...But Disney Could Be Better

This is how

Yesterday I read about how Disney really wasn’t remotely a fascist. The anti-communist group he joined was also an anti-fascist group and had some recorded Jewish members. When Walt Disney saw To Kill a Mockingbird his response was that he wished he could make a movie like that. I learned Lilo and Stitch had this outtake that looks better than anything that actually made it into the film regarding depicting Hawai’i in a way that doesn’t look just superficial.

I refuse to call things “woke” in a derogatory sense anymore. Woke is just a Black slang so I’m not going to make it a negative thing. Anyway, Star Trek, X-Men, The Matrix, etc. really were woke in the non-derogatory way, if we get rid of them what are we going to do, watch Hallmark movies? That sounds like garbage. I don’t want to watch Hallmark movies, I want to watch science fiction. The thing with Disney in particular is for most of its history they really didn’t do science fiction at all, the public wouldn’t accept that just like they wouldn’t accept To Kill a Mockingbird or the scene making fun of Hawai’ian tourists being racist and clueless. Heck, saying that some science fiction ideas and racism are partially equivalent was literally a lot of the point of X-Men. Making a film using actual science fiction is too strange for mainstream audiences like making a film using actual Hawai’i is too strange for mainstream audiences even if their idea is not at all valid, and that’s why Lilo and Stitch isn’t very good, because it held back too much.

I don’t think this fully exonerates Disney from making films that are clearly nowhere near as good as what they should be. The corporation should probably still take those risks that they refused to take and the people behind the corporation should’ve made different decisions. Lilo and Stitch isn’t magically an enjoyable film for me now that I know it could’ve easily been better, in fact it’s worse because I’m thinking about what we could’ve had. The correct word for things you don’t like isn’t woke, it’s tokenism. They just throw in a Black woman or whatever for no reason and it’s all very superficial. I know not everyone who said woke means to be secretly racist or anything but from now on I’m not saying it in a derogatory way at all and I’m leaving it to the people who actually are racist.

Yes, Ibram X. Kendi is really dumb and racist against White people, but I don’t think having more representation in film, comics, etc. should ever be conflated with these kind of opinions anyway, it’s not like it was back when representation meant Star Trek: The Next Generation and those kinds of things. Those stupid opinions are much more recent and we should carefully remember that. Saying Black people in movies means we have to discriminate against White people is like saying we should equate the movie Alien with radfems who want to oppress all men as supposed revenge for the patriarchy or whatever because there’s a female lead in Alien. That’s just stupid. Anyone who thinks that is clearly just unhappy about female leads, not about radfems, so I’m going to apply the same logic to Black people etc.

I think one of the issues of our time is that there really are a lot of people who are racist. I think most people who are racist just feel like life owes them things so they have to throw other races under the bus to get things. Same for sexists and genders etc. However, there’s also just a sort of bureaucratic aspect to socially not being racist that’s similar to the bureaucratic aspect of navigating universities or businesses. Just like no matter how much talent you have, if you can’t navigate the bureaucracy of the university, you’re not getting through, no matter how non-racist you are, if you aren’t up to date with how to sound non-racist today and how to address the points of the idiot of the moment like Ibram X. Kendi who says that you should discriminate against White people, people will just call you a racist.

Disney doesn’t make better films mostly just because of corporate greed, and while that’s not really excusable, I think it is possibly changeable and redeemable if they change. Mostly people probably just have to demand better films from them first and we’ll get better films.