Wokeness in film is a spectrum which ranges, without exception, between the mildly annoying and the intolerable.
Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune duology is a good example of the former, managing to only be slightly annoying while being genuinely entertaining, yielding successful box office results.
It’s not surprising that a Dune adaption would be woke, of course. The 1972 novel is an anti-colonialist screed about how imperialist factions seek to greedily harvest the natural resources of the Middle Eas… err, I mean Arrakis, also known as Dune, while oppressing the indigenous Musli… sorry, I mean the indigenous Fremen, who are religious fanatics awaiting the coming of their Mahdi … yeah, any subtlety kind of ends there, as that’s quite literally the word describing the messianic figure awaited by both Middle Eastern Muslims on Earth and the Fremen on Dune.
It's a story that already strokes the anti-colonialist sensibilities of the modern woke, but director Denis Villeneuve made some artistic decisions that ramp up the wokeness.
For example, the Fremen liaison to House Atreides, Dr. Liet-Kynes, was played by Max von Sydow in David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation. In Dune content until 2021, from books and comic books to video games to movies and television series, he is a white man. In 2021, Villeneuve decided that Dr. Liet-Kynes should be portrayed by a black woman.
This is the merely annoying side of the woke film spectrum. This race and gender swap doesn’t really do anything to serve the story, and obviously nothing more than an attempt to pander to the stupid, yet central idea of wokeness in entertainment -- the idea that movies are somehow made better when all audience members can see someone onscreen who looks like them.
The new Dune movies are saved, however, by the fact that most of the woke choices at least make sense in the story, even if those choices were made for the wrong reasons. In the 1984 version, the Atreides, the Harkonnens, and the Fremen were all played by white actors, but it would make sense for there to be some racial differences between the different futuristic factions that existed for centuries or millennia on entirely different planets. The villainous white Harkonnen characters didn’t require race-swapping in Villeneuve’s 2021 reimagining for reasons that should be obvious to everyone by now, but it does make perfect sense that the Fremen might appear more like Middle Easterners or Africans rather than Europeans. The impulse to selectively put more “people of color” on the screen, in this instance, was slightly annoying because you know the stupid reason why the storytellers chose to do it, but it didn’t particularly impair the story to any great degree.
Sometimes, however, the stupid woke choices made by Hollywood are an absolute detriment to the story, as it was with the woke retelling of Count Dracula’s sailing to London in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.
The film adapts from Chapter 7 of Dracula, in which the captain’s log reveals the terror of the voyage, ending with a lifeless crew, and the captain lashed to the wheel, dead and holding a crucifix. It’s fantastic and largely unexplored material for a horror film. What horrors that crew must have seen!
No, as it turns out, they were bored to death by an anachronistic black doctor railing against white privilege in the 19th century or something, with the suggestion that the crew was almost saved by him and the only woman on board -- a strong, intelligent, and brave Transylvanian peasant girl who inexplicably speaks English and harbors exceptional leadership skills.
The wokeness in that movie was more than slightly annoying. The audience is puzzled throughout, extracted from the world that had been presented because none of it makes any sense. It was vexing, though somewhat tolerable as a bit of horror schlock, I suppose.
But some decisions don’t just annoy or confuse the audience, but makes us downright uncomfortable in looking at the screen.
One example of this is 2023’s Evil Dead Rise. The teenaged boy in the film who releases the evil spirit is played by a female Australian named Morgan Davies, who identifies as a trans man. The moment she appears on screen pretending to be a teenaged boy, the viewer is confused and uncomfortable. Audience members are already expected to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in a world where demonic incantations allow demons to possess the living in order to consume their souls, and on top of that, they’re expected to believe that this boy, who is clearly a girl, is actually a boy?
But perhaps the most disastrous and uncomfortable example of this is the recent series on AMC, Monsieur Spade. [Some minor spoilers follow.] The show takes place in France in 1969, and it stars Clive Owen as a retired Sam Spade, a character made famous by Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the character in The Maltese Falcon. It’s a very fitting role for Clive Owen and would have been generally enjoyable if it weren’t massively encumbered by the inclusion of a large man (trans actor Rachel Root) playing a key role as Sam’s British neighbor. The absurdity is unbearable, and his presence alone completely removes the viewer from the action onscreen. Here is this large man, Adam’s apple and all, wearing a dress and heels that accentuate his manly calves, speaking in a deep and masculine voice, and not only is the audience supposed to believe that he is a woman, but the characters on screen are also going along with it, also pretending that he’s a woman.
It's nothing short of an uncomfortable madness. I’m reminded of the notion of the uncanny valley, which is a “sense of unease or revulsion to humanoid robots that are highly realistic.” Same thing here. You know what the thing is meant to look like, but it’s not convincing enough to shake your knowledge that it’s not the thing it’s meant to look like, and that makes you uncomfortable.
My wife and I continued wondering after each episode when it would be revealed that he was actually a man and that his pretending to be a woman was part of a poorly concealed ruse in the story line -- but nope, it never happened. The series concluded with all the main characters sitting in a room, where it’s revealed that “she” is just a senior MI6 agent or some such. Again, the show is set in 1969 France, so even an actual woman in that role would be pretty unrealistic. To put what is obviously a man into that woman’s role is doubly ridiculous. It is peak wokeness.
None of this serves the story. More than that, it’s insulting to the audience, and in the worst examples like this, it makes the viewing experience altogether uncomfortable. I wouldn’t think that this would be the aim of filmmakers and storytellers.
But then, it appears I’d be wrong about that. The lady who’s been tapped to direct the new Star Wars film trumpeted that “it’s about time we had a woman come forward to shape the story in a galaxy far, far away,” and has explicitly stated that “she enjoys making men uncomfortable,” signifying that we have every reason to think that Hollywood will give us more silly woke nonsense before it gives us anything more entertaining.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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