GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: Maureen Callahan: The year Hollywood died. 2025 started with the LA fires… ended with the savage Reiner slayings… and finally exposed a shameless, sickening lie.
Say goodbye to Hollywood.
This was the year Los Angeles burned to the ground: Literally, economically, culturally, spiritually.
What was once one of our greatest exports — movies, movie stars, a glittering celebrity industrial complex reflective of American supremacy itself — is no more.
That’s a good thing. A great thing. Healthy, even.
We began this year with horror as wildfires tore through LA, burning for nearly the entire month of January.
The response, needless to say, lacked urgency.
Mayor Karen Bass, upon finally flying home from a presidential inauguration in Ghana, was speechless as a reporter peppered her with questions about where she had been, why she had ever left, and how it was that LA was so woefully underprepared.
‘Both sides botched it,’ she said vaguely, at the end of this month. LA will doubtless re-elect this abject failure.
Read the whole thing. As Christian Toto asks: Is Hollywood Finally Getting What It Voted For? Pro-Newsom, Anti-Trump town tripped over woke, DEI and progressive pols.
Consider a second, sobering expose tied to La La Land. Compact Magazine’s recent feature by Jacob Savage, dubbed “The Lost Generation,” explores how the Left’s DEI obsession prevented many talented straight white males from entering the entertainment industry.
In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story. The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.”
It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified.
Turns out the discriminatory tales told by comedian Tyler Fischer, author James Patterson and others were the tip of the un-American iceberg.
And just like that, Peak TV came to a close. Coincidence? Either way, Hollywood progressives have gotten what they demanded time and again:
- DEI policies
- Democratic leaders
- Soft-on-crime legislation
- Open borders
Closer to L.A., Democratic leaders fiddled while the Palisades fires burned earlier this year. Mayor Karen Bass was literally in a foreign country when the blaze began.
In “Movies as Weapons of Spiritual Warfare,” published on Monday, “George MF Washington” wrote:
One of the reasons why American men, from Generation X in particular, keep coming back to movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Master and Commander”, “Gladiator”, “Braveheart” “The Great Escape”, “The Lord of the Rings”, and even “Die Hard” and “Predator”, is precisely because, as Men of the West, we are hard-wired to fantasize about how we will meet our own confrontations with “The Big Evil”, when and if those confrontations come. Modern American culture tends to look down upon this uniquely male instinct with ill-humor, if not outright derision. These kinds of male-coded sentiments are considered old fashioned at best, explicitly toxic at worst. Which is a shame, because the big studio movies we once made to cater to this male instinct for adventure, risk-taking and the instinctual defiance of Evil remain some of the greatest and most compulsively rewatchable films ever made.
To build on what “Washington” alluded to above, the worldview of woke Hollywood leftists prevents them from creating product that resonates with the public:
Which is why, the Critical Drinker noted early last month, we’re witnessing “The Beginning of the End:”
But then, we have been for some time, perhaps without realizing it:
(Classical reference in headline.)