The Case for Not Firing Whoopie, "The American Flag is so Evil I'm Going to [Checks Notes] Make Money From It!"Apple+Tiktok Killing Facebook? Leak Reveals Best Movie of '22? (The Five for 02/04/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
One quick note before we dive in. My friend Sho Baraka (a rapper/video producer/podcaster, he does a lot of stuff) is doing a really interesting video series for Black History Month. The first one is on Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), a novelist and filmmaker from southern Illinois who made “black cowboy western” stories, in part to encourage African Americans to abandon cities for a more promising (in his view) Agrarian life in the American West.
Michaeaux is a fascinating character that I’d never heard of, but I’m going to try to get to one of his novels this year. His most famous work, The Homesteader is old enough to be in public domain, so you can grab it for free on Kindle or other ereader.
It’s Friday, so let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
You’ve no doubt heard about Whoopie Goldberg’s insane comments about the Holocaust this week, and her two week suspension from a talk show where the five hosts may be able to add up their IQ scores to achieve a total that’s roughly equal to the points in the average NBA game.
There’s been a lot of buzz about Whoopie’s two week TV suspension vs. Gina Carano’s firing from Star Wars, when the former is an open racist and the latter simply asked people to be nice to their neighbors, via a meme posted to Instagram.
But the answer here is not to get “revenge” for Carano by seeking Whoopie’s firing. We’ve had more than enough eye-for-an-eye battles in Cancel Culture. With very rare exceptions, I’m just not interested in destroying anyone’s employment, famous or otherwise.
I’ll happily watch Whoopie (real name—Caryn Johnson—and yes, it’s pronounced “Karen,” which is fitting) in Picard Season 2, as loved her character in Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid and it’s pretty easy for me to separate the art from the artist.
And I’ll never be able to enjoy The View, but I wholeheartedly support that stupid show existing—because if major players in entertainment are going to be blatant anti-Semites, by all means, put your cards on the table.
My wife is half Jewish, my daughter is 1/4 Jewish…we are Christian by faith…but that wouldn’t have mattered in Nazi Germany, as Jews were slaughtered as a race, not as a religion. The fact that Whoopie is stupid enough not to know that is actually somewhat helpful out in the open, because it gets people talking about real history.
That same theory, in the darkest corners of the internet, only breeds more extremism and hate.
People in Hollywood (in particular, and entertainment in general), are too often narcissistic, sociopathic, cruel, bigoted…and have been able to largely keep that truth behind closed doors.
If keeping Whoopie on The View cracks those doors open a bit, great. It’s safer to have people like her out in the open vs. pushing their ideas underground, where they spread faster.
It would be great if Disney (who employs/employed both Goldberg and Carano) would agree with Woke cease-fire and put Carano back on The Mandalorian, who was a beloved character on one of the best shows on TV. It would be great for Disney to bring Carano back, not because of what she believes, or doesn’t believe, or what the Twitter mob says…but because Carano’s character served the plot of the show so well, and it’s a shame to diminish a great story on the basis of a few very vocal randos on Twitter and kill off a potential spin-off fans were hungry for.
But then again, if Disney were good at making decisions…the last Star Wars trilogy might have had…a plot, so I’m not holding my breath.
But the culture changes from the fringes in, not the middle out. So if you and I decide to stop calling for people to be cancelled for bad opinions, and instead defeat the stupid idea on it’s merit and get back to our lives…that’s not nothing.
By the way, Carano’s first movie since the Disney firing is out this spring, and it looks great.
[two]
“Bulletproof” doesn’t mean a whole lot in the world of tech. Like MSN, AOL, MySpace and a host of of other digital platforms that once held the world’s attention, Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is on the decline, and can’t figure out how to stop bleeding users.
A day after Facebook reported that its streak of user growth had come to an end, its parent company's stock plunged more than 26% in a staggering loss that obliterated more than $230 billion in market value and triggered Wall Street's worst drop in close to a year.
