Before the Woke: Pre-2010 Hollywood Films With THE MESSAGE

Many of us have spent the past few years criticizing the excessive amount of garbage Hollywood product that emphasizes woke sloganeering, diversity hiring, subverting expectations and a singular focus on identity politics over entertainment. We've all seen how Disney Star Wars has become a raging dumpster fire, the emergence of the Netflix Adaptation meme and garbage shows like Batwoman and Star Trek: Discovery.

In reality, this type of annoying politcal preaching and sloganeering, which we now refer to as virtue signalling, has been a staple of Hollywood movies and especially TV shows since the 1970s. This is my attempt to at least highlight some examples of films made before 2010 that I feel were nothing more than vehicles for the writers and sometimes actors for a soapbox rather than entertainment.

You won't find clever/subversive political commentary that still remains relevant today like They Live, Brazil, Robocop and Demolition Man - all films that have been attempted to be co-opted by breadtube leftoids to be "anti-capitalist" statements. You won't find films that feature gay characters or even cross-dressing here, as none of that was designed to push any agenda or normalize pronoun shit. You also won't find the myriad of made-for-TV movies and TV episodes as these were consistently the worst offenders when it came to forced and unsubtle political soapboxing/virtue signalling. If the list included TV episodes it would take up probably 80% of this list.

This is still a work in progress and will be continually updated as more suggestions flow in.

HIGHER LEARNING (1995)

This is the wokest movie made before the entire concept of woke was even a thing. This movie claims that colleges are hotbeds of Nazis, white supremacists, rape culture and anti-black bigotry. Sounds like something Netflix would spew out in 2022, doesn't it? It does, but it was made in 1995! And no, Spike Lee had nothing to do with this. I could not believe this movie ticks all the Reddit-era stereotypes when it was made before the average Redditard was probably even alive.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT (1996)

What appears to be some type of romantic comedy is really just a commercial for the DNC via it's notoriously leftist writer and director: written by Aaron Sorkin, an avowed partisan Democrat who later created The West Wing, and Rob Reiner, a notorious TDS sufferer and Russiagate believer. Michael Douglas plays Andrew Shepherd, who is so obviously a Bill Clinton self-insert. The film climaxes with a pure propaganda speech where he extorts the values of the ACLU and gun control, even going full Beta O'Rourke and vowing to "grab the guns myself". That speech ruins the entire movie since it's nothing but neolib talking points.

THE FRONT (1976)

Woody Allen's muh blacklist movie. I am not denying that there were communists in Hollywood and that some of those who got blacklisted were unfairly blacklisted over guilt by association, but there is no subject Hollywood loves to self-flagellate itself over than the early 1950s blacklist. They have made it their January 6/George Floyd moment. Hollywood crying about the '50s blacklist while actively participating in a new blacklist of anyone who isn't a leftist drone (Gina Carano, Vic Mignogna, Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain, Tim Allen and James Woods all say hi) is hypocrisy at it's finest.

GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI (1996)

Notorious TDS sufferer/Russiagate true believer Rob "Meathead" Reiner's movie about the civil rights movement. Is there ANY topic of the 20th century that Hollywood doesn't keep making movies about over and over and over, besides the Holocaust and the blacklist of course. 

CRASH (2005)

Racism is bad, didn't you know that? Yeah, and this movie will stop at nothing to remind you of that fact. This message was brought to you by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who awarded this thing an Academy Award over Brokeback Mountain. Because as we learned in 2006, when it comes to TEH MESSAGE Hollywood will always love their muh racism message over their muh gays message. 

SCHOOL TIES (1993)

Did you know that elite boarding schools in post-World War II New England were still hotbeds of anti-Semitism and closeted Nazis who would turn on friends if they found out they were Jewish? That's the plot of this 1993 drama starring Matt Damon, Chris O'Donnell and Brendan Fraser in early film appearances. Brendan Fraser, in a role that would today be called "Jewface" by retards like Sarah Silverman, plays a young football player from Scranton, Pennsylvania named David Green(berg?) who gets accepted into an elite New England prep school on a scholarship. He conceals his Jewish identity and says nothing when his new friends make overtly anti-Semitic jokes, falls in love with a beautiful blonde shiksa, leads the school's football team to victory and thinks his life is made. But then Matt Damon's character overhears something about David, and then "drops the soap" by outing him as a Jew with all the usual slurs. Everyone turns on David and in one scene, he finds a Nazi flag and graffiti reading "GO HOME KIKE" in his dorm room. Was this based on a real incident or something that the writer made up? If this over-the-top depiction of bigots seems familiar, it's because the script was written by Dick Wolf - the creator of Law & Order.

PLEASANTVILLE (1998)

This one goes both ways, admittedly. It can either be read as woke propaganda or an accidental anti-woke propaganda. A pre-Spider-Man Tobey Maguire plays a late '90s teen who is clearly the product of a broken Gen-X era home, with his mom being divorced and living with his bratty feminist sister played by Reese Witherspoon. He finds escapism in watching Pleasantville, a fake sitcom set in a strawman version of 1958 where literally everything is perfect. He and his sister get sucked into the sitcom and at first adapt to it's obviously FAKE environment. Of course, as it goes on Reese begins to introduce "bad" things to this world like premarital sex but also art, books and music - things that were already very much an accepted part of society by then! I'm surprised they didn't say anything about women wearing pants. Of course, as each person gets "modern" they turn color, and the writer doesn't waste any time in trying to make it into a thinly-veiled civil rights statement. I dunno, I actually like this one and think it can go both ways. It's clear the writer was making it as a leftist commentary, but I kinda feel this one can also function as an All In The Family-style "it can also be seen as a critique of wokeness."

