The Problem With ‘Woke’ Media
One of the most common complaints levied at modern tv-shows and films – apart from an overuse of CGI – is their ‘wokeness’. Particularly in the western world, it seems each new super-franchise that gets launched is met with animosity – mostly from the political right – about anything from the casting to the writing to the messages being preached. And every time, the response from the creators and cast of the media in question seems to be that their critics and detractors are bigoted, small-minded, or even racist.
As an average viewer in a big city with left-leaning political ideals, I find the problem to be, that a substantial amount of that criticism is, in fact, justified.
In 2021 Amazon premiered the fantasy show Wheel of Time based on the homonymous book-series by Robert Jordan. This show had been long-awaited, as longtime fans of the series were excited to finally see their favourite characters brought to life on the (home-theatre) silver screen. And Amazon ran an intense marketing campaign to reel in more of their potential demographic in the void left behind by HBO’s recently ended Game of Thrones. But there was a problem. Even before the series premiered, as Amazon released press photos announcing their cast, some fans started to note the curiously perfectly equal ethnic variety among cast members. Especially among the main characters, a bunch of kids from a small village in the middle of nowhere.
This in itself is not a new phenomenon. Look up the phrase “Representation matters” and you will find countless articles from the last decade proclaiming the virtues of ethnically diverse casting in mainstream media, with a focus on reducing stereotypes of underrepresented groups. The main arguments often being that for the majority of film and tv history, practically the only people you would see on screen were Caucasian heterosexuals. Which is certainly true for American and European media. And within the last 15-20 years the western world has seen a shift in the people being featured in mainstream productions, although white people – the largest demographic in this part of the world – continue to be featured the most.
I think this is a very sympathetic cause, and I believe – in spite of evidence to the contrary on certain online forums – that most people actually feel the same. I think the average person has no problem connecting to another human being, just because they happen to differ in skin tone. For one thing, non-white people have also been enjoying movies for the last 60 years in spite of the homogenous cast, so they at least have the capacity. Therefore, I think we have been seeing an overall positive change in western media in the 21st century. But this new doctrine doesn’t come without its own flaws.
As a big fan of stories and storytelling as a craft, I find myself annoyed more and more by the practical application of this new way of thinking, and the way it seems to make every new piece of media more generic. Returning to the example of Wheel of Time, I too was a long-time fan of the books excited to see this rendition of the story told in show-form. And I too felt let down by the incoherent casting.
The problem with Jordan’s books is that they began publishing in 1990, long before the current philosophy regarding representation had broken though the mainstream. So, Jordan wrote a story about a remote village in a world with medieval equivalent technology, where people had lived mostly undisturbed for over 2000 years. Expectedly this region is quite ethnically homogeneous. In the books the inhabitants are described similarly to real-world Italians, but for the purposes of a tv-show one could really have picked any ethnicity. The point though is to actually pick a single ethnicity to sell the isolated, close-minded nature of the setting, instead of having it look like a downtown bar in a major American city.
This focus on ethnic homogeneity might seem petty or nitpicky, but the shared bloodline of the village-people is actually an important plot-point in the series for a number of reasons. Not least of which is the fact that the series’ main protagonist is importantly different in appearance than everyone else. In fact, his ancestry turns out to be hugely important in the later books, and its importance is foreshadowed from the very beginning in his physical differences. This is obviously quite a lot less noticeable in the tv-show, where he is simply another ethnic representative in a cast that looks like the cover of a newsletter in an American college. And this is only one example of the many ways the show seems afraid to actually tell the story it is based on.
As a viewer I am constantly reminded, that I’m watching a show, by constant immersion breaking akin to watching an 80’s action movie where physics are more of a suggestion than coherent laws. And coherency is the keyword here, because even in a world of monsters and magic, internal consistency is needed to sell the illusion of realism. The problem isn’t that this one casting decision has ruined the series, but that is a type of decision that is often seen alongside a host of similar poor choices. None of which are made to tell a better or more engaging story. Which, overall, was also the case for Wheel of Time.
It feels as if casters and producers in Hollywood are deathly afraid of not adhering to the current zeitgeist to the point that they force every product to conform to the same checklist of approved decisions. Worse still, this is done without any thought to alternative ways of achieving the same effect. In the case of Wheel of Time, the story told over 14 volumes takes the characters all over the world and introduces a multitude of different nations and peoples. This feels like a prime opportunity to introduce many different ethnicities among the new characters that join the story going forward.
But Amazon – “bold” enough to include representation in their casting but not bold enough to make the entirety of the starting village inhabited by a real-world American minority – would rather create a much more muddled world with no clear national distinctions, losing much of the potential in the later part of the story to portray the individual nations strife-ridden cooperation against the forces of darkness. All of this also extends to the writing of these stories and the messages they portray as there appears to be a very limited set of ideals that are currently kosher to the ‘modern audience’.
I will not go as deeply into the other examples of this, but the coup-de-grace for me, was the opening to Episode 7, where a pregnant woman in labour(!) fights off 5 armoured soldiers, 3 of them simultaneously in a fight-scene that would put Bollywood action-flicks to shame. Granted this woman comes from a race of very martially gifted people, but they aren’t magic. And while the current political climate might lend the scene some leniency in its reception – Look up the scene and you’ll find countless online outlets proclaiming it to be a fantastic example of girl-power, as if there was no other way to make the audience feel impressed by a woman giving birth without the aid of modern medicine, alone on a snowy mountainside – it is hard to see this scene aging any better than the infamous shield-skating scene with Legolas from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
An unfortunate side-effect of this complicated mess is that it makes it look like the actual bigoted minority is right. Currently, if I’m picking out a new show or film to watch on any streaming service, I can pretty much spot the uninteresting generic shows simply by looking at the casting on the poster. Not because ethnic minorities (in America) can’t act as well as anyone, but because these race-based castings are symptomatic of media that is simply trying to fulfil some producer’s list of defendable decisions.
It makes me wonder why, if these producers truly cared about positive social change, they would not simply invest in new stories that are not based on 30-year-old books by white authors with many themes that might be considered problematic by modern standards (like the authoritarian nation that enslaves female magic wielders with magical leashes and treats them like dogs). But of course, the simple answer is money. Hollywood has no interest in telling stories that aren’t deemed profitable and Amazon released a generic show that disappointed many long-time fans for the exact same reason there were long-time fans to disappoint: It was an established IP.
I love stories that have something to say. Stories that reveal the inner workings of their authors and stories that are honest and genuine in their beliefs. Many modern pieces of media fail these qualifications for me, as producers and publishers fall over themselves trying to test screen and iterate upon their products to create the most inoffensive, formulaic trifles that they can be fairly certain will return their investment.
Ultimately, we as audiences are to blame. Until we learn to be more curious of things that fall outside the accepted norm, and until we stop calling everyone who even slightly disagrees with us sexists, racists, and idiots, I wouldn’t put 2 pennies in a non-clinically tested film either.