It wasn't just Facebook colliding with a brick wall in user growth. Like a horror movie killing off victims one by one, the hits kept coming when Meta reported earnings Wednesday.
Facebook said Apple changes that made it harder for apps to track iPhone users would cost about $10 billion in advertising revenue this year.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was struggling to compete with short-video app TikTok.
The company's expenses were skyrocketing as it poured $10 billion in augmented and virtual reality hardware to build its "metaverse."
[three]
Folk band Hiss Golden Messenger (decided the American flag is “overprivileged and insensitive.”
So, obviously, he’s selling merch with the flag on it now.
The band decided to delay their album by six months over the use of the American flag in the album artwork, due to the January 6th riots. Weird move, considering physical sales of music are so miniscule compared to streaming these days.
Now, they’re selling the same merch.
“In an instant, the cover felt totally inadequate and sort of childish, even,” Taylor tells Rolling Stone. “It was hard for me to imagine anyone having the bandwidth to pick up and listen to something covered in an American flag, because I certainly didn’t… The flag came to seem insensitive and overprivileged and dilettantish.”
Taylor’s decision wasn’t without ramifications. It necessitated both new art — a photo of him staring pensively in a field was chosen as the cover — and a new release date of June 25, four months later than planned.
Now, with a year passed since the insurrection, Hiss Golden Messenger are releasing a limited run of the previously pressed Quietly Blowing It and its original cover as a way to support democracy. Fifteen percent of proceeds from album sales will be donated to Democracy Now!, the nonprofit news organization.
The initial idea behind the cover — created by graphic designer Darryl Norsen — came in the midst of the turmoil and tragedy of the first year of the Covid pandemic. The art, Taylor says, “was a commentary about the state of our nation…[It] was meant to be subtle: I knew many people weren’t going to count the 52 stars — one for Puerto Rico and one for Washington, D.C.” It was also a further nod to Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the 1971 album that Hiss Golden Messenger reference in the title track.
The story is notable, not because Hiss Golden Messenger is notable (they aren’t), but because what this weird story reveals about virtue signaling.
Breaking it down:
A. The band thinks the American flag, more than 200 years old, and flown on the battlefield and on the moon, over liberated concentration camps and carried in celebration at the Olympics…has now permanently been altered by a handful of idiots wandering around the U.S. Capital. According to this view, one day can cancel 200 years of selflessness, heroism and sacrifice.
By that same reasoning…if this Missouri serial killer was in my showing of House of Gucci (improbable, but technically possible), does that make the movie bad? I mean, in that case, the movie would be “associated” with a brutal murder?
B. If the band does believe the flag stands for bad things…why are they selling it, even if 15% of the profits are going a nonprofit. If someone were to sell KKK hoods online, but give 15% of the profits to HBCU’s (and kept the other 85% of each sale), would that be justified?
I believe the band is sincere here…but this is virtue signaling at it’s finest.
Nobody is really being helped, a large number of people are generally annoyed (those who *gasp* like the American flag), and the band has falsely positioned themselves as the champions who vanquished the 01/06 riots (actually, local D.A.’s did that…those people are in jail).
Rock and pop music used to be about rebellion, but those who create our pop culture now stand with the government, major corporations and woke social media influencers.
There was a time when young people at music festivals were actually arrested for turning the American flag into clothing in the 1960’s and 1970’s, during \
Getting arrested in the name of free speech took real courage, as they were defying federal law at the time.
It takes no courage at all to go full Karen in an interview with a corporate magazine and keep 85% of the profits from imagery you have condemned.
[four]
In the wake of the Joe Rogan controversy, a popular science podcast is pivoting to offer Joe Rogan rebuttal episodes.
The makers of an award-winning science podcast on Spotify say they're dropping their regular show amid the Joe Rogan COVID-19 misinformation row.
Wendy Zukerman and Blythe Terrell, respectively producer and editor of "Science Vs," say they'll now only make shows "intended to counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify."
Great. This is how the free market is supposed to work.
You should listen to both.
