The Event Horizon of Woke

Why You Can't Blame Comic Books for Hollywood's Failed Year

It was refreshing to be called into medical at Philly Federal Detention Center after over a month in a facility that was supposed to be just a temporary stop on my journey to my permanent prison. Outside of the DC Gulag where J6ers were housed, the physician's assistant attending me was a sight for sore eyes: a non-criminal college-educated white male. His mannerisms, cadence, and lexicon were all refreshingly familiar.

I felt at ease.

He asked me questions about my health and mental state before the exchange diverted into more casual chit-chat. I wondered if he was as comfortable talking to someone like me as I was to be talking to him. Working medical in a prison, especially in a detention center like Philly, can't be the greatest experience. Detention centers house inmates who occupy some interstitial space in the American justice continuum: people who are awaiting trial, haven't been sentenced, or are in transit to another facility like myself. As such, the population is typically on better behavior than it is in the penitentiary where gang law is supreme.

So while detention center populations are generally more tame, they are also unpredictable because of the lack of order imposed by gang hierarchy. As such, you can get some unusual combinations in these places -- people sentenced to life without parole as well as short-timers being held for a few months.

The PA proceeded to tell me of one such incident that happened only a few days prior to my medical appointment.

There was a man who had been murdered by his cellie in one of the other units. He was a bit of a comedian, who constantly bragged that he was only down for a parole violation and would be out soon.

His cellie was the polar opposite -- a man sentenced to life behind bars. You can guess he wasn't doing time for simple drug dealing or embezzling. In other words, he wasn't the kind of person you want to mess with.

The parole-violator didn't seem to care. He bragged about his short time. And then he did the one thing that's inexcusable in prison: he refused to follow toilet protocol.

I knew what that meant because it's the first lesson anyone learns in prison. When you go to the bathroom, you sit, always. And you flush, constantly. From the moment your ass hits the steel to the moment you wipe, the toilet must be constantly flushing. It's annoying to keep hitting that flush button throughout the process, but it's not hard labor.

The benefit of toilet protocol is the low pressure created by the water flowing out of the bowl also takes the air, and most importantly the smell, with it. That's also why inmates tend to smoke weed with their heads hanging over the bowl.

Inmates rightfully understand that having a toilet in the same room you sleep in -- one that's in full view of the bunks and anyone walking by -- is how the very architecture of prison demeans you. You're on display like an animal in the zoo even in your most vulnerable moment. Without toilet protocol though, you're forced to constantly smell the stink straight from the festering bowels of the one guy you can never get away from.

But our parole violator in the story wasn't down for fully embracing the reality of prison life. He was just getting out in a couple of days anyway.

Or so he thought.

His cellie warned him. Mr. Parole Violation refused to heed the warning. So his cellie brutally murdered him. And then had violent sex with the corpse.

This is what passes for casual conversation in prison.

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I took the story on board. I think the PA judged from my speech and comportment that I wasn't making the effort to fit in with the other inmates. Perhaps he feared I had been banking too hard on Trump winning the election. He wanted me to know no matter what happened in the next few months, you're not out of prison until you're out of prison. Until then, you must obey the culture.

I didn't really need the scuttlebutt. I've been a gaijin, submariner, and spook. I'm better than most at reading the room and adjusting my behavior accordingly. Not to mention the fact that I was already 11 months into my incarceration. I suspected he mistook my natural ability to immediately grade my speech and mannerisms to him as a sign that I wasn't actually adapting to my environment. In reality, however, I was actually getting along quite well with my unit.

But I appreciated the thought. I think the PA's concern was sincere. Even though that concern had to be conveyed through a horrifyingly graphic story, he wanted to use the occasion as a teaching moment.

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says:

“It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.”

I suppose to that list of misguided kings and suckling wolves we can also add, drug lords, sex offenders, bank robbers, and hit men. They too are part of this world. Just not the part most of us have to deal with.

According to MacIntyre, stories inform us with the virtues of our culture. In prison, those virtues are obviously different from those "on the street" (inmates never call it "home." The world outside of prison is known only as "on the street.") This was precisely what the PA was doing by telling me that story. He was inculcating in me the reality of prison life.

Some people don't care for stories. They have no time for fanciful fictions that have less substance than a dream and just as much meaning. MacIntyre obviously wasn't one of those people.

And neither were the Inklings (the literary group formed by JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Warnie Lewis, and others). These were men who had been through war and bloodshed and yet dedicated their adult lives to writing fairy stories for younger audiences.

To the very practical and pragmatic among us, stories are a frivolous waste of time. Ask the Inklings themselves why they dedicated so much time and talent to such a pursuit, I'm sure they'd each give their own answers. But at the heart of each response is likely to be the concept of values.

You can't have a world of good adults if you never bother to show them while they're still children what good really is. As Tolkien's Samwise Gamgee character says:

“It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.”

Counter-intuitively these weavers of fantasies were taking that all-important first step in the education of a society of warriors. Because in order to fight, you must be able to recognize what is worth such sacrifice.

