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sloganeering social management represented by DEI, ESG, and all the Biden/Kamala-era political fashions, all summarily repealed by Trump’s executive orders two months before this movie hit the box office.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. 

The arts community got the message. 

So in 2022-20023, we inhabited a world that had essentially gone psychologically mad, as substance abuse, pharmaceutical addiction and injury, and deeply distorted perceptions of reality, to say nothing of traditional bourgeois understandings of boundaries, had reached their apex. 

It was in this period when there emerged an actual and widespread confusion about the meaning of chromosomes as biological determinants of sex. We quickly moved from polite kindness toward gender dysphorics to actual mandates to pretend as if biology does not matter or is entirely malleable with pharmaceutical assistance, just to give one example of many. Suddenly every aspirational professional faced pressure to declare one’s pronouns. 

It was during this period that the movie Snow White was being put together, along with many symphonic seasons programmed and museum exhibits scheduled. They came to fruition at the exact moment of turning. 

It was a sudden awakening from a crazed dream, and we found our world in a state of madness from out-of-control crime, unhinged protest movements, a migrant crisis by political design, and revolutionary art forms all crashing in on our heads at once. 

We cannot forget the great Bud Light saga of 2023, in which some one member of the overclass holding a high corporate position briefly imagined that it would be smart marketing to sell a working-class beer through the personage of a fake trans influencer with a great number of Instagram gawkers. This led to the toppling of the king of beers to become a mere pawn among many, precisely as any member of the non-expert class could have predicted without much thought. 

One might suppose that this consumer revolt would send a message that would be immediately absorbed. Instead, it took more time than one might have supposed. The leading lights of elite culture simply could not bear to believe that their lessers were more and more in the driver’s seat of cultural change. 

Lockdowns, isolation, and mass social and cultural upheaval had such a far-reaching impact on the arts that it led its most confused elements – long having existed in the underworld of disgruntled anger at the bourgeoisie – to imagine that they really could become the mainstream, and thereby shove all this alienation down audience throats regardless of ticket sales or collapsing revenue streams. 

I’ve personally experienced this countless times now in the post-lockdown period at local theaters, museums, and symphonies where it would seem that the management truly had lost all touch with reality. The Kennedy Center with its drag shows, the Met Gala with its Hunger Games opulence, European arts festivals struggling to be as offensive and tasteless as possible, and so much more. 

It was never more clear that something had broken than when standing in the gender-neutral lines for the washroom at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts concert hall, surrounded on all sides by seething audience members who paid up to $1K a ticket to be publicly humiliated in some grotesque biological experiment. 

The reset in which we live right now is not the Great Reset of 2020 and following but just the opposite, a desperate clamor for normalcy, merit, reality, and truth, backed by a burning passion to drive out any strains of wokeness from educational and corporate institutions. 

There seems to be no stopping the counterrevolution at this point, as the spat upon and disrespected middle voice of cultural normalization claws its way back from humiliation back into the mainstream of cultural experience. 

Snow White was caught in the breach between two periods of madness, revolution and counterrevolution, and ended up as the target of anger from both sides. But it is hardly the only piece of cultural presentation to elicit such fury. 

It’s the same with many movies and most legacy media too. The lockdowns provoked mass disorientation, but the post-lockdown period has kicked off a fiery passion to repair whatever it was that caused such outrages as two successive cancellations of Easter and Christmas. 

The last of the Covid era’s craziest art, music, film, and literature is being released into a world that is positively fed up with being hectored, manipulated, browbeat, and lied to with unrelenting political bromides that demand totalitarian acquiescence to a value system utterly alien to anything our ancestors knew or believed. 

This is why we are witnessing the advance of a type of neo-traditionalism in the face of revolutionary hype that suddenly seems more ridiculous than radical. 

We really must have sympathy for the locally owned theaters, struggling for revenue in the post-lockdown period and competing so directly with home streaming services. They imagined that a Disney classic could bring families back to the movies, and purchased the rights to days of showings scheduled on the hour, only to fire up projection screens in empty theaters. It was a bad decision, one that will not likely be made again. 

If only one theater had decided instead to show the 1937 version of Snow White, it likely would have sold every seat in the house. That’s where we are and where we are likely to stay for the duration, in a long period of nostalgia for what was and a hunt for what went wrong to the point that somehow we threw it all away for no good reason. 

For many of us today, the only question is how far we must go back in history to find clarity over many matters concerning practically everything from art to science to health. Is it the 1980s or perhaps the 1880s? Whatever the stopping point, we are looking for a better way than the one dreamed up for us by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and the new and not improved Disney Corp.