Culture Wars! At the multiplex
Culture Wars! At the multiplex
On "Am I Racist?" and choosing to not take the bait
This past Thursday, I drove a half hour to watch a movie made by people who hate me and believe that my worldview needs to be destroyed. I watched this film during a week where the political Rorshach Test du jour was about whether certain people in a certain place were eating household pets. A very dumb topic of discussion. Also profoundly inhumane and mean-spirited, but mostly dumb. The point, it seemed, was not merely to defend the people or the place in question, but to show off what your defense of the people or the place meant about you. Are you a sympathetic voice for those who are pushed around and demonized? Do you believe in social progress and a bigger tent? Or do you stand with places left behind by progress, or at least places that you’d like to imagine are left behind by progress because that sounds like a less selfish thing to defend than outright hatred for an entire ethnic group?
You know this cycle, because you’ve lived this cycle thousands of times. Liberals/leftists/progressives attempt to push society in a new direction— sometimes artfully, sometimes clunkily, almost always earnestly. This then provokes a misanthropic response from conservatives, often accented in the language of victimhood. Progressives, in turn, attack the conservatives for some combination of illogic, bad taste or general offensiveness, which, of course, provides more evidence for the conservative siege mentality. Critiques are made. Insults are traded. Very little changes in the world, but the conservatives stay aggrieved, the progressives stay righteous and the circle remains unbroken.
I watched the movie that hates me in a conservative Milwaukee suburb, at 1:00 PM on the day it was released. It was being screened in a tiny theater in the far corner of a large multiplex. All of the signage outside advertised SCREEN X, AN IMMERSIVE THEATER EXPERIENCE. The movie that hates me was not on SCREEN X, thank goodness, but it did have those sprawling Lazy Boy seats, the kind that you can really sink into. The theater wasn’t packed, but it was far from empty. Another Rorschach test. Was the fact that anybody showed up for a 1:00 PM showing on a sunny Thursday a victory for MAGA Nation or were the mere sub-dozens gathered there in a Trumpy municipality a sign of a movement fizzling and dying? At a time such as this, most conversations are just debates about crowd size. Many people are saying, etc. etc.
I was a little late for the movie that hates me, so as I made my way to the far corner to my assigned Lazy Boy, I was afforded a decent survey of my fellow movie-goers. No offense to any of them, but it’s tremendously hard to look cool in that particular variety of furniture. Extremely comfortable, yes. But mostly stuck. A dozen strangers in Lazy Boys look like a dozen strangers sinking very slowly into quicksand, if quicksand was made of pleather and featured generously-sized cup holders. Being at the stage of life where I value coziness over cool, I love those cushy seats with all my heart.
Would you like to make a guess as to the demographics of my fellow theater-goers? You likely already have. We are skilled sorters, us Americans in 2024. Did you guess that, as I tried my best to unobtrusively navigate my way to my seat, the faces that stared back at me from their cup-holdered cocoons were all elderly and white? How presumptuous of you! How judgmental! But also, in this case, how accurate. On September 12th, 2024, the audience gathered for Am I Racist?, the Daily Wire’s inaugural foray into theatrically released films would consist of a dozen of Southeast Wisconsin’s presumably most woke-averse grandparents and also me, a bespectacled middle-aged bleeding heart who literally writes about race for a living. Here we were. Alone, together, ready to have our worldviews either complimented or excoriated.
If you’re not already familiar, The Daily Wire is a Nashville-based conservative media outlet known primarily for podcasts where fast talking hosts like Ben Shapiro call liberals imbeciles, but they have designs to be much more than that– a true economic and cultural behemoth, a media empire capable of slaying wokeness once and for all. Black mermaids? Not on The Daily Wire’s watch, thank you very much.
Am I Racist? is the latest project from one of The Daily Wire’s biggest stars, a former drivetime radio shock jock turned decidedly un-merry culture war jester named Matt Walsh. You may remember him from his previous film, What Is A Woman?, a feature length exploration of one man’s enmity for trans people and his nostalgia for a world where ladies were ladies and fellas opened pickle jars for them (that’s not a rhetorical flourish on my part, mind you, that film’s denouement is a literal scene of Walsh’s wife asking him to open a pickle jar).