Yet there are those today who say we have reached the end of stories. Lately people are saying that the age of the story hero is over. Specifically, the word is that the genre of movie dedicated to comic book superheroes is now officially dead.

This analysis is based on the poor performance of the latest Superman and Fantastic Four movies which have not fared well.

I don't find this analysis valid. What is a movie in the first place if not a tale about a hero? To say hero movies are dead is like saying stories themselves will no longer exist. Whether they come from a comic book, novel, or video game does not necessarily doom them to popular rejection.

I don't think the genre is played out. I think the real issue is that Woke Culture has irreparably damaged the brand of the US studios that make comic book movies.

Others argue the perpetual string of comic book movie failures can't be attributed to solely woke influence because these most recent movies weren't conventionally "woke." Giancarlo Sopo, of The National Review ran interference before the new release of Superman imploring Conservatives not to dismiss it as woke without first viewing it for themselves.

After release, a number of prominent anti-woke pundits ranging from Tim Pool, to Sarah Fields, to Nerdrotic all went on record pronouncing the movie as officially "not woke."

I had my own take on why that wasn't necessarily the case for the Superman movie. All the same, I understand what these pundits meant. They were happy that Superman hadn't been race-swapped or that the Justice gang weren't all gay transgender quadriplegics.

Fantastic Four was a slightly different case. Though the movie, like Superman, had been surrounded by production rumors of woke casting, plot, and character arcs, the final product was thoroughly straightforward.

And yet, it still underperformed at the box office.

To many minds this proved it wasn't woke which killed the comic book movie, but that the genre has lost its popularity.

But then how to explain the popularity of the movie K-pop Demon Hunters? Last week, the movie topped the box office, beating out Weapons, a movie that had been heavily advertised for many months now.

The movie is a product of Sony Animation and thus doesn't bear the stigma of being of obvious US origin. The creator, Maggie Kang wrote it as a celebration of Korean culture which is the primary reason it avoids the stigma of being woke. There are no race-swaps (everyone in the movie is Korean) and trans inserts or praising of sexual immorality. It is also very telling the audience responses in Korea have been generally good.

While K-Pop Demon Hunters is not based on a comic book, the movie's story of a trio of female singers using special powers to fight Eastern demons has all the trappings of your typical comic book movie. What's more, this is a rare case of a movie doing very well in the box office after it had already been released for home audiences via Netflix.

That's right. K-pop Demon Hunters crushed the box office even when you didn't have to go to theaters to see it.

So it seems to me that superhero (or heroine) movies aren't dead at all.

How to synthesize this data? What does it point to?

I think it points to a rejection of the values being promoted by the woke fanatics of Far-Left Hollywood. I believe consumers now understand the extent to which we as individuals and our society as a whole are being destroyed by those who advocate cultural death through suicidal empathy. The poison which flows through our veins has been injected into the modern West through an abuse of the power of stories to transmit important values.

Americans are awake. Our culture is not a prison where we have no choice but to abide by the whims of the boardroom bullies. We reject their values and ideals along with the madness of open borders, streets ruled by gangs, and the mental instability of transgender nonsense.

Though the movies may not have been "woke" in the sense that we normally understand them, woke did indeed destroy their appeal. The real issue is the people no longer trust Hollywood to deliver good stories.

And by "good" I mean both in the sense that stories are engaging and well-received as well as in the sense that they convey some moral goodness.

The only reason these Hollywood productions have been so popular until now is because people are resistant to change. A resistance to change is a major reason why dysfunctional relationships persist despite how unhealthy they are.

But in psychology there's a concept called the "tipping point" whereby a small change or series of changes pushes one to the point of making a radical transformation. Once you reach that point, you can no longer go back.

What's more, researchers like Pankaj Aggarwal have noted that brands have a potential to become anthropomorphized and this results in the formation of a personal relationship between the consumer and the brand itself. The dark side of this personalization is that brands can have to power to evoke a sense of betrayal in the consumer.

Taken together, this is very bad news for Hollywood. It means that the reason their movies no longer resonate is because American society has effectively moved on from them. We recognize Hollywood is a coven of self-interested perverts who have no business trying to tell us what our values should be.

So I suspect the reason why the attempted "de-wokeification" of Superman and the Fantastic Four didn't work isn't because the movie makers didn't pivot hard enough to the Right or take a more vocally apolitical stance.

It's because by the time they made these changes to Superman and Fantastic Four, it was already too late.

How else can you explain the astounding success of a movie like K-pop Demon Hunters in the aftermath of these big name flops? K-pop is a Korean phenomenon. Anime and manga are likewise part of Japanese pop culture. For years now, American consumers have been running to these Asian producers of entertainment because they were tired of the way Western media constantly brow-beats its consumers into embracing cultural and personal self-loathing as a "virtue."

Asian pop culture doesn't play games with gender norms. The three females in Demon Hunters are protagonists, but they're also unabashedly feminine and (gasp!) attracted to handsome men! That such a seemingly normal characteristic is unthinkable in the current age of American entertainment speaks volumes to the failure of the producers of Western pop culture to give up their personal fetishes in the name sparking wider appeal and relatability.

