Gen Z’s woke warriors have no imagination

Q: At the end of the movie which character sings: “You better shape up” and “to my heart I must be true”?

Is it:

A: Danny

B: Sandy

C: Rizzo

D: Kenickie

We can only assume the students from Presbyterian Ladies’ College and Scotch College have not actually watched to the end of the movie because they would know that the answer is Sandy who, of course, ditches her simpering girl-next-door vibe and struts out with attitude.

“I’m not putting up with this,” Olivia Newton-John’s character effectively says to John Travolta’s Danny.

But such an entertaining take on female empowerment – notable for a film released in 1978 and set in the ’50s – is not sufficient for the Year 7-10 students who declared it sexist, offensive and anti-feminist.

And so we have yet another instance when the pubescent self-appointed proprietors of cancel culture have slashed a big red cross through a piece of popular entertainment they deem inappropriate.

Despite raising two members of Generation Z, it’s increasingly clear the “Z” stands for zero imagination because as well as being unnecessarily woke – Grease is a rom-com from another era not a contemporary social commentary – their vetoing of the musical is intellectually disappointing.

Why didn’t they rewrite it to represent more progressive social mores? Could they have given it a post #MeToo interpretation focusing on diversity and inclusion?

Or swap the male and female roles as the Sydney Theatre Company did recently, casting a woman in a shapeshifting interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

As an English literature graduate I’m incensed by the far-reaching assault on the creative industries by people who have contributed nothing except mealy-mouthed disdain for works they both fail to understand or contextualise.

They’re killing off storytelling with their joyless opprobrium and crushing independent and interpretive thought.

The point of art is to challenge, disrupt, question and amuse, yet the cancel culture cohort are clearly too fragile to flex their imaginations or consider an open-minded exploration of the times and context which produced these stories.

Worse, institutions, individuals and art platforms whose very existence is predicated on freedom of expression are cowering in the face of the hysteria.

You know you’ve reached peak woke when Shakespeare is being called out for “white supremacy, misogyny, racism and classism”. As one teacher declared, she taught Romeo And Juliet “through the lens of adolescent brain development with a side of toxic masculinity analysis”.

Did she invite her students to appreciate the genius of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and his deftness in playing with identity in the 1600s when women didn’t act and men played their roles?

Sadly, it’s living authors and playwrights who are tiptoeing around these culture warriors to avoid a Twitter pile-on.

British author Sebastian Faulks, who wrote Birdsong, last month confessed that he will no longer physically describe female characters in his novels after being criticised for doing so. Never mind that we get our visual cues from such descriptions – or that Leo Tolstoy’s canon would be cancelled for the crime of description – Faulks was desperate not to offend.

Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo called such censoring “ridiculous”, while author and comedian Dawn French was appalled.

“The minute we start to police people’s imaginations, we go down a very nasty old route. I have the right to write anybody or anything I like,” she said.

Similar happened here when the online journal Verity La was forced to close after it ran a piece exploring the power imbalance in a relationship between a white Australian male and a Filipina woman.

Critics unionised social media, bludgeoning the publication and its editor with a brutality far worse than the alleged transgression.

In the technological age, creative works can be “deplatformed” in an instant. Last year HBO removed Gone With The Wind from its streaming service after it was declared racist. The film was later reuploaded but with an introduction offering context on slavery because viewers clearly can’t think for themselves.

Shooting the storytellers in this way is not an empowered expose of problematic ideas but a cowardly act of self-lobotomy. The creative arts offer us an opportunity to consider and expand, and yet in the hands of cultural quiverers they are only ever a word or a brushstroke away from castigation.

Fortunately, there’s early signs of a “wokelash” from institutions that won’t cower to this nonsense.

When staff at publisher Hachette threatened to down tools because they regarded JK Rowling as a toxic transphobe for a tweet mocking “people” who menstruate instead of “women”, management pushed back saying they couldn’t refuse to work on a book because they disagree with the author’s views.

Likewise, the head of news at the BBC who told LGBT staff last week that while they may hear things they don’t like, they will have to get used to it.

“These are the stories we tell,” she told them. “We can’t walk away from the conversation.”

If only the Perth school kids had been similarly directed.

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