Cancellation

“Cancelled” is one of the watchwords of 2020. What is it, why is it, and is a force for good, evil, or something else?

By now, if you spend time on the internet, you probably have a vague idea of what “cancelling” someone means. Vaguely, it’s when a group of people — usually on Twitter — decide that this or that person has behaved inappropriately, and proceed to call for them to be fired, or jailed, or whatever other consequence they think are deserved. Sometimes they just yell and call the person names.

Or at least, that’s the way people see it when they’re being cancelled. For the cancellers, cancellation is about holding powerful people to account when they do something stupid or offensive or harmful, often using social media to voice their discontent and force the person to confront the consequences of their actions, where before they wouldn’t have had to.

Like a lot of things in this day and age, the issue has become politicized, with its supporters digging in and upholding it as a way for the powerless to hold the powerful to task and its detractors decrying it as an attempt to stamp out free speech, with no less than the President of the United States invoking it to enflame his base (even though insulting people on Twitter is one of his favorite pastimes, but whatever).

Because I’m an incurable waffler, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think canceling can have value in certain cases, but in others it seems like anger in search of a problem.

Modern canceling really got underway with the targeting of people like musician R. Kelly, who was credibly abused of child pornography and worse for years, but nothing really stuck until cancellers called out for him to be prosecuted on Twitter, inspired by a 2019 documentary detailing his offenses. He is now in jail. Much the same could be said of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and other powerful industry types who faced justice for sexual abuses carried out over decades after women came forward, often on Twitter, to detail their experiences. Much of the activism carried out under the heading of the #MeToo movement resembled cancelling, and a lot of it was important and needed.

If those are examples of cancel culture working, others are harder to pin down. Nowadays, you mostly see “cancel culture” being invoked for offenses that, compared to the stuff Kelly and Weinstein did, aren’t as severe. Take the recent instance of Mandalorian star Gina Carano, who came under fire for mocking the practice of specifying one’s pronouns, something done to accommodate trans people, and for perpetuating election conspiracies.

All of that is pretty objectionable, but if you put Carano’s backwards comments up against child pornography and sexual assault, you’re not going to have nearly as many people convinced she needs to answer for them. In that kind of situation, it’s easier for Carano to get defensive rather than listen and learn something, and it looks like that’s what she did. And it’s hard to blame her when people were doing things like sending her death threats, which is a blatant overreaction.

At the same time, there were also people trying more calmly to explain why what she saying was offending people, but I can imagine how it’s hard to see and respond to that amid a wave of hatred.

I think that’s a problem with social media call-outs like these: unless the condemnation is universal, and it usually isn’t, the targets always have the option to retreat into a defensive position instead of taking a breath, considering some of the criticisms, and trying to look at things from another angle. Instead, they can harden their views and become even more difficult to reach. In these instances, cancelling isn’t very good at what it’s trying to do, assuming it’s trying to turn people on to more progressive views.

The most prominent case of this happening from this year that I can think of is Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling digging in against her critics when they accused her of supporting known transphobes and making transphobic comments herself. In response to their critiques, she dispelled all doubt and wrote a lengthy essay peddling in transphobic cliches, basically embracing a new role as a transphobic thought leader. Talk about someone hardening their views.

There are more graceful ways to handle it. When cancellers came for Warner Bros. after the new HBO Max movie The Witches offended members of the disability community, the studio put out a lukewarm apology that pleased no one. However, Anne Hathaway, who wore the costume at the center of the controversy, issued a more thorough apology that made clear she understood where the critiques were coming from. And the cancellation faded away…

…for now. One feature of cancel culture is that, even if someone issues an acceptable apology, cancellers tend to bring up the original offense as if it was never accounted for the next time there’s a controversy. But it can’t hurt to stay ahead of things. At the least, if you’re being cancelled, these examples show that you should never argue back against cancellers; they seems to make matters worse in approximately 100% of cases.

I’d recommend an apology, a straight denial or silence. Silence is the strategy that director Joss Whedon used (mostly) when people were calling for him to be banished from Hollywood after Justice League cast member Ray Fisher accused him of inappropriate behavior on set, and his fortunes seem not to have dimmed…

…until he announced that he was leaving his HBO show The Nevers, purportedly for exhaustion. But it was it actually the cries for his ouster that forced this exit, with “exhaustion” used as a cover? It’s hard to know. Also, Warner Bros. was doing