No one, not a single soul, is still mad about Tropic Thunder
After all, if there’s one thing that the left loves to do, it’s making sure that no one is allowed to enjoy a film from 15 years ago.
If you’re at least moderately in tune with the current state of digital media, you don’t need me to tell you how angry everyone is all the time. The ‘outrage economy’ dictates much of the content we interact with and how we interact with it. Big tech companies have openly taken advantage of this, with Facebook engineers recently admitting that their ‘angry react’ feature was given five times the weight of a normal ‘like’, thus pushing controversial or potentially upsetting content further up in users’ news feeds.
This Algorithm of Anger™ is evident throughout much of the content that appears in news feeds under a ‘Suggested for you’ banner. The way that many such posts are worded evidences a seemingly deliberate attempt to generate ire, driven by a commercial incentive for clicks. Among the most popular (and most egregious) of these posts are purposefully vague or misleading headlines and quotes which describe the latest development in cancel culture, “wokeness”, political correctness, etc.
A good example is a recent string of articles regarding the 2008 film Tropic Thunder. The apparent patient zero was an article posted by media company UNILAD, with the titillating headline: “Ben Stiller makes 'no apologies for Tropic Thunder' in response to 'cancel culture' criticism”.
The 2008 action comedy, directed by Stiller, satirises the movie industry, as well as the self-important actors within it. Despite its critical praise and commercial success, the film was incredibly controversial upon release, drawing backlash for its use of blackface and ableist slurs, as well as portrayals of Jewish and disabled people that many deemed harmful and insensitive. On the other hand, it’s also held in high regard by many ‘pro-free speech’, ‘anti-PC’ types for its unabashedly offensive humour.
The question is, of course: Why is all this relevant now? UNILAD’s headline implies that the ‘cancel culture’ crowd have decided that Tropic Thunder will be their next victim, ensuring that it is swiftly removed from streaming services and never aired during Channel 10’s Saturday night movie slot again. After all, if there’s one thing that the left loves to do, it’s making sure that no one is allowed to enjoy a film from 15 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, this was not the case. The non-controversy actually started when Benny S., a self-described “R&B Singer/Songwriter/Actor, 2nd Amendment Activist & Seeker of Truth”, tweeted out a screenshot of a Facebook post he had made, in which he claimed “liberals have been trying to ‘cancel culture’ the movie, Tropic Thunder…”. In the tweet, he tagged Ben Stiller and told him to “stop apologising for doing this movie”, prompting a response from the director where he stated “I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder. Don’t know who told you that.”
It’s difficult to see the newsworthiness of, to put it simply, an innocuous response to a fabricated drama. Nevertheless, the post has racked up north of 22,000 reacts and 4,000 comments, with many being fooled further by the post’s caption: “Some people wanted to boycott the film”. The “Some people” in question actually refers to advocacy groups who protested the film back in 2008, and has nothing to do with recent events. Later that same day, UNILAD posted another Tropic Thunder-related article titled “Robert Downey Jr doesn't regret wearing blackface in Tropic Thunder”. Again, this was referring to events that are far from relevant to today’s cultural discourse, seeing as it stemmed from a Joe Rogan interview which took place three years ago.
It should be noted that, yes, UNILAD is hardly the gold standard of journalistic integrity. However, slightly more reputable publications, such as USA Today, ended up running the same story — using the same headline — several days later. It’s also gone on to be propagated by several cultural idols of the right, from media organisations such as Daily Wire to YouTube comedians like Isaac Butterfield. And yet, not a single person or organisation that has commented on this story has managed to provide evidence of any recent attempts to ‘cancel’ the film.
The truth of the matter is, despite the backlash it received upon its release, Tropic Thunder is a well-loved movie that is the subject of praise far more often than it’s the subject of heated arguments. A quick search of the film’s title on Twitter will yield a deluge of fans posting clips, gifs, and quotes from the movie. On top of that, various responses to Benny's post, including some from self-proclaimed liberals who enjoy the movie, pointed out the ridiculousness of his claims.
The whole ordeal is reminiscent of many other similarly pointless cultural debates from recent times. In May last year, The Very Hungry Caterpillar himself became a martyr in the great cancel culture crusade, when one researcher's claim that the book was harmful was given the weight of an entire movement by the media. There’s also the numerous times that conservatives have become filled with righteous anger over symbolic gestures made by multi-million dollar companies; Who could forget the dreaded “woke M&Ms”?
The common thread among these nauseating ‘controversies’, apart from obvious attempts at rage-baiting on the part of media figures and publications, is the misrepresentation of one person or company’s actions or opinions as a broader social movement. The ‘woke’ crowd — stand-in for the left — is constantly vilified for their ‘cancelation’ of beloved cultural icons, be they films, books, or colourful chocolates. We are caught in an endless cycle of sensationalist media presenting fringe opinions as the liberal gospel, so that pundits can trick gullible audiences with alarmist rhetoric about culture wars and create even more demand for these ridiculous stories. In reality, apart from a few isolated individuals, no one cares about what jokes a film from 2008 made.