The end of ‘woke' Hollywood? Unlucky, Florence, Mel's back

Times

20 hours ago

That didn't take long. Woke is dead, apparently. Or it is in Hollywood where, according to the gist of a recent New York Times report, 'diversity' is a dirty word, 'equality' a thing of the past and 'inclusion' is an embarrassment. Sydney Sweeney, allegedly, was the final nail in the coffin. Her controversial advert for American Eagle denims, one that appeared to dog-whistle the values of Aryan breeding (with a pun on 'genes'), is emblematic of a creative community that has effectively abandoned the concerns of the cancel culture brigade. In short, the all-girls Ghostbusters is out. Middle-aged white men? They're in.
And so Mel Gibson is back (of course he is!) with a new Jesus movie, called The Resurrection of the Christ. The film will be split into two tantalising parts, and released in 2027. As Mel would say, put it in your diary now, sugar tits! Next year, meanwhile, Hollywood celebrates the greatest middle-aged white male of western culture, Odysseus, played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan's version of The Odyssey. Expect Oscars, chin-stroking analysis and Damon in full flight. The 54-year-old actor was one of the first Hollywood males, when the MeToo movement emerged, to suggest that the time had come for men to listen, and not speak. He promised, in 2018, to 'get in the backseat and close my mouth for a while'. Well, Matt, you know what they say? Time's up.
And, grandads, grab your Viagra, there's the news that 80-year-old Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas is back in smut mode. The Hungarian-American controversialist, who also wrote the sleazy Nineties classics Showgirls and Sliver, has allegedly been paid $2 million to reboot Basic Instinct for an anti-woke audience. When interviewed about the project Eszterhas promised that this new instalment would be a 'wild and orgasmic ride'. It's a phrase, presumably, that the octogenarian also applies to bath time, doing the crossword and eating an extra portion of Ambrosia creamed rice.
Point being, is that it? Is it really all over? No Pixar cartoons, like Elio and Elemental, about being an outsider in an oppressive, heteronormative society? No more Florence Pugh in Don't Worry Darling, mobilising terrible dialogue and a 'world's worst' performance from Harry Styles into a battle against the tyrannical patriarchy? No more flop Marvel blockbusters such as Eternals, where superheroes from marginalised social groups spend hours hectoring everyone about the importance of inclusion while ignoring the fundamentals of narrative, character and dramatic tension? Angelina Jolie as the first superhero with dementia? Just forget about it.
Being a middle-aged white man, however, I'm not sure I'm ready to go backwards either. I have no interest in Eszterhas's wild and orgasmic ride, and I certainly don't want to revisit a Michael Douglas type, in a V-neck jumper and saggy buttocks, humping his way through another Basic Instinct. And, yes, I loved the Lethal Weapon movies at the time, but I'm not especially intrigued by the proposed new Maga-baiting sequel Lethal Weapon 5 — Gibson recently said of that movie's screenplay, 'It's the best of all of them.' And though I'm excited to see what Christopher Nolan has done with The Odyssey (I loved the Ralph Fiennes version, The Return, this year) it's baffling to think that we might now need some sort of protective push towards the work of 'endangered' middle-aged white men in Hollywood.
• Thanks to Sydney Sweeney we are now living in the 'can trousers be Nazi?' era
This, at a time when we are surely only a handshake deal away from an official Trump movie, about and starring the subject? He is, after all, an inveterate cameo player, and has popped up in everything from Home Alone 2 to Zoolander to, my favourite, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. In that movie's one truly bizarre scene, cut from the final release, Trump delivers hairstyling tips to Gordon Gekko, asking, 'Did anyone ever tell you you'd look great — really great — in a combover?'
A big studio movie about Trump and his miraculous return to frontline politics would indeed signal the death of woke Hollywood. Just don't ask me to review it.
When Trump called Thompson
Speaking of Trump and movies … Emma Thompson has recently grabbed global headlines for revealing, apparently for the first time, or at least since she last revealed it on The Graham Norton Show in 2017 (how quickly they forget!), that Donald Trump once asked her out on a date. He called her on the set of Primary Colors, in 1997, on the day that her divorce from Kenneth Branagh had been finalised, and suggested they go to dinner. 'A nice divorcee. That's what he was looking for,' said Thompson, when rehashing the story at the weekend.
Now the joke here is in the disparity between these two public figures, and in the idea of Thompson, the Cambridge-educated left-leaning luvvie and Corbyn-supporting human rights activist, possessing anything at all in common with Trump. At the dinner date she talks Jane Austen while he does WWF. She mentions Greenpeace. He does tanning tips. And so on. Hilarious. Yes. Obviously.
I, however, am not so sure. She did one thing, for instance, that was very Trump to me, and probably me alone. At a London Film Critics' Circle bash in 2022, with the star-struck audience in the palm of her hand, she suddenly began reading from my (admittedly savage) review of her then recent, and much admired elsewhere, sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. She addressed the room and asked for me to reveal where I was sitting, and to show my face. Thankfully, I wasn't there (star sucking is, weirdly, not my bag), but I sometimes shudder to think about what exactly she had in store for me, and how far her retribution would've gone. Either way, it's always struck me as a mean-spirited gesture, certainly petty, clearly thin-skinned, and well, very Trump.