I’ll begrudge feminism one thing. Like communism, it won’t go down without a fight. Both ideologies are indivisibly wedded to the other. Both promise a suicidal solution to fabricated oppression. Both leave nothing but misery in their wake. And both caused the deaths of tens of millions, even if feminists refuse to acknowledge their 65-million baby victims as ever having lived.
But although communists once tried and failed to take over Hollywood (see my piece here on the subject), feminists succeeded—and brought a magnificent industry built by men to smoldering ruin.
The Hollywood Reporter found October box office earnings hit a 27-year low with a meager $425 million. Apologists may point out that the month’s biggest studio bombs, *Tron: Ares* and *One Battle After Another*, were based on male-driven intellectual properties. But by this time, the desired audience can smell a female rat. Men aren’t as dumb as film folk think they are and constantly depict them as.
The original *Tron* came out in 1982. I remember that entertainment year because I was working at the Greek Theater in LA and going to the movies every night with two late, great pals. We saw *E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial*, *Blade Runner*, *Diner*, *The Thing*, *The Verdict*, *First Blood*, *Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan*, *Fast Times at Ridgemont High*, *The Year of Living Dangerously*, *Rocky III*, and *Tron*.
I realized even then, at my young age, that it would never get better than this. But I never imagined how much worse it could get.
Of course, back then men ran Hollywood, and they knew something today’s moviemakers either don’t know or don’t wish to know: how to appeal to both sexes. They didn’t have to alter nature and humanity to uplift one gender and diminish the other. Nor would they have wanted to, at the loss of half their audience.
“That way madness lies,” they might have said, quoting a dead white male—Shakespeare—too obscure or too toxic for the present industry players.
They could show male-female truth in a familiar setting: hack lawyer Frank Galvin’s (Paul Newman) redemption in *The Verdict*; reporter Guy Hamilton’s (Mel Gibson) choice between betraying a love (Sigourney Weaver) and writing a story in *The Year of Living Dangerously*; male comradery versus romance in *Diner*; teen lust; or transpose it to science-fiction, as in the best of the genre—the replicants’ desire to live in *Blade Runner*, the title alien’s longing for home in *E.T.*, Admiral Kirk’s acceptance of mortality at the loss of his best friend Spock in *Star Trek II*, and justified paranoia in *The Thing*.
Women understood this truth and embraced every one of these movies—except for *The Thing*, which was a guy thing.
And when the men who made these classics hired a woman to tell a story—writer Melissa Mathison for *E.T.* and director Amy Heckerling for *Fast Times at Ridgemont High*—it was to add a genuine female sensibility, not a fabricated imitation-male one at the expense of the real thing.
Which brings us to *Tron: Ares*.
The 1982 *Tron* was neither a great movie nor a big moneymaker. But it had a simple premise and the use of a brand-new digital technology. The film incorporated the medium into the plot about a computer programmer (Jeff Bridges) lured into a VR world. Bridges didn’t have to do any of the stunts depicted in the picture, like a motorcycle chase, because the audience understood it was all a computer-animated universe.
And boys loved it, as much as they enjoyed Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) rescuing his hot glowing digital girlfriend (Cindy Morgan) like they’d want to do in real life.
None of that sexist macho nonsense in *Tron: Ares*, decided the new filmmakers, who couldn’t have conceived the *Tron* universe if their lives depended on it.
In their mind, boys would pay to see a plain but masculinely strong Asian woman (Greta Lee) save the weenie white male “hero” (Jared Leto) after an uglified but masculinely strong Black woman beats him up.
Actress Jodie Turner-Smith shaved her eyebrows for the part, lest some male accidentally find her too attractive.
As it turned out, boys and normal girls who actually like strong boys and feminine beauty didn’t see any of this reimagining since they avoided the movie. Some showed up the first week out of curiosity ($33 million) and obviously spread the word for a near 70 percent drop the second week ($11 million).
Chalk up another wrecked franchise for Disney.
Warner Bros. didn’t fare much better with older men on *One Battle After Another* and for the same reason: feminism.
I never read Thomas Pynchon’s *Vineland*, although I was working at a prestigious DC bookstore at the time. I was a forlorn Reaganite already irritated by the “kinder, gentler” weenier George Bush, and had no interest in another novel elegizing 1960s druggie culture and knocking Reaganism for opposing it.
But I know two things: the novel didn’t have a feminist lecture, and it didn’t have a Black woman (yawn) revolutionary.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation has both. What it doesn’t have is an audience, after making $24 million the first week and tanking with a 50 percent drop to $11 million the second.
So, feminism wrecked Hollywood like it has everything else it touches—and to advance a poisonous lie that has not empowered women but depressed them.
A great article in PJ Media brilliantly explains why:
> “Men and women were never designed for identical roles. Men are stronger and more expendable. Women are fertile for a brief span and pay a higher price for reproduction. Left unmanaged, that imbalance leads to chaos: predation, jealousy, neglect.”
But conservative powers deserve some of the blame. They shouldn’t just watch Hollywood fall. They should replace it.
Elon Musk saved free speech with $44 billion on Twitter. For one billion, he or someone like him can save the screen trade.
So when we traditionalist artists write great stories about masculine heroes and beautiful feminine heroines that can become wives and mothers—a role model extinct in Hollywood fare—we don’t have to line up for the two or three producers making such films.
We could have our own Walt Disney.
—
**A Gut Punch in the Culture Fight**
**Goodbye, Doctor Woke**
**Seven Chillers Without Drillers for Halloween**
https://spectator.org/the-wreck-of-feminist-hollywood/
