It’s one of the most riveting exchanges of any film, courtesy of 1976’s “Marathon Man.”

Is it safe?

Tell me what the “it” refers to.

Is it safe?

Yes, it’s safe, it’s very safe, it’s so safe you wouldn’t believe it.

Is it safe?

No. It’s not safe, it’s… very dangerous, be careful.

Hollywood deemed the Woke Mind Virus as very dangerous. Be careful. And, boy, were stars ever careful.

Now, a few artists raged against it from the jump, like comedians John Cleese and Adam Carolla. Others bowed to its will sans hesitation. See Halle Berry and Scarlett Johansson, two superstars who spat out Hostage Video Apologies after accepting trans character parts.

Stephen King made an obviously true statement and scurried to the pages of The Washington Post to apologize after the mob came for him.

Meanwhile, the industry’s film and TV pipeline mostly avoided the subject. Instead, they did the woke mob’s bidding.

Slowly, some cracks appeared in the surface.

Cate Blanchett’s 2022 drama “Tár” featured her character blistering a student for his woke posture.

“If sanity ever returns to the American culture, writer/director Todd Field’s brilliant and hypnotizing Tár will be remembered as the only honest document of the disgraceful Woke Era.” https://t.co/Urg2FQ1S45

— John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte (@NolteNC) February 1, 2023

The 2023 drama “Dream Scenario” with Nicolas Cage found the Oscar-winner playing a professor grappling with cancellation for the craziest reason – he began appearing in people’s dreams where he behaved badly.

Very badly.

Still, Hollywood by and large refused to defend itself during the woke era. Some stars self-censored. Others yanked their creative works from the public indefinitely. Most prayed they wouldn’t be canceled next.

Now, as the woke era recedes from view, some stars are starting to speak out against it. Take Jennifer Lawrence, appearing in the awards season drama “Die My Love.”

The Oscar winner shared that she and fellow A-lister Emma Stone are working on a Miss Piggy solo feature. The wrinkle? 

“So, during lockdown, one of my good friends who is not in the industry—it was also kind of around cancel culture,” she recalled on The Tonight Show. “It was like both things were kind of happening at once. We were all locked up in our rooms, naughty people were being locked up in prison.”

Lawrence explained, “Miss Piggy is a feminist icon, and she said it would be so funny if Miss Piggy got canceled. Now, that is not the plot, necessarily, but it got the wheels turning.”

A progressive starlet like Lawrence wouldn’t dare admit anything of the kind just a few years ago. Now, she has permission to say that without expecting professional blowback.

More importantly, we’re starting to see the Woke Mind Virus on the big screen. And it’s far from flattering.

“After the Hunt” stars a never-better Julia Roberts as a professor torn between a friend (Andrew Garfield) and worrying if an academic star’s accusations against him are true.

The story wrestles with MeToo hysteria, Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and more. No easy answers are supplied in the smart but confounding film. But, for once, just “asking questions” is a valid pursuit.

The recent box office dud “Eddington” also explores woke culture, from the George Floyd riots and BLM’s rise to pandemic insanity. The film’s flaws are easy to spot, but it courageously tackled subjects most artists fear going near. It also gets some of the year’s biggest laughs by mocking woke nonsense.

This overdue examination isn’t relegated to the States.

Last year’s “Douglas Is Cancelled” featured a British-based tale centered on the cultural scourge. The show’s rollout allowed its actors, including star Hugh Bonneville, to explore the issue sans punishment.

If there was a sin, even if it was a sin of syntax, or a sin of verbal mispronunciation, or misquoting, it’s too late – the tide has already started, and it will not stop until there is blood. That’s usually the pattern. The reason I wanted to engage with this, apart from working with this wonderful team, was that it shines such a clear spotlight on exactly that – this tiny thing that was apparently innocuous becomes the centerpiece for a national debate, certainly an industry-wide debate within our context.

Which brings us to actress Sydney Sweeney.

The starlet looked the Woke Mob in the eye and refused to blink. The “Christy” actress recently appeared in an American Eagle jeans commercial where she coyly made a “jeans/genes” pun tied to her physical beauty.

