Affirmation Art and Box Office Politics

Pop culture as a self-esteem holodeck

An online search for the term “affirmation art” doesn’t turn up much, but many people will recognize it when they see it. If you’ve felt stifled by notions that depiction equals endorsement, or that art can’t be separated from artists, or that there’s been a self-esteem-obsessed YA-ification of what’s supposed to be grown-up culture, then you’ve run into affirmation art. I’ve written about it before in the context of Asian American art, especially in literature.

Affirmation art can seem a lot like the feel-good genre, which has been around for a very long time. However, the distinctive feature of affirmation art is that it not only refuses to shy away from its flattery of its audience, but claims that doing so boosts its artistic bona fides. Whereas a feel-good movie is sheepish about its pandering to the audience and asks for respect despite that element, affirmation art is proud of its fan service because it believes that that is the main purpose of art. The power of art is to be harnessed not to bring truth and beauty to the world, but to enact good and meaningful change for a better society. In fact, truth and beauty may need to be sacrificed, because the truth is sometimes—actually, often—unkind, and beauty is ruthlessly hierarchical.

I’m not going to turn this into a film review of current Oscars overlord, Everything Everywhere All At Once, because at this point, what more about the movie needs to be said? But it is a perfect example of affirmation art because it embodies its ideals both internally and externally. The message of the movie’s storyline is designed to assuage the en vogue anxieties of the Millennial-and-younger audience, from intergenerational trauma to imposter syndrome. In his post-Oscars examination of EEAAO, LA Times critic Justin Chang noted “the generational divide . . . between those who couldn’t stand the movie, like my uncle, and those who adored it, like my younger cousin and most of my undergraduate film criticism students.” If the target audience were divided into Evelyns and Joys, which character would that audience identify with more? And which character does the film portray as being in the right and in the wrong? Vox proclaimed EEAAO, in glowing terms, as the leading example of the Millennial Parental Apology Fantasy, a type of narrative “where the parent is more to blame than the child.” I’ve watched EEAAO twice, and I’m still not sure what Evelyn’s harrowing motherly flaws were. The fact that she’s icily accepting of her child’s romantic partner and doesn’t engage in playful banter makes her the median parent in the world. Her main crime is that she’s not Lorelai Gilmore and for that, she must pay. 

And that’s just within the world of the movie. In the real world, all those involved further the correctly live-affirming messages. Michelle Yeoh represents the triumph of women of colour (especially over an imperious blonde woman like Cate Blanchett in their Best Actress showdown), as well as an older woman finding mainstream success later in her career. Ke Huy Quan is the child-star comeback king (who also not-so-coincidentally sings odes to the greatness of fading Hollywood titans like Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford).  

This is not to say affirmation art has achieved a total victory in our culture. Shows like Succession and Beef are antithetical to the ideals of affirmation art, yet they have been two of the most popular and acclaimed shows in recent times. It’s certainly an ongoing cultural back and forth.

A natural offshoot of affirmation art is seeking societal moral validation via the box office. If consuming morally righteous media can lead to self-improvement, then it’s critical that this happens at a mass level. Thus, the box office becomes a crucial thermometer in taking the moral temperature of a population. 

One of the most absurdly funny online wars I’ve ever seen happened in early 2020 when Birds of Prey (the Margot Robbie Harley Quinn movie, in case you forgot) was released. COVID hadn’t yet hit us, and the movie was trying to ride the fading wave of the #MeToo cultural zeitgeist, which meant large segments of the online crowd were both deeply invested in its success, and conversely, its pratfall. The opening weekend box office wasn’t stellar, leading to crowing or excuse-making. The next weekend, Sonic came out and broke box office records. And for a brief moment, the blue Sega hedgehog became an anti-woke hero and a symbol of misogyny.

Such box office culture wars didn’t start with Birds of Prey vs. Sonic, and they certainly didn’t end with it. The latest battle is over The Little Mermaid had high standards to live up, at least more in terms of box office performance than cinematic quality since its predecessors—the live-action remakes of The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast—all made over a billion dollars in total. A couple of weeks ago, The Little Mermaid made headlines as the alleged victim of racist Asian audiences. The movie has been doing okay in the United States, but has underwhelmed abroad, especially in China and Korea, which were both critical markets for the financial success of many of the other Disney live-action remakes. Same with Japan, where The Little Mermaid is doing better compared to Korea and China, but still not well.

The American eagerness to blame Asia, especially as a way to deflect attention, isn’t surprising. The Little Mermaid isn’t doing spectacularly in any market, including America’s, where it’s now questionable whether it can hit $300 million (box office-ology means I’ve become all too familiar with these benchmarks), which would be a disaster. With all the turmoil going on in Hollywood right now with the writers’ strike, the end of ZILCH (zero interest loan culture heaven), and fatigue over so-called woke entertainment, the disappointment of The Little Mermaid will need a scapegoat, and Asia’s always been a good candidate for that (never mind that the film will probably fall half a billion short compared to its other major live-action remake peers and there’s no way that East Asian markets will be responsible for all that).

The question here is not whether Korea or any country has racial problems, but whether box office performance is a reliable way to determine that. What about the fact that Korea was Get Out’s most successful international market (or that Soul was one of Pixar’s best performing movies in China)? Saying that Korea’s one of the world’s most racially enlightened countries because a Jordan Peele movie did well there sounds ridiculous, as it should. But if so, saying that Korea—or any country—is racist because a movie didn’t do well there is equally absurd, especially if movies of a certain racial group have succeeded there previously and the movie that tanked actually kind of sucks. If box office performance can only prove an audience’s moral failing yet never vindicate its virtue, then it merely becomes an eternal cudgel, a supremely useful weapon for the mediocre and untalented to guilt-trip people into consuming their cultural products and always having an unassailable excuse for failure. 

All this reminds me of the long-standing Asian American obsession with media representation, myself (once) included. But it’s important to note that such obsession came from a position of weakness. While there’s an element of luxury in worrying about media representation, it’s also a coping mechanism when other more substantial needs seem hopelessly out of reach. For Asian Americans, no matter what the stats rosily say about our income or education levels, there is the justified feeling that we will never truly matter that much in America, that we’re the taken-in stray and thus always the ones who belong least to the litter. So we pin all our hopes onto the screen, preferring to fall into the world of make-believe. It is the VR headset before the holodeck. A modern-day opium den.

It even becomes a social justice cause for many, and in doing so, they get cause-and-effect wrong: Whereas media critique often begins because the media reflects existing social biases, especially those that are difficult to quantify like interpersonal slights, it then morphs into the belief that with the right casting decision and with the satisfactory box office opening, all can be fixed. Whether this is due to genuine mistake or wishful thinking is besides the point; at least it gives us something to do.

And now, we’re all becoming Asian Americans. And that’s not a good thing. It’s a debased state to be in, to rely so heavily on mass entertainment to make or break our sense of self. However, it’s not difficult to understand the appeal of doing so. Consuming media and engaging in celebrity gossip are much more fun pastimes than almost anything else, and what a wonderful thing it’d be if engaging in those things was also part of some greater justice movement. And that’s the grotesque thing about affirmation art. It reflects an ugly society, one in which its members feel so devalued and alienated that they can only find meaning in either consuming or creating self-affirming entertainment. The lucky few who do end up occupying these coveted positions then in turn debase art itself, turning what ought to be the most unique expressions of our mortal selves into little more than therapeutic fables. And if you don’t pay enough money to consume these fables, then you’re morally reprehensible.