Asian pop culture also generally doesn't preach self-loathing as a virtue but instead focuses on the necessity to persevere and strive to be a force for good.

These are all values that were once the bread and butter of American stories, especially comic books. But the industry was infiltrated by mentally damaged freaks and audiences were berated for having natural and visceral reactions to their demoralizing.

Those negative feelings, those reactions, have built up in our modern living collective consciousness to the point where we now suddenly find ourselves. Hollywood slaves away on what they hope will be received as masterpieces, but when the main course is rolled out, our plates are slathered with old banana peels and used coffee grinds.

We can't even entertain the idea of wasting our time with this fare. We've left the venue. Never to return. Who in their right mind would put up with this?

This isn't a reaction to the genre of comic book superheros. The data paints a more nuanced picture. Consider:

• Comic books (US) are dead, but manga (Asian) is not

• Movies (US) are dead, but anime (Asian) is not

• Star Wars (US), which is rooted in science fiction space opera and not really part of the "comic book superhero genre" is also dead

• The Netflix series (US), based on Tolkien's writings and not comic books, is also a spectacular failure

You can be forgiven for saying that spectacle hero pieces are the common thread of all the failures, but it is also a common thread of all the successes.

The one commonality among the failures is a close association with woke anti-culture. Therefore we can conclude those markets haven't died. The true picture is that consumers became more savvy and elected to move on.

Those who insist that comic book movies are simply another in a succession of theater genre types that have come and gone; genres like noir, westerns, cop movies, science fiction, and others; these people are ignoring the history of comics themselves. Each of those genres just mentioned have all been chased after and subsumed by comic books over the generations.

If genre is a species, comic books are a genus. Like movies themselves, comic books refer to a medium. This means that their topics have endless variety and they do not belong at the same level in the taxonomy as movie genres. Indeed, from a Western perspective, this genus would include all of manga as a subtype.

(Do I have to break out the Venn diagrams? Don't make me call Kamala Harris to explain how those work, please!)

To say comic book hero movies are dead is like saying movies themselves are dead. Only that latter statement is arguably more valid than the former thanks to language and culture barriers that still complicate the importation of good entertainment necessary to liberate American theaters from the army of fiddling Neros in H-town.

Understand the implication of that statement. If you blame comic books for poor box office numbers this year, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. What Wokeism is killing is no mere genre but a whole industry albeit only that part of the industry which is physically located in the United States. There are some who go even further and say that this year isn't just the year that killed movies, but killed pop culture itself.

This is a wake up call for all the woke evangelists of Hollywood and Wall Street: the psychological phenomenon of the tipping point means there exists a point of no return -- an emotional event horizon where the gravitational pull of our disgust becomes inescapably powerful and no amount of fan service, no degree of focus-grouped changes, no extent of openly shilling for Conservative ideas or ideals, no number of normal heterosexual white males -- none of these will save Hollywood.

The doom that the tipping point has been reached wasn't announced through some climatic confrontation between consumer and provider but by a yawning emptiness, a black pit of disinterest. Empty theaters and canceled subscriptions.

This is no longer a playful experimentation in the name of artistic license, but an infusion of toxicity that is, at this very moment, murdering their every revenue stream, actively bankrupting them even as they sleep.

In fact, I believe that by the time the true extent of the problem is properly understood by the C-suite, it's already too late to make that course correction. That's why the tipping point is so fearsome.

For most of us humans, we are drawn to good stories out of love. What makes a story lovable is the response of our human souls. Stories speak to the universal truths written into our very hearts from before time.

Woke anti-culture kills love and rejects the signature of God on our hearts. It replaces this universal resonance of the Good with an anti-human obsession and hatred of everything that makes us who we are. It is in its very essence repugnant to humankind.

Hollywood wishes they had done a better job of cornering the market and taking from us all possibility of choice. I bet they regret not closing off Asian productions from our shores. But no amount of walling us in the prison of their intellectual property could succeed at making their stories palatable. Instead of being story-tellers, they tried to use stories the way prisons use metal bars. They forgot that our hearts and minds can't be contained by their gatekeeping and threats of social reprisals. Our hearts and minds aren't prisons. They are an essential element of the liberty we enjoy. This liberty from sin is where we choose to live. That is our true home or, as the inmates say, our street.

The failure of the movie industry in 2025 is only the first sign that we are kicking them off our turf.

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Matt da Silva once worked at the highest levels of government trust as a Japanese and Mandarin Navy linguist. In addition to working at the tip of the intel spear, he also has the distinction of having served 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in Jan 6. Now he's pardoned and using his intel analysis and writing skills in defense of the 21st century civil rights movement known as the MAGA movement. You can find more of his writings at his substack (which is free). You may also want to give him a follow on X and TruthSocial or watch his videos on his Rumble channel, J6 Matt Cast. Please subscribe!