(Hat Tip: Chris Spangle)
[five]
It’s probably a bad idea to name The Batman as my favorite movie of 2022 after watching a three minute clip…but holy cow. It took several years for moviegoers to get over the blah-ness of Twilight (although, in retrospect…those aren’t TOO bad), and realize Robert Pattison is an amazing actor. In his (very) brief screen time here, he owns your attention. The grittiness of the lighting and scene are on point. Simply superb. In theaters March 4th.
The next big show out of South Korea is making waves on Netflix. All of Us Are Dead follows a zombie infested high school, and has rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s not often that history and comedy meet for the premise of a show, but in the case of Stede Bonnet, “a pampered aristocrat who abandons his life of privilege to become a pirate,” a retelling of the (very odd) man’s life obviously lends more to comedy than drama. Rhys Darby (Flight of the Concords, Yes Man), Fred Armisan (Portlandia, Saturday Night Live), Leslie Jones (Ghostbusters, Saturday Night Live) and Taika Watiti (Thor: Ragnarock, Avengers: Endgame) triples down on acting, writing and producing duties. On HBO Max in March. First trailer here.
Nine years after being announced, the blockbuster HALO game franchise is finally making it to live action TV. The first trailer debuted during the AFC championship game, creating very solid buzz, with substantial positive reaction from fans around the high budget action and special effects.
Believe it or not, the plot and lore could go pretty deep here, as the story revolves around a galactic crisis when a group of alien races from several planets band together to form a death cult to wipe out the human race for religious reasons. Faced with imminent annihilation, the military secretly steals children, leads their families to believe the kids have died…and puts those children in a program to genetically enhance them into super soldiers, which raises significant ethical questions (obviously).
The majority of TV and movie projects based on video games have been terrible, but that track record is quickly turning around. Whether or not HALO can make the jump from console to streaming show is TBD, but sci fi is the best when the genre shows us other worlds…so that we will reflect on our own. The source material certainly lends to the possibility of a great show here.
Debuting on Paramount+ March 24th.
And speaking of video game to live action…
Mortal Kombat, the movie based on the long-running hyper-bloody video game series, featured one of the best opening scenes I’ve ever seen…in any genre. (I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say the first seven minutes belong in film school curriculum).
But that brief flash of glory was followed by about 90 minutes of “what am I watching?” The very mediocre action-er is getting a sequel, release date TBD. This time, writing duties will be tackled by Jeremy Slater, who handled the scripts for the upcoming Marvel series Moon Knight (which hits Disney+ in March, but already has a lot of hype+).
This publication only lightly covers video game news, but Playstation buying up Bungie, the studio behind the mega-hit Destiny game series, for $3.6 billion, can’t go un-noticed.
Traditionally, most games have been available across multiple platforms (XBOX, Playstation, PC etc.), but with Microsoft and Sony gobbling up the studios via acquisition, it’s likely that major titles will only be available on one major console (or the other) going forward.
MUSIC NEWS: NYU is offering a Taylor Swift course this spring.
From The Hill:
According to the course description on the school website, the class "proposes to deconstruct both the appeal and aversions to Taylor Swift through close readings of her music and public discourse as it relates to her own growth as an artist and a celebrity."
Students will also delve into an analysis of culture, teen girlhood, fandom and whiteness through readings and lectures.
This is fodder for Buzzfeed listicles, not scholarly work. When I see a course like this at a top university, I realize why I’ve had so much trouble working with recent grads from “big name” schools in a professional setting…because many spent four years in a “reality” that doesn’t exist.
(Hat Tip: Craig Dunham at Second Drafts)
MUSIC/MY PICK: Feel free to skip if this doesn’t appeal to you (but then again, you might give it 60 seconds)…but my one sentence summary of this Andy Squyres record, is that it’s a “church music” album that fits in equally well in a bar, coffee shop, college campus…it’s a tough project to nail down in a sentence or two, but it’s pretty dang great.
Until the next one,
-sth