The dwindling woke mob raged for weeks, but Sweeney refused to apologize for a harmless ad. Days ago, a woke interviewer nudged her to apologize for the ad.

The actress never blinked, and the woke movement suffered yet another body blow.

Would she have been so brave back in 2020, the peak of woke hysteria?

We’ll never know.

Either way, the changing cultural temperature made her stand acceptable, even fashionable. Perhaps Hollywood could start making more movies about a cultural scourge that upended their industry.

The post Is It Safe? Is Hollywood Finally Tackling Woke Mind Virus? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Crazed with resentment after Trump’s win last November, they decided nothing less than the term “Nazi” would do. You know who “they” are: The New York Times, The New Yorker, protesters funded by George Soros like Antifa, furious left-wing types, Hollywood lefties, and other such kinds. Enough said about these people. They’re the types who […]

Walking recently in a quiet quarter of Geneva—is there any other kind of quarter in Geneva?—I looked up and saw something strange. Everywhere in Geneva is expensive, and this was not the least expensive part of it. Draped from the window of a flat in a fin de siècle building, a flat that must have […]

“Life is suffering” may be a Noble Truth, but it feels like a deepity. Yes, obviously life includes suffering. But it also includes happiness. Many people live good and happy lives, and even people with hard lives experience some pleasant moments.

This is the starting point of many people’s objection to Buddhism. They continue: if nirvana is just a peaceful state beyond joy or suffering, it sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain. If your life was previously good, it’s a step down. Even if your life sucked, maybe you would still prefer the heroism of high highs and low lows to eternal blah.

Against all this, many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that. Partly it’s better because jhana is temporary and nirvana permanent, but it’s also better on a moment-to-moment basis. So nirvana must mean something beyond bare okayness. But then why the endless insistence that life is suffering and the best you can do is make it stop?

I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question. But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening. He said: mental valence works like temperature.

Naively, there are two kinds of temperature: hot and cold. When an environment stops being hot, then it’s neutral - “room temperature” - neither hot nor cold. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of coldness, making it colder and colder.

But scientifically, there’s only one kind of temperature: heat. Apparent “neutral” at room temperature is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very hot” and take away heat, at some point your perception switches from “less hot” to “more cold”, but you’ve just been taking away heat the whole time. The real “zero heat” isn’t room temperature. It’s absolute zero, which feels colder than we can possibly imagine.

In the same way, naively, there are two kinds of emotion - joy and suffering. When a situation stops being bad, then it’s neutral - “just okay” - neither joy nor suffering. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of joy, making yourself happier and happier.

But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering. Apparent neutral is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very bad” and take away suffering, at some point your perception switches from “less suffering” to “more joyful”, but you’ve just been taking away suffering the whole time. The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.

In this model, the statement “life is suffering” is equivalent to “temperature is heat” and literally true. An ignoramus might boggle at this: all temperatures are heat? What about fifty degrees below zero on a winter’s night in Alaska? Sorry, that’s heat too - 228 degrees Kelvin. It’s colder than the reference temperature you dubbed neutral, but that was always fake. Likewise, it seems surprising that all life is suffering: even when you’re having sex? Even when you’re on heroin? But to Buddhists, both of those states are some number of degrees worse than the absolute zero suffering of nirvana.

Why should we believe this model?

First, regardless of whether we believe it or not, I find it helpful in understanding what Buddhists are asserting. It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things.

But also, it does seem to match some of the other ground we’ve covered about what people notice during meditative experiences - for example, in Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem. The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss? The qualiologists propose that you’re just bad at sitting in a dark room. If you were good at it - that is, a trained meditator who could calm their brain down enough to pay full attention to the lack of stimuli - it would be amazing. This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel. And from here it’s a short hop to the symmetry theory of valence, where the unpleasantness of mental states tracks a sort of irregularity or asymmetry in brain activity.

The emotion “happiness” is a form of brain activity which is more regular and symmetrical than usual - maybe the most regularity and symmetry we can get in the normal course of things. But ice is a form of matter which is colder than usual - yet if you drop it into liquid helium, it will add heat, not subtract it. Thus the insistence among meditators that happiness is an obstacle and you should seek nirvana instead.