“Pluribus” Feels Like an Allegory for Wokeness
It’s not, but it feels that way
***WARNING: The following contains general spoilers drawn from the first three episodes of Pluribus. And you should watch Pluribus — it’s really good! Here’s the trailer:
There is virtually no chance that the new Vince Gilligan show Pluribus is meant to be an allegory for The Great Awokening. That’s just not what Vince Gilligan does — he’s on record about the importance of jettisoning pointy-headed screenwriter bullshit and just telling a good story.1 And maybe that’s why his stuff is so good; while most of us writers imagine that people are waiting for some Hollywood poindexter with a degree in The History Of Feelings to tell them what life is about, Gilligan just tells a story lets other people wank about the meaning.
So: Let’s wank about the meaning. Pluribus really reminds me of the sudden onset of wokeness. The way that Carol, played by Rhea Seehorn, feels — which is to say, bewildered, isolated, and crazy — is how I felt. I was the odd man out while everyone around me seemed blissfully in synch with the New Consciousness. Again, I’m all but positive that this isn’t what Gilligan was going for, but that doesn’t mean that the allegory doesn’t track.
The first detail that matches is how sudden the takeover was. On the show, the entire world gets body-snatched in a night — wokeness didn’t happen in a night, but…it was maybe like a week or two, right? Most people I talk to agree that it started in 2014, specifically; we don’t place it to 2016, when Trump replaced Obama, or 2010, which is a nice round number — we all recall The Lego Movie coming out and then, poof, everyone was woke. Wokeness also didn’t encompass the world, but it took over whole ecosystems, like my world in entertainment, which was influenced by wokeness about as much as Pompeii was influenced by Mount Vesuvius.
If you were in one of those spaces and weren’t one of The Converted, then you stuck out like a sore thumb. I somehow avoided having my mind wiped — I attribute that partly to age and partly to being a world-class cranky bastard — and I stubbornly clung to old ways of thinking (e.g. free speech and color blindness are good). I think that one reason why a lot of people recognized wokeness as a religious movement is that the converted engaged in public evangelism. They developed their own behaviors and rituals, such as land acknowledgements, which are stranger than anything shown on Pluribus. If you didn’t partake, it was obvious, so there was quickly a “one of us/one of them” dynamic that nobody missed.
On Pluribus, the non-body-snatched people other than Carol decide that the easiest thing to do is to just go with the flow. It’s not clear what, if anything, they could do, so they decide to roll with the new order instead of banging their head against a wall. One character thinks that the change is unambiguously awesome and turns the new arrangement to his advantage — this is the guy who, in our world, would have gotten rich running an “antiracist” consulting company called Privilege Check. When the change came, there were three categories of people: The woke, the Vichy woke, and “Carol”, and there weren’t many Carols out there.
Finally, there’s the fact that on Pluribus, the totalitarian takeover of people’s consciousness is extremely nice. The show portrays the most Ned Flanders-y zombie takeover you’ll ever see, and wokeness ensnared many habitually friendly people. In fact, I think that what basically happened is that people with extreme views bullied empathetic people into going with the flow. After all, if you hate racism — and you should! — and someone says “believe this or you’re racist,” you might talk yourself into believing the thing just to be safe. And the one detail of Pluribus that makes me think that maybe it is an allegory for wokeness is the fact that the Pod People literally collapse if you’re mean to them — that feels very on the nose. One thing that helped wokeness spread was that if you said “this dumb bullshit is dumb bullshit,” your inquisitor would collapse into a pile of mush and you’d be hauled into HR to discuss your “violent” language.
Though I doubt that Pluribus is about wokeness, specifically, it’s unavoidably about conformity and individuality, generally. Even if the wokeness allegory doesn’t fit your experience, you can probably think of a time when you felt out of step with the people around you. Though I’m sure that Gilligan’s goal is just to tell a good story, the show can’t help but raise questions about what’s lost when dissenting voices disappear. The fact that we have a dyspeptic, borderline-antisocial protagonist means that dissenting views will be loudly voiced. And that might be the only way that Pluribus isn’t like the Great Awokening.
It's Always the Adults' Fault
This week, Jesse Singal had an article on his Substack that resonated with me. Singal described how the attempts at social commentary on Arcade Fire’s new album made him feel cranky and old. He writes:
The show has two meanings. First, I think a lot of the surface level stuff (including specific dialogue lines and acting styles) was more attuned to AI and a growing monoculture, where everyone sounds the same. Like the hive, everyone using ChatGPT to write emails or letters has the same affect, same use of em dashes, same vocabulary (“delve,” “saccharine,” “tapestry,” etc.) The second deeper part of the story is that Carol is a misanthrope who now must realize she’s undervalued humanity. She’s chronically pessimistic about humanity and can’t really connect with others. She sneers at the thousands of fans who like her book. The reason why she utterly fucks up the Air Force One meeting is that she can’t interact with 5 random people without showing her distain or superiority. And now, she has 7 billion slaves but not a single friend or lover. I think the show is going to demonstrate that Carol needs to grow and find a deeper love for humanity, even if that humanity is different than her
In 2013 I went to a conference in Australia and heard my first land acknowledgement and thought “oh that’s interesting and I guess good.” By 2014 suddenly everyone in academic spaces were saying oh we need to do land acknowledgements and I thought “huh where did this come from, did everyone go to Australia last year?”