The Tossed Salad Principle in the Culture Wars

When spite and score-settling trump everything

In Chris Rock’s standup comedy special, Bring The Pain, he talks about how messed up prisons are and repeats an interview he’s seen on TV with some kind of boss inmate. The inmate is asked how he breaks in new prisoners, and he says he makes them toss his salad (i.e. eat his ass) with either jelly or syrup (he prefers syrup). When the interviewer asks why not just make the new prisoners blow him, the inmate says, “Because when a man is sucking your dick, he can pretend it’s something else. But when he’s eating ass, he knows it’s ass.”

Crude as that joke may be, it explains a lot of the culture wars. It isn’t enough to be critically acclaimed or earn tonnes of money. All that’s for naught if your enemies aren’t also humiliated, and most importantly, they themselves know they’re humiliated. For further illustration, in a Malcolm in the Middle episode where Lois and Hal have to volunteer for a week as helpers at Malcolm’s high school, Hal engages in a war against Malcolm’s teacher, Mr. Herkabe (whom I maintain is still Nick Smith from Metropolitan under a pseudonym after he’s fallen from social grace). When Mr. Herkabe expels Hal from the program, Lois tries to calm Hal down, telling him he should be happy since he didn’t even want to volunteer in the first place. But Hal still fumes:“But [Herkabe] didn’t know that! Which means he thinks he won! Which means I think I lost!”

The Tossed Salad Principle stands for the idea that it is not enough for one’s deeply cherished idea to be embraced and eagerly spread. What is more critical is the satisfying humiliation of one’s enemies, whether real or perceived. If you had to choose between the two, and you had to be completely honest, you’d choose the latter.

There was a recent Disney live-action Peter Pan movie, Peter Pan & Wendy. Barely anyone saw it, so it’s probably not even worth writing about. But still, the mini-controversy it stoked (at least in certain corners of Youtube) fascinated me because I wasn’t sure if this version of Peter Pan could even count as the most so-called woke live-action Peter Pan movie of the last thirty years. 

Let’s start with Hook, the Spielberg movie from the early 1990s. Were it to come out today, the backlash against it would be obvious. Firstly, the Lost Boys are too diverse. Their leader is an Asian kid (Rufioooooo!) and after his tragic death in battle (RIP), he is succeeded by Thud, a black kid. The non-leadership rank-and-file are also made up of a lot of different races and ethnicities too. Secondly, Tinkerbell has actual speaking lines and is more than a spiteful and short-lived fairy who mostly sabotages her perceived female rivals for Peter’s attention (I’m guessing if you’re shelling out for Julia Roberts, you probably want her to talk a bit too). 

Then there’s the 2003 version, simply titled Peter Pan, which is also one of my favourite movies of all time. Some of the controversy over Peter and Wendy had to do with the fact that Wendy was given too much of a central role over Peter. Even the title was blasted as caving into woke pressure to uplift female protagonists in everything, despite the fact that the original play and book was actually called Peter and Wendy. The 2003 Peter Pan, which has been rightfully hailed as the best adaptation of the source material, clearly focuses on Wendy as the main character. The movie begins as she’s swordfighting with her brothers, knocking over lots of furniture in the process. She doesn’t care much for her studies and she talks exuberantly about all the adventures she’s going to have, which she hopes to later novelize into at least three volumes. But her parents think she’s being silly and tell her that it’s time to grow up. Naturally, in swoops Peter to present her with the tantalizing possibility of never having to do so. Peter is the titular character, but the story is all about her journey and dilemmas.

I’ve wanted to read the original Peter Pan books for a while now, so I finally did so recently: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy. The former is more a series of loosely connected short stories, all set in the fairy world that secretly exists in Kensington Gardens. Not all of the stories are about Peter, but we do learn that Peter, at a week old, kind of turns into a bird and flies away from home into Kensington Gardens, where he’s raised by fairies. It’s in Peter and Wendy, which was s a novelization of a popular play that spun out of the Peter Pan story in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, where we find the familiar elements of the Peter Pan story.

Not only is it clear that Wendy is the protagonist of the story whom the audience is meant to relate to, but it’s also emphasized that Peter Pan is a tragic figure. Wendy, her brothers, and all of the Lost Boys ultimately leave Neverland because while it may be fun to be a little kid, staying one forever would mean missing out on too much. The only one who refuses to realize that truth is Peter Pan, and for that, he’s condemned to a life of loneliness and amnesia. His childish mind cannot retain memories for long, so he forgets everything about Captain Hook, Wendy, Tinkerbell (who, as a fairy, doesn’t live long and soon dies after the events of the novel). He is Phil Connors from Groundhog Day, except he’ll never escape the repetitive time loop where nothing matters.