SAVE THE LAST DANCE (2001)

Or "Swirler's Paradise" as I've come to dub it. This movie is what happens when a white liberal with limited knowledge of black culture attempts to write a ghetto Romeo & Juliet. Julia Stiles plays a white suburban teen ballet dancer who's mom is killed on the way to her Juilliard audition. She relocated to the South Side of Chicago to live with her estranged jazz musician father and soon enrolls in ficticious Wheatley High School (i.e. Wendell Phillips High School). She's one of like 3 white students in this extremely dangerous high school and tries desperately to fit in. Of course, she befriends the "smart, sensitive" black guy who wants to get out of the ghetto and go to college. The whole thing is so corny and obvious with it's "love conquers race" message, plus as I've stated previously I find the entire setup and premise unbelievable as well.

FREEDOM WRITERS (2007)

Hilary Swank plays a rich white liberal who starts teaching at a high school in Long Beach that was once considered one of the best in Southern California but by the mid '90s was completely overrun with blacks, Hispanics and Asians due to a forced integration policy. She starts teaching in a room of "special" students, with the lone white student clearly uncomfortable to be there without saying it. This movie is admittedly far better than Swirler's Paradise as it was based on a true story and thus the plot is completely believable, but the movie does not make any attempt to criticize multiculturalism and forced integration because as we know...DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH, even though forced diversity results in the black students, white students, Asian students and Hispanic students all sitting at separate tables in the lunchroom which the movie depicts in an early scene. But it's another MTV movie, so of course they weren't going to criticize diversity.

Stand and Deliver and especially Lean On Me did this same topic much better without being preachy or politically correct. I especially like the opening scene of Lean on Me where it depicts the high school in 1967 as being a mostly white and clean-cut school, then cutting to the same HS 20 years and depicting it as being a violent and dangerous ghetto shithole. The use of "Welcome to the Jungle" in that opening scene was perfect! 

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are in this - but that doesn't make this film any good. It's set in the late 1950s, the favorite period of Hollywood liberals to demonize. Not only that, this is an early example of "subverting expectations". We start off with a picture-perfect view of a suburban neighborhood with picket fences, children playing and husbands going off to work. But of course, we have to tear this strawman down: it turns out Dennis Quaid's character is having an extramarital affair...with a teenaged twink. Because it's the supposedly bigoted '50s, he tries to suppress it by getting conversion therapy. While he's trying to analyze the gay away, Julianne begins to develop a friendship with her black gardener. Of course, this soon leads to rumors from her society friends that she's a "commie nigger lover". What happens next? She divorces Dennis who shacks up with his little twink, while Julianne and Smart Black Man leave town. Oh so stunning and brave this film is. Yawn.

MONA LISA SMILE (2003)

Another "muh '50s" film. Despite having a cast of charismatic female actresses (Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal), the overt feminist messaging and sloganeering of it makes it particularly hard to take seriously. The message of the movie is basically: "Women, don't become housewives or mothers. Pursue your own path because conformity is bad." Haven't we seen 50 years later what this did to the nuclear family, PARTICULARLY the black community?

THE TRUTH ABOUT JANE (2000)

Normally I don't include made-for-TV movies, but I had to include this one. Stockard Channing (aka Rizzo from Grease) plays a "liberal" mom with a token gay black best friend (played by, who else, RuPaul). She and her husband soon notices her daughter Jane (Ellen Muth) is "not like other girls", and of course this means she's a lesbian (what, she can't just be a tomboy?) Of course, they refuse to accept it and insist it's just a phase and yadda yadda yadda. Not particularly woke, except we do get one truly cringe moment from RuPaul where he says "HONEY, I'M BLACK AND GAY." Of course by the end of the movie, Rizzo is fully onboard and joins P-F(L)AG and fully supports her daughter being gay. So preachy and obvious, but it's a made-for-TV movie

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

Did you know that all middle-class white families have problems, your dad is hitting on underaged teen girls and your anti-gay ultra-MAGA toxic masculinity marine neighbor is himself a deeply closeted gay guy himself? The fact that Kevin "I Outed Myself As Gay To Avoid Being Called A Groomer" Spacey plays the HETEROSEXUAL dad when he should've been playing the strawman closeted gay dad only ads to the irony of this movie in hindsight, considering he is obsessed with an underaged teen girl in it. I know this movie is regarded as a classic, but in hindsight there's nothing about it I particularly want to return to. 

THE WAY WE WERE (1973)

Barbra Streisand's title song has far outshined the movie itself. While not a terrible movie, it's impossible for me to take her radical communist character seriously given how she calls people she disagrees with a fascist (hi Twitter!), leads college students to take a pledge to never support the government if it goes to war and gets upset when her husband's friends make FDR jokes (who knew leftoids were humorless gits, even then!?). And of course it all culminates in the 1947 blacklist - a topic Hollywood simply can never let go of. We're supposed to sympathize with her but she is such an over-the-top caricature of an angry, humorless, perpetually unpleasant ideologue that you can't help but be reminded of the freaks we see on Twitter today. 

GET ON THE BUS (1996)

Spike Lee's pro-Million Man March propaganda piece about a group of rabid black men riding on a cross-country bus from L.A. to D.C. has some truly cringy Black Twitter moments, including of course the obligatory black gay couple since nothing is more stunning and brave then black gay men. The most telling bit is when a rich black man gets on the bus and they throw him off because he reveals he is a Republican and car salesman. In the words of Joey Robinette Biden: if you aren't Democrat, you ain't black.