Last Friday, the Walt Disney Company abruptly severed its professional relationship with writer-director James Gunn. Gunn’s third movie for the company, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, was to start production this fall; his first two Guardians films (sorry, “volumes”) grossed a combined $1.6 billion for Disney.
So this was no small thing — the termination, for cause, of a central asset of the most successful movie franchise in the world. What ended Gunn’s gig was not his job performance, but his pre–Marvel Universe status as a fringe director, internet asshole, and provocateur. His time at Disney expired due to bad tweets, now the second leading cause of Hollywood career death, behind only sexual misconduct. The tweets — an endless, gross, “indefensible,” in the company’s words, litany of sick jokes about pedophilia — were not entirely fresh news. They, along with entries on a blog Gunn eventually took down, had been the subject of online discussion for quite some time. If the studio didn’t know about them already, the reason can only be that it simply wasn’t paying attention. (The studio’s statement dismissing Gunn did not address the question of how long those in charge have known about his tweets.)
What apparently caused Disney to pull the trigger was the tweeting of Mike Cernovich, alt-right self-styled scourge and a central figure in the Pizzagate/Infowars Universe, who re-unearthed Gunn’s jokes and went into strategically righteous “how can Disney let this man work around children” mode. (The Guardians movies are cast with adults, but never mind.) Practically bleeding concern from every pore, Cernovich later wrote of Gunn’s tweets, “How do you know they are jokes?” Cernovich then got to his real point, which is that he claims to have examples of “100” more Hollywood people making pedophilia jokes on Twitter. Oh, good. Yay. This should be another awesome couple of weeks in the land of Everything Is Garbage Now.
There are many boxes to unpack here, and the smallest, least interesting one is labeled “Find a better use for your time and creative energy than making jokes about sex with children.” That doesn’t need to be discussed because, one’s absolute right to make those jokes aside, pretty much everyone agrees that it’s bad, including Gunn, who tweeted his regrets about them, and after being fired, issued a statement about his “wildly insensitive” tweets, the sum of which was that although “they don’t reflect the person I am today … I take full responsibility,” and as a “business decision,” I get it.
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As mea culpas go, fine: It’s a teachable moment. Henceforth, everyone should sing like no one can hear you, dance like nobody’s watching, and tweet like several years from now you’ll be employed by a corporation trying not to run afoul of government regulatory agencies mid-merger. Let your work be your “brand,” not your needy impulse to shock the room. But it’s too easy to say that Gunn brought this on himself. He didn’t. Assuming there is no more to the story than we are being told, from all appearances Disney capitulated, without more than a half-day’s thought, to a manifestly disingenuous pressure campaign from a movement seeking to recast an ongoing debate about offensive speech to suit its own purposes — a redefinition that does not stand up to a minute’s scrutiny. And in doing so, Disney endorsed something far more offensive and dangerous than Gunn’s joke that in the sequel to The Giving Tree, the tree gives the kid a blow job.
The road to the takedown of Gunn probably began two months ago, with Disney’s (via its network ABC) abrupt cancellation of Roseanne after its star compared former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape, while attacking Muslims and George Soros for good measure. Like Gunn, Barr had a long history of appalling statements on social media, one that was well-known to ABC before Roseanne was revived. Unlike Gunn, the tweet that resulted in her dismissal was brand-new, which suggested that Disney was willing to draw a line, in effect granting its top-level talent amnesty for any preemployment offensiveness as long as, going forward, their records stayed clean.
Barr’s support for Trump made her a hero of the right (and of Trump himself, who called her to offer congratulations on her first episode’s ratings). When she shot herself in the foot, as anyone who has followed her social-media career knew she would, her firing was quickly reframed by alt-righters as the end point of a liberal-media smear campaign. And here’s where the problem starts. The Breitbart/Trump/Cernovich portion of the right has always tried to minimize blatant racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim rhetoric by placing it all under one heading: “not politically correct.” In their world, only “snowflakes” take umbrage at people who dare to “tell it like it is”; they view everything from the #MeToo movement to attacks on racism as penalties that liberals administer to those who violate perceived political orthodoxy. The outrage with which Cernovich went after Gunn is a calculated posture, a way of saying, “If you can get someone fired by saying their words are offensive, we can too.”
That approach depends, for its effectiveness, on a deliberate refusal to draw any categorical distinctions. It insists on a world in which punishment should be weighed not by the intensity of the offense but by the noise level of those who are (or act) offended. Thus, Gunn’s comment that a hotel shower was so weak that it felt like a 3-year-old peeing on his head (yes, that is literally one of the “pedophilia” jokes that was quoted in support of his firing) is given the same weight as a blunt-force attack on African-Americans, the LGBTQ community, or women. If you can’t see a difference between a lame Gunn tweet from 2012 like “Three Men and a Baby They Had Sex With #unromanticmovies” and “When is the last time women organized to support a men’s rights issue? Stop being fags. Who cares about breast cancer and rape? Not me” (a Cernovich tweet from 2012 — he’s super-interested in not being interested in rape), then you’re either not trying, or you’re invested in insisting there’s no difference. As is, for example, Ted Cruz, who swiftly attached his suction cups to the underside of this news cycle and sweatily tweeted about Gunn that “if these tweets are true, he needs to be prosecuted.” By Saturday, Gunn’s Wikipedia page had a subheading labeled “Pedophilia accusations”; it has since been changed, but the reputational damage is done.
(Excerpt) Read More at: Vulture.com