This year, I’ve pledged to cut back on my tendency to hate-read and hate-watch with mixed results. Peter Pan & Wendy is a bit of a relapse. I regret it now, because it was one of those movies that took me twice as long as its runtime to get through because I kept getting distracted. For all the controversy I’d seen about it, it was all very limp and dull and didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before. Sure, there were Lost Girls, but we’d already had the United Nations Lost Boys before. And Wendy did a lot of fighting and had an adventurous spirit, but we’d already seen that before too. The main thing Peter Pan & Wendy thinks needs fixing is Wendy’s domesticity in the original story. In Neverland, she is given authority over the Lost Boys and even Peter, but “only” as a motherly figure. She even begins to treat her youngest brother, Michael, as her child, out of her maternal instinct. But in the new movie, she even wonders if she wants to be a mother.

That’s it? If we’re going to get into gender war stuff, the original story stated that there were only Lost Boys and not Lost Girls because only little boys were stupid enough to wander away fom their parents. J.M. Barrie even seemingly preempts #MenAreTrash when Peter boastfully takes full credit for re-attaching his wayward shadow (after having cried to Wendy for help and she sews it back on).

So what’s this really about? Because it’s not such a simple dichotomy of certain people roundly hate all narratives where women are not just protagonists, but also action-oriented heroines. The success of Mad Max: Fury Road (commonly regarded as the best action movie in recent history) and Star Wars: Rogue One (widely regarded as the best of the Disney-era Star Wars movies) should’ve ended the debate a while ago, about whether it was possible to reconcile established franchises with predominantly male fans with new narratives that highlighted more female and non-white characters. Fury Road committed about every possible anti-fanboy sin imaginable by taking an existing franchise and sidelining its male protagonist in favour of a female one. The villain was a repulsive patriarchal warlord who wanted to hoard and enslave multiple wives, and there was even an all-female band of nomadic warriors. But unlike a lot of movies with similar elements in that mid/late 2010s era, these movies were not only objectively good, but also rather understated in their messaging. Show, not tell. And certainly not lecture and scold.

The phenomenal success of Barbie attests to the idiocy of the Tossed Salad Principle because it contains the kind of message that the likes of a Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro would melt down over. And those types did, but by then, it was too late because Barbie had already built up so much goodwill among the public that it was virtually impossible to tar it as an enemy work. Its Nice Girl strategy is now readily apparent when we look at interviews with Mattel film executives, who in the lead-up to Barbie’s premiere, denied that it was a feminist movie . Some have made criticisms that Barbie is just corporate feminism, but somehow, I doubt those corporate executives were coming from that angle. And for all of the many uses of the word “patriarchy” in Barbie, Ken actually ends up being a sympathetic character, much to the consternation of some people.

It seemingly doesn’t make sense that movies with socially progressive elements could be made in the 1990s and 2000s without much controversy, but then somehow nowadays, Wendy can’t even swing a sword without half the country getting upset. Maybe some will say that the power structure is feeling especially threatened in the 2020s, so the regressives are especially sensitive. But then how would they explain near-universal praise of the movies I just mentioned above? Why do the same people who allegedly hate The Last Jedi because it has a female lead and a diverse cast also adore Rogue One, which has a female lead and a diverse cast? We all know the answer. First, it has to be good. Then second, you can’t go around rubbing your message in people’s faces and acting like everything that came before your glorious selves was backwards, stupid, and evil. Do that, and audiences will love anything.

Online interactions are so perversely incentivized to maximize conflict, often performative conflict, in order to obtain social media relevance, and how IRL communication just naturally begins with a baseline level of mutual respect. While media can never substitute IRL interactions, there are enough examples now that show that it’s not so much the message as the manner: Just treat us like people, not obstacles or lepers.

It would appear to be a grand bargain, a clear example of the old cliche of getting more bees with honey than vinegar. If you’re an artist, and you want your work and message to have as much reach as possible, wouldn’t you want this deal? But not all people working in the arts are artists. Some have higher priorities, like settling personal scores and venting resentments. That’s ultimately why they’re in the game. To forego that would be to forego the entire ballgame. Thankfully, if only due to rising interest rates, their little heyday seems to be coming to an end.