The post-lockdown disorientation in the arts

Snow White, the live-action version cobbled together by Disney, opened over the weekend with devastating reviews and empty theaters coast to coast. In my community, there were no sellout crowds on opening day and the thinning turned to zero tickets in the final afternoon and evening of the weekend. No showings are scheduled past Wednesday.

This is in a town full of blue voters with plenty of kids, seemingly an ideal market.

Based on reviews, the plot was incoherent, toggling between woke revision of traditional gender roles and accommodating audience expectations of the famous tropes of the film. The final results upset everyone. It seems like yet another disaster for Disney, but, more than that, emblematic of a serious problem in the arts world in general which has never really recovered from lockdowns.

Disney has misread the room for a very long time, and seems implausibly slow to course correct. One might expect market signals would be enough to shock the internal culture of an enterprise. Ideology, however, can be more powerful than even failing profitability statements. Our times provide many such examples.

The movie's release was also caught in a cultural turning and got squeezed in the hinges. Seemingly out of nowhere, the 2024 election revealed a mass revolt against the sloganeering social management represented by DEI, ESG, and all the Biden/Kamala-era political fashions, all summarily repealed by Trump's executive orders two months before this movie hit the box office.

It's strange how quickly this turning took place. One day, the orthodoxy of imperious management of cultural loyalties landed on one side and, the next day, they flipped to the other side. Of all the pushes by the Trump administration against what it inherited, its moves against DEI and that with which it was associated seem to have garnered the least resistance.

Trump did not so much cause as reveal and permission the revolt. Universities, corporations, and governments have all gone along with the new push for meritocracy over DEI seemingly effortlessly. It was as if masses of people just said: finally it is over!

The sudden lane switch has left plenty of roadkill, this movie among them.

It's fascinating to reflect on how this film got caught in the cultural crosshairs. To understand it, we need to return to 2020 and the lockdowns that shut not only movie theaters nationwide but also imposed extreme restrictions on the operations of movie makers. Broadway shut down completely as did museums and countless concert venues, only to open later with mask and vaccine mandates that kept critically minded people away.

One of the first films to appear during the lockdown was Songbird, a tremendous dystopian film that was panned by critics for no good reason other than that it told too much truth. That was the exception. Most filmmakers gave up trying to adhere to the strictures over masking and social distancing and decided to wait it out until regular life returned.

That 18-24 month period, however, led to a serious isolation on the part of the film and arts community, as it did with everyone. When it ended, we might have expected a sigh of relief and a return to normalcy. We got the opposite, an arts community more alienated than ever, along with distorted politics and culture too.

The signaling systems were set in motion by the George Floyd riots and protests of the spring and summer of 2020. They sent the message that you can come out of isolation and house arrest only provided you are doing so for purposes of advancing progressive political goals. Your freedom comes at a certain price: your political loyalties must shift to a refashioned leftism that has almost nothing to do with how anyone defined that term decades ago.