As the old saying goes, “politics is downstream of culture.” Unfortunately, this tends to be forgotten in election years, when this observation is even more applicable. If conservatives want to understand why progressives think and vote the way they do, they need only look at their media which influences them in profound ways.
Accordingly, it might be a good idea to pay attention to Disney and the unexpected triumph of its newest animated movie, Inside Out 2. Considering the moribund of the year’s movie lineup and the ongoing financial woes of Disney, it’s fair to declare that Inside Out 2 was an instance of divine intervention. Not only has it been the highest-grossing film of the year, earning over $1.6 billion worldwide, but it’s also the highest-grossing animated film ever.
It also happened to be a decent film, recreating much of the magic that made earlier Pixar and Disney movies so special. Like most critics, I thought the plot felt like a reheated version of the first movie and thus suffered from a superficial vision of the human psyche, but it was far and away better than Pixar’s other recent films like Soul, Onward, or Elemental.
That said, although Inside Out 2 gave Disney a new chance at life, not everyone who worked on the project was happy about it. According to a lengthy article in IGN, many of the people working on the project actually bemoan the film’s success and what it means for the future of Disney. They resent the film putting pressure on employees to produce, maintaining a strict creative hierarchy, and playing it safe on cultural issues.
While somewhat ridiculous in themselves, these objections shed light on the causes for the current decline of mainstream entertainment. This decline is not due to the changing formats brought on by streaming, the challenges in meeting the demands of a global audience, the unwieldy budgets eliminating creative risk-taking, or even the rise of dopamine culture transforming audiences into restless zombies who can’t sit still for a feature-length film. What’s killing Disney and Hollywood in general is the rampant immaturity and laziness of its creative workers.
Nearly everyone interviewed in the article whined about the amount of pressure they were under to finish the product and meet their respective goals. Apparently, the general desire among the producers to turn a profit on a project that cost over $200 million was a real downer for some of the staff. As one source relates, “That was the pressure felt by everybody. ‘We need this movie to succeed because we won’t have a studio [otherwise].’ And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time.”
In practice, this meant that some of them had to work overtime (for which they were fairly compensated), and that many of them had to revise and redo scenes that were not working. There was also a hope that everyone would keep a steady job after the project and receive handsome bonuses, but many were let go due to budget constraints, leaving them bitter.
Normal people who don’t work in Hollywood might wonder how the volatility and demands of a creative project are not always present when making a new movie. Evidently, there must be film productions that put little pressure on employees these days. Instead of being told that their movie needs to succeed, workers on movie sets are being told the opposite: the movie might flop, but it’s no one’s fault (except maybe the audience), so take it easy and guard your mental health. This would explain how television series like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, The Acolyte, or Rings of Power command massive budgets ($225 million, $180 million, and nearly $1 billion, respectively) and still look cheap and ugly.
Perhaps most striking is the resentment of employees towards the Chief Creative Officer of Inside Out 2, Pete Docter. Having been behind nearly every successful Pixar movie, including Toy Story, Wall-E, Up, and Inside Out, it obviously made sense to bring in Docter: “I mean, you saw the end result of that. [Inside Out 2] made a billion dollars at the box office,” one employee noted. “That was a direct result of Pete’s involvement. Pete’s a genius. Nobody can dispute this.”
And yet, the malcontents at Pixar will indeed dispute this. Yes, Docter had a proven track record and seemed to be a relatively nice boss, but he was also “a symbol of Pixar holding fast to an internal culture that’s stubbornly set in its ways, with an aversion to bringing on new directors and voices.” One of those “new directors” was rookie director Kelsey Mann who was originally overseeing Inside Out 2, but was replaced by Docter. As one source put it, “You cannot do anything without Pete. Literally nothing.”
Entertainment is not about advancing progress and indoctrinating the young, but about telling a story everyone can relate to and enjoy.
However, what really bothered employees about Docter was his insistence on making “universal stories.” That is, he wanted to make movies that a mass audience could relate to instead of pushing an agenda to appeal to a select group of people.
Naturally, this was a problem for a progressive staff who learned nothing from the failure that was Lightyear, which proudly featured a lesbian couple kissing. Many of them were set on telling the story of the Inside Out protagonist, 13-year-old Riley, having a romantic relationship with another girl—because this is what they think families with young children want to watch. Docter called for edits that make Riley “less gay,” which led to “a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.”
The fact that edits had to be made in the first place should again prompt one to wonder how things would be if Docter never took over and Mann was bullied into making Riley gay. What if Anger (a clear avatar for conservative white males), not Anxiety, was the antagonist trying to force Riley to conform to her heteronormative surroundings and deny how she feels? What if her goal in the movie is not making the hockey team, but kissing the girl of her dreams?
No doubt, it would be a disaster, but not necessarily because this would offend people. Rather because it would be boring and cliché. A gay Riley would have to be superlatively virtuous, never making mistakes and having only the purest intentions. And the only way to thwart a homophobic Anger would be to lecture him on how normal and natural it is to have same-sex attractions and act on them. Instead of a story about the feelings going on a journey in order to realize that they need to work together for a mentally healthy Riley, it would be the feelings going to war with Anger and his cronies to liberate Riley’s sexuality. As for Riley herself, she would mostly be hiding away, dealing with her insecurity, working up the courage to ask out the other girl, who will also conveniently turn out to be gay as well.
Out of respect for the queer community, it would be next to impossible to have any levity in any part of this story, for fear of trivializing and misrepresenting the issue and the people involved. The only potentially funny and relatable character might be the antagonist Anger, but even he would have to be censored and sufficiently flattened with no redeemable qualities so that younger viewers would understand he is bad for being homophobic while the other characters are good for celebrating Riley’s sexual identity.
Perhaps a handful of people might be genuinely interested in taking their kids to see this kind of film, but most people would understandably pass. Not because they don’t care about gay people, but because the movie will be humorless, dull, and patronizing. As the TV show “South Park” memorably pointed out, the novelty of “putting a chick in it and mak[ing] her lame and gay” doesn’t work—and it never did.
All the same, the disgruntled employees of Pixar will lament that they “may never see a major gay character in a Pixar movie.” Of course, they will see plenty of gay characters everywhere else, but Docter and some of the other sane people at Pixar have come to realize that this is simply not a good fit for family movies. They hold fast to the antiquated notion that entertainment is not about advancing progress and indoctrinating the young, but about telling a story everyone can relate to and enjoy. It’s about bringing people together in an artistic experience that speaks to their shared humanity. And most of all, it’s about making money.
Until today’s creative class understands this and adjusts their expectations accordingly, they can expect to continue seeing the decline of their industry.
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