Politically correct postmodernists make movies no one wants to watch

Fivethirtyeight has a new piece out which is reasonably self-explanatory, The Next Bechdel Test by Walt Hickey, Ella Koeze, Rachael Dottle and Gus Wezerek.

The Bechdel-Wallace Test — more commonly abbreviated to the Bechdel Test — asks two simple questions of a movie: Does it have at least two named female characters?1 And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man? A surprising number of films fail the test. Although the test is punchy and has become pervasive, it doesn’t address the core inequalities in Hollywood films.

That isn’t a knock on the test. Alison Bechdel — an acclaimed cartoonist who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014 and whose memoir was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical — in no way set out to solve Hollywood sexism when she wrote the test into a comic strip in the mid-1980s. Instead, she was drawing attention to the severity of the problem by showing how low you could set the bar and still watch Hollywood executives trip over it.

A third of the top 50 movies of 2016 failed the Bechdel Test

32 passed

18 failed

Still, 30 years on, we’re not exactly sitting on a superior answer for measuring the movie industry’s gender imbalance. What does the next Bechdel Test look like? The time is ripe for a successor. Is there a short, punchy test we can apply? One that, if movies start passing it, would indicate that the industry is actually becoming better for both the women who make movies and the people who watch them? Is there a new test that could pull the modern film business in the right direction? And if there is, where on earth do we find it?

I must admit to an exasperation with the politically correct/postmodernist crowd, their victimhood, their race obsession, their divisiveness, etc. And yet, the underlying issue remains a valid one from a government perspective - individuals are free to do as they like but government should be neutral, neither favoring one group over another or harming them. Equal rules for everyone.

And so while I object in general to the obsessive dividing of individuals into imposed identities, sometimes interesting insights can arise.

What Fivethirtyeight has done is to go to various postmodernist critical theory people to come up with a range of additional identity measurements (gender, minority, ethnicity, etc.) In fact, they come up with an additional twelve measures of victimhood and a scoring of the top 50 movies in 2017 against those 13 total measures and a nice little chart to go with it.

If identity equity is what you are obsessed with (rather than equality of opportunity) then their approach makes sense even though it smacks of multiple forms of bigotry and intolerance.

But what fascinates me is that they overlook a foundational issue. Performance. In business you invest in what makes the highest return and the Fivethirtyeight people omit that critical measure completely.

I was curious. My impression is that the politically correct postmodernist critical theorist are divorced from reality. They have a conversation all of their own and disdain everyone else, even though everyone else are the great majority. Anecdotally it has seemed to me that the more politically correct a book, song, artwork, movie, a piece is, the less commercially successful. I decided to investigate whether the impression is objectively accurate.

This is a back-of-an-envelope quick and dirty approach. I took the results of their analysis for forty-nine of the movies (I could not find data for the fiftieth) and I looked up the domestic and international revenue gross for each of them.

I then counted the number of Politically Correct Purity tests each of the movies passed. So for example, the movie Bad Moms was the most politically correct, passing eight of the thirteen ideological purity tests. At the other end of the scale, the innocuous sounding Secret Life of Pets only passed one of the tests.

From there, it was a simple matter to match the revenue against the politically correct score.

My hypothesis is that the postmodernist people and their concerns are of little interest to ordinary people and therefore the movies that are most politically correct are also those that generate the least revenue. If you were to graph the results, you would expect the least politically correct movies (scoring a 1) to have the highest average revenue and the most politically correct (scoring an 8) to have the least. A downward sloping demand curve as it were.

And, indeed, that is, with one aberration, what you find.

Click to enlarge.

Again, it is quick-and-dirty. Forty-nine is too small a sample size. These movies have been out for varying lengths of time which will skew the results a bit. The different purity measures focus on different things. All true.

But basically it affirms the null hypothesis that the higher the politically correct purity score, the less likely people are to want to watch the movie.

And interestingly, when you look at domestic versus international movie revenues, Americans are the least averse (though still averse). The most politically correct movie generates only 72% of the domestic revenues in foreign markets. For every dollar in movie viewing in the US, there are only 72 cents of sales internationally.

In contrast, the least politically correct movie, scoring only one pass, generates 144% of domestic revenues in international sales.

The most politically correct movies generate the least money in the US and they are even more unpopular globally. That seems a very relevant factor when considering the performance of movies. Postmodernism doesn't pay the bills.