The Cain Mutiny
Marjorie Morningstar
Youngblood Hawke
War and Remembrance
Eh, they could have accused you of virtue signaling I suppose. Their using “woke” there is indicative of it having turned into simply a snarl word – ISTM it’s more like, when you say you don’t like wasting food (or insert any resource here) they are primed to read that as you making an indictment of the general consumer society and now they feel compelled to question if they agree with that.
Because to them your mission as author/artist/entertainer is to reaffirm what gave them enjoyment before, full stop, and they don’t want to hear anything else. “Shut up and just dribble the ball.”
Woke? Is that how Wouk is pronounced? I always thought it was pronounced wook.
If you’re snooty Trans-Atlantic and socially enlightened, you’re “”wook”
It is pronounced woke.
But it’s also The Caine Mutiny, so no points for Hufflepuff.
I bring up the not in person part because I have a strong suspicion that such voices are amplified online. That because of this amplification, these voices seem more numerous than they actually are. But maybe I’m naive, and people are worse than I think they are.
Judging from what I saw online, yeah. Of all the people I’ve talked to, that wasn’t their complaint about the new Star Wars movies.
“Woke” came to be used by the black community first to denounce unfair acts that a good number of minorities were also missing or not pushing back. Considering how the right wing turned the word into a slur, a lot of the time the slur is directed to businesses that are too friendly (in their opinion) to minorities. After years of looking at how it is being used, by many on the right wing, it is used as a more polite way to say ‘don’t be a “Ni**** lover”’; just as it was, and is still, directed to many white people that do care about injustice towards minorities.
Oh, I get that too. Same crowd, I think.
A lot of it seems to come from (or at least be propped up by) notions of ‘established tradition’. Sort of: “if racism was good enough for my grandpa, it’s good enough for me”. People see the world changing in a way that means they themselves might need to change, and they don’t like the idea that they might need to change.
Studios sometimes change some scenes for release in foreign markets but I can’t think of an example of different edits for different U.S. markets.
I know that something like a director’s cut might not be booked in a theater that had booked the original because the new film* is super-raunchy, for example.
But you imply a mass-market movie having different scenes in New York than it has in Peoria. Does that ever happen with wide-release films?
*that’s an entirely different film though. It’s not just deleting 10 frames of a woman’s breasts or gay men kissing.
I agree with the OP, just wanted to add a couple of notes:
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Obviously the ethnic status of the lead is insufficient information on how woke a film is. It’s OK when giving a general accounting of films in general (as the OP is) but may be misleading on an individual basis.
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These days I only hear “woke” as a pejorative, by people on the right complaining about it. So I fear that the word now intrinsically implies a number of negative connotations and feature creep (e.g. dictating that all black people must be shown in a positive light). I can’t think of a better alternative word though.
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British TV is quite “woke” now. That is, almost all new shows seem to have ethnic minorities, gay people and women going against stereotypes, and disabled people played by disabled actors. I’ll confess that at first I did roll my eyes, but I think that was just because it was quite noticeable. Once adjusted, of course it makes sense for the people on screen to look the same as the people around me.
Hollywood has a looong way to go to match this.
Yeah, it doesn’t mean anything when you look at any one individual movie. It’s only when you look at a significant sampling of movies, and look at the collective statistics, as the OP has done, that you can draw a conclusion about movies as a whole.
I mean they don’t, not really.
We may have increased the diversity in gender, sexuality, and race, but what about us ugly people, when are we going to get represented?
If the people on screen looked like the people around me, they’d have crooked, stained, and missing teeth. They’d be overweight, with no makeup, shabby and mismatched clothes, and unshaven.
The few times I see someone who looks like me on the screen, it is a signal to the audience that this is a loser who plays video games in his mother’s basement while eating cheetos all day.
Genuinely on the first draft of my last post I mentioned this. 
I left it out just because it was another tangent in an already somewhat long post.
Arguably the move toward diversity began in the world of High Fashion approximately 30 years ago, with eye-catching, norm-challenging multiracialism and homoeroticism. But High Fashion is not about egalitarianism whatsoever. So while the backlash certainly stems from racism, it’s also a response to “we’re rich and beautiful and also your moral superiors.”
To be fair, I was being a bit facetious with the first part. I don’t go to the movies to see the people I see at Wal-Mart.
But as to the second, they could stand to be a bit more “woke”, as it does seem as though anyone who is portrayed as having less than a perfect body has something wrong with them.
In response to the OP, I don’t think the complaint about wokeness is necessarily about the race/gender of the characters themselves but their message. Conservatives would throw a huge fit over white men preaching a leftist message, and be just fine with minority women touting a right-wing message.
When it comes to LGBT, though, that’s probably where they still draw the line no matter what.
I know you’re talking about what’s done nowadays, but I would just note that this practice was by no means unheard-of in the US at least up to the mid-20th century or so.
For instance, some scenes with black performers such as the Nicholas Brothers and Bill Robinson and Lena Horne would be cut out of movie prints shown in southern US theaters:
Scenes were cut only if the black performers were featured rather in demeaning servant roles. Those got through just fine.
But the practice of individualizing films for locations was far more prevalent than that.
Most states and many cities had their own censorship boards and they would force a variety of cuts before they would pass the movies. There could be literally dozens of variants of individual films.
And most countries demanded their own cuts as well, although by the late 50s many European countries would allow nude and other so-called risque scenes and many movies had them added for extra viewership overseas. Movies you wouldn’t imagine, like Sex Kittens Go to College, which was utterly clean in the states but had a robot fetishing scene abroad.
Most of this nonsense in the U.S. stopped six decades ago, of course. You’d have to be very old to have ever experienced it. Television prints were normally made from a single master, so most of the variants appear only in collections. Changes for other countries still abound.
? I don’t quite get this. Did you perhaps mean something like “only if the black performers were featured other than in demeaning servant roles”? Yeah, I agree that even southern theaters seem to have had no problem with movies depicting black performers as domestics and other subservient roles.