The Hollywoke Strain

Michael Crichton warned about ideological contagions long before Hollywood succumbed to one of its own.

The late great author Michael Crichton gave Hollywood one of its biggest franchises, Jurassic Park — still going strong — and the television monster hit ER. Most of his novels became major films, including The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Rising Sun, and Timeline. Yet today, were Crichton a live white male instead of a dead one (he died in 2008), producers would ban him for having opposed their woke mind virus before it metastasized.

Crichton’s 1994 bestseller Disclosure depicted the dark side of the now Hollywood sacred cow, the Girlboss, at the time rising on both sides of the screen. In the book, the happily married protagonist’s hot ex-girlfriend — the Male Gaze not yet having been ideologically censored — and now boss, tries to seduce him. When he rebuffs her, she charges him with sexual harassment.

“Please understand that communists do this on purpose … They live for destroying beautiful things. Especially the ones most important to you.”

Already back then, Hollywood didn’t appreciate the theme of a straight white family man being destroyed by a professional woman. But it did appreciate the book’s commercial success (19 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, five at number one). So, Warner Bros bought and made Disclosure with two big stars. Unfortunately, one of them was the non-hot Demi Moore, who was getting every prominent female role in the Nineties, until Striptease — based on another huge bestseller by Carl Hiaasen — got her stripper act laughed off the screen. But Disclosure was a hit.

In 2004, the woke mind virus was starting to metastasize when Crichton published State of Fear, a novel blasting global warming — er, climate change — alarmism. Although another New York Times bestseller, Hollywood wouldn’t touch the book. By then, the Message began overruling the money.

Michael Crichton’s breakout bestseller, The Andromeda Strain (1969), the prototype for the scientific-medical thriller, could be a metaphor for current Hollywood. The novel starts with the entire population of a southwestern town wiped out by a mysterious space virus. An insulated team of scientists race against time to discover the nature of the germ and stop it from spreading. Yes, the mass public once read and popularized a technically complex book. It became a fine hit in 1971, with the movie directed by the masterful Robert Wise.

A similar team of experts may be needed to determine what killed Hollywood, where film and television critics once sufficed. The few people still working there may technically be alive, but the industry itself is crumbling to dust — like the bloodless corpses in The Andromeda Strain. I call the contagion the “Hollywoke Strain.” It may not consume the body, but most certainly the mind. Its latest victim is highly respected yet, in my view, very overrated director, Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer).

There is endless proof that wokeness has devastated the screen trade. Mega-bomb exhibits A to Z: brown Snow White, Latino heavy West Side Story, girl power The Marvels, all-female Ghostbusters, gay Eternals, feminist Charlie’s Angels, gay-environmentalist Strange World, black The Little Mermaid, etcetera. Clearly, audiences have had enough of their traditional values and admirable characters getting displaced by delusion and degeneracy.

This month, entertainment insider website That Park Place reported that Disney executives are considering removing the last Star Wars trilogy — featuring a girl Jedi and humiliating deaths for the original heroes — from Star Wars canon. In much the same way, they removed Kathleen (“The Force is female”) Kennedy from the presidency of Lucasfilm. Her and her sisters’ galaxy has gotten far, farther away.

One of my favorite new follows on X is @SirBylHolt. William Holte is a gay black conservative who checklists the woke elements in films and series, so the rest of us don’t have to suffer through them. A recent target of his is the race-swapped remake of the 1986 Rob Lowe hockey picture Youngblood.

“While the original focused on hockey, fights, and romance, the new version heavily emphasizes RACISM,” posted Holte. “Opponents repeatedly call Dean ‘boy’ during games … Dean’s father tells him ‘They suspended you because you’re Black’ … And there’s even a locker room scene where Dean is told to ‘tone down’ his anger because it makes the white players ‘uncomfortable’ … Reviews describe it as an ‘anti-racist screed.’”

So, white and black audiences that enjoyed a movie about hockey in the 80s would now have to endure a remake about racism. Thanks to Holte, they won’t. Anyone who attends this nightmare will have their head pounded by something worse than a hockey stick — the Message.

Which brings us to Christopher Nolan. He may be an overrated director in my view, but he’s smart enough to know about the film-killing potency of the Hollywoke Strain. Yet instead of avoiding it, he appears to be injecting it, into his adaptation of one of the greatest and oldest classics of literature, The Odyssey.

How many people, myself included, would flock to a screen retelling of the Homeric epic, full of gods and monsters, heroes and battles, sirens and villains, and a man’s long voyage home to his wife and son. What we won’t accept is a feminist interpretation of one of the manliest tales of all time. And that’s precisely Nolan’s source for the material — Emily Wilson’s gender heavy, morally ambiguous, unromantic translation of the story.

We’re not thrilled by Matt Damon as Odysseus. We’re fine with Ann Hathaway as Penelope. We dislike Zendaya as Athena, goddess of wisdom. We welcome the beautiful Charlize Theron as the seductive demigoddess Calypso. But we’ll avoid like the plague a small deluded girl, Elliot Page, as the fearsome warrior Achilles, and a plain black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, as Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Illium.” (Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus)

What could possess Nolan to sabotage his and Homer’s work? Yes, the Hollywoke Strain, but something else, perfectly described by Jesse Kelly on X. “Please understand that communists do this on purpose … They live for destroying beautiful things. Especially the ones most important to you.”

https://spectator.org/the-hollywoke-strain/