I was recently discussing the idea of “Get Woke, Go Broke” with a friend, and as so often happens my best insights in the conversation came after it was over. For those who don’t know, the phrase refers to entertainment franchises that change to become ideologically “Woke” (which is, long story short, basically academic Marxism mutated to be about race rather than economics) and then are greatly disliked by their fans, often resulting in poor sales.

The claims about the economic performance of entertainment franchises which become Woke are just a matter of statistics and not something I find very interesting. That these things are frequently hated by the fans of the franchise, I do find interesting. Why that is, I’m going to discuss.

Before I get into it, something I want to put on the side is the very real phenomenon of people who make bad movies blaming audiences thinking they’re bad not because they’re bad, but because the audience is un-woke. Hence the incompetents who made Star Wars Episodes 7-9 claiming that fans disliked Rey because they are misogynists rather than because she’s a badly written character. This is common enough, but people clutching at straws to excuse their incompetence isn’t very complex and requires no explanation. (There is also a tribal element; “they hate me because I’m part of our tribe” will rally the tribe to one’s defense, while “they had me because I did a truly terrible job” won’t.) So yes, this happens a lot, and for any given movie where its poor performance is being blamed on its fans being bigots of some kind or other, this is probably the horses in “when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” However, what I’m interesting in talking about, today, is the zebras.

The much more interesting aspect to “Get Woke, Go Broke” is the indirect causal relationship between a franchise going woke and its fans starting to hate it. This relates to what Jonathan Pageau often calls “one’s hierarchy of values”. What is most important? The answer to that question will dictate what sorts of trade-offs one will make. Once the most important value is satisfied, what is next most important? That, too, will dictate what sorts of trade-offs one will make. This world is one in which we never get exactly what we want and must always choose between alternatives; one’s hierarchy of values will dictate what choices we make. And this is the key to explaining “Get Woke, Go Broke”: if the top of one’s hierarchy of values is making a good movie, every decision one makes will be oriented toward that goal. If at the top of one’s hierarchy of values is making a woke movie, then making a good movie is not at the top of that hierarchy, and one’s choices will follow from what is at the top. One will make a good movie only by accident—if the stars line up and what makes a maximally woke movie just happens to also make a good movie.

You can see the same thing in a lot of “Christian” movies, by which I mean low budget movies which are about everything in the movie being culturally Christian according to a particular Christian culture. These are notoriously bad, and for good reason: at the top of the hierarchy of values of the people making them is not making a good movie.

(I should pause for a moment to explain that the nature of a hierarchy is that everything on the hierarchy is at the top of what is below it, thus we can consider only a portion of the hierarchy and refer to what’s at the top of that portion. Obviously if what truly mattered most to a human being in all of life was making a good movie, he might lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, burn, pillage, defraud and do all manner of evil in order to make the best movie he could. In short, a man with the wrong thing at the top of his entire hierarchy of values will be an evil man. (That said, evil men may, of course, do good by accident.) When I refer to what is at the top of the hierarchy of values of the people making a movie, I mean that sub-set of their hierarchy of values which is particular to making a movie. Obviously such people should of course have God at the top of their hierarchy and loving their neighbor in the same manner that they love themselves just below that. Making a good movie should come further down in their hierarchy. That said, it is not convenient to talk about the very top of the hierarchy when talking about particular actions because the things at the top apply to literally everything that one does, meaning that talking about them conveys no information which a person should not have already known. That is, they’re obvious. It is sometimes useful to occasionally point out the obvious, but it is never useful to always point out the obvious.)

The idea of a movie “going woke” is somewhat often described in relationship to the races of the actors relative to the races of previous actors for a role. While woke movies will frequently feature “race swapping,” this on its own in no way makes a movie woke, and certainly doesn’t make it bad.

