponderance of female-authored source material. Or even when teaching Alfred Hitchcock, highlighting how he had women collaborators behind the screen. The films don’t change, but we can frame them through an inclusive lens and spotlight new research and discoveries that weren’t written or prioritized yet when you and I were in undergraduate programs.”
The above has nothing to do with art. Judgementalism is anathema to art. Worst of all, these professors abuse their positions to create forever-babies through coddling while destroying art appreciation with their stupid judgementalism.
That’s the whole problem with mixing woke and art: the smug and superior judging.
Rather than allowing stories to play out and characters to behave realistically, we are told how and what to think about both. We are ordered to judge characters and situations. How stupid is that? It’s so stupid we used to mock this one-dimensional, simpleton approach through subversive cartoons about Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash. But that’s all it is now… Good. Bad. Right Wrong. Black. White.
One of the great joys of movies is trying to figure out what to think about someone and what you would do in the same situation. Woke removes all of that. Remember Captain America: Civil War? That’s how it’s supposed to work. Which side would you take? Who’s right, Captain America or Iron Man?
Remember 24? That show was all about putting Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer character in one impossible moral predicament after another, and it was Bauer’s choice — right or wrong — that defined that character.
Woke takes all that away from us by turning art into propaganda.
And then to remove Birth of a Nation, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen — Woody Allen! — from the canon?
First off, as dull and racist as Birth of a Nation is (and it is both and then some), teaching film without teaching Birth of a Nation is like teaching medicine without teaching blood pressure. Polanski is a fugitive child rapist who dodged justice. However, he still made Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion and Knife in the Water and Tess, and his place in the New Wave is crucial and undeniable.
Woody Allen is 100 percent innocent and one of the top five filmmakers of the last 50 years… Excluding him is like excluding Ty Cobb from baseball history or Louis Armstrong from Jazz history.
This isn’t teaching. This is blacklisting.
Oh, and naturally, instead of helping their students mature, grow a thicker skin, and separate art from the artist, these dreadful professors are coddling them:
“That’s been an interesting lesson for me the last couple of years preparing students for these topics that were taboo but were tolerated in parts of our culture,” she said. “I have to put a note in that they should come talk to me and I can prepare them. I’ve had some students who need to step out of the room. And I respect that.”
Students stepping out of the room deserve ridicule, not respect. Stepping out of the room is a narcissistic act meant to make everything about them and their crybaby trauma. Imagine living such a privileged life a movie upsets you to the point you must leave the room. These students should be ridiculed, not respected. Forever infantilizing children is cruel, as is destroying their ability to appreciate art.
All I can say is thank heaven for Blu-ray. I’m done with Hollywood. The movie industry got sick in 2001 and died in 2019. If you want to see a “new” movie, there are plenty of great movies produced between 1930 and 1998 that you haven’t seen. And make sure to buy your hard copies before the fascist babies blacklist the hard copies and censor the digital copies. If the Woke Gestapo will censor The French Connection (1971), they will censor anything.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here and a review of the novel here.