You know how when you are too afraid to talk about a thing directly so you can only approach it indirectly.

Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” stars June Squibb as a 94-year-old woman who, out of grief and loneliness, does a terrible thing.

After her best friend (Rita Zohar) dies, Eleanor (Squibb) moves to New York and, after accidentally joining the wrong meeting at the Jewish Community Center, adopts her friend’s story of Holocaust survival. The film builds toward a moment where Eleanor could be harshly condemned in a public forum, or not.

For Johansson, her movie speaks to the moment.

“There’s a lack of empathy in the zeitgeist. It’s obviously a reaction to a lot of things,” says Johansson. “It feels to me like forgiveness feels less possible in the environment we’re in.”

What moment, what zeitgeist?

But that’s how liberal critics tend to indirectly address cancel culture by discussing a “lack of empathy” and a lack of forgiveness which entirely misses the point as destroying people for minor disagreements and errors is considered an important lesson and also a whole lot of people.

Why might Scarlett Johansson be interested in addressing the ambiguous zeitgeist and the lack of forgiveness? In woke parlance, she was ‘dragged’ for suggesting that actors should be able to play any role regardless of their race. Rather than address that, we have all this dancing around, a Holocaust plot, and an indirect way of addressing the issue without really addressing the issue because everyone is scared.

So no one gets to mention wokeness.