Woke, Pre-Woke, or Post-Woke?

Lily Zuckerman joins me again to discuss the new Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another. The movie consciously goes out of its way to separate itself from circa-2020 era wokeness. Lily calls it representative of Chapo Trap House liberalism.

I enjoyed Lockjaw as an amalgamation of rightoid characters. He’s in the military, and also a Nazi, and an incel. I point out that another way that this movie is not woke is that its bad guys are literal white supremacists. There’s none of this idea that the real enemy is unconscious bias or disparities or whatever. It’s a liberal fantasy through and through. You get sex and violence, but also an enemy that makes you feel morally pure.

I argue that a move away from the neurotic version of woke – here I’m thinking of a room full of masked DSA members talking about their anxiety – was inevitable. How would you even make an entertaining movie glamorizing these people? A liberalism that is about sex, violence, and killing Nazis is broadly appealing. It would center left-wing economic ideas, which are popular across the political spectrum including among Trump supporters, and also lets one protect the innocent and fight adversaries who are both evil and pathetic, like Lockjaw. We talk about the prospects of immigration being the issue that unites various factions of the left, given that it is the one place where conservatives actually do use violence against people of color.

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