A good example of the actor’s race not lining up with the character’s race which was both excellent and not-woke is Kenneth Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing. In it, Denzel Washington played Don Pedro, who was the prince of Aragon (an area in northern Spain). In the late 1500s (which is around when the play was set) it would have been fairly strange for a prince of Aragon to have sub-saharan African features, but Denzel Washington is an extremely talented actor, and in watching the movie we (the audience) are playing pretend anyway, so this is one more thing to pretend in exchange for getting to watch a fabulous performance. Truth be told, the mostly English cast looked English, not like Spaniards or Italians, either. One always has to make allowances for movies, and it only takes a few seconds to figure out that this is just one more such allowance to make, rather than it being a change to the thing we’re all pretending is going on.

And this is really the key to the whole difference between it being fine that actors don’t match their parts, and things going woke and fans hating it.

Denzel Washington wore the exact same historical costumes that everyone else in the film did (who knows how historically accurate they actually were?). He spoke the exact same lines written by Shakespeare that any other actor in the part would speak. He had the same sort of mannerisms (body language, cadence of voice, etc) as everyone else in the cast, which they used to convey to the audience that they were in Messina in the 1500s. In short, he played the part, he didn’t change the part. And being an excellent actor, he played the part excellently, and we the audience benefited.

When movies (and other entertainment) go woke, they don’t merely make different casting decisions. They change the part. This is because, being racists, to a woke person the race of the actor is more important than the character they’re playing. When a movie goes woke, it is not merely the race of the actor that changes, but also the race of the character. But you must remember that race, in this sense, is—as it always is to racists—far more than skin deep. To a woke person, being a racist, it must influence what the character does, and how people interact with the character. This often involves the inclusion of to-a-woke-person cathartic moments where some characters acts non-woke and the woke character rebukes them. This is where wokeness being at the top of their hierarchy of values instead of making a good movie being at the top of their hierarchy of values shows itself.

A good thought experiment, by the way, which will make much of this clear is to consider a Nigerian movie of Murder on the Orient Express which casts entirely Nigerians with sub-Saharan African features (as, currently, most Nigerians have). Suppose further that it is extremely faithful to the Agatha Christie novel, making only those changes necessary in adapting a book into a movie. It would be set on the Orient Express in 1934 starting in Istanbul and heading to London. It would feature Hercule Poirot, speaking English in as good a Belgian-French accent as the actor can do. The other characters would be Russian, American, English, and so-forth as they were in the novels, again featuring the appropriate period clothing and with the actors doing the best accents they can (English actors cannot always do good American accents; it’s not easy to do accents in different languages, so Nigerian actors may fair no better than English actors, on average). Such a thing would be excellent or terrible or anywhere in between according to the skill of the actors and the many other people working on it, from makeup artists and costumers to set designers and photographers. For the sake of this thought experiment, let us suppose that they’re all quite skilled, and everyone does their job extremely well.

Now, consider people’s reactions to it.

Ordinary fans of Agatha Christie would, except those very few with very weak imaginations, enjoy it. The novelty of the thing might be talked about, but on the whole, its faithfulness to the original would be appreciated.

By contrast, one would expect woke people to not like it at all. They would find the way that the black people (it’s unlikely they’d deign to distinguish Nigerians from any other people with sub-Saharan African features) took on European attributes to be “problematic”. They would complain about how it didn’t “challenge” anything but instead reinforced “white supremacy”. In short, they would complain about how it was not woke.

Now, all that is required to see why “Get Woke, Go Broke” has a causal connection to fans hating woke movies is to consider that the artistic taste of the artist matters as much as his talent does to the quality of the art he makes. If he thinks it bad, according to his taste, he will keep working on it until he thinks that it’s good, according to his taste. If the thing at the top of his hierarchy of values is not artistic quality, he can only make an artistically good movie by accident.

There’s nothing unique to Wokeness about this; as I noted it applies just as much to “Christian” movies which are basically trying to be Sunday School lessons. It also applies to patriotic movies whose goal is to beat patriotism into the thick skulls of the people watching. It applied to the anti-drug commercials of the 1980s whose makers had “don’t use drugs” higher up on their hierarchy of values than “be truthful”.

It’s not that people always violate what is lower down on their hierarchy of values. That’s why it’s a hierarchy; if the top is satisfied one can work to satisfy the things of lower importance, too. It’s just that it’s rare that we get to satisfy them all at once, and the hierarchy tells us what goes when they’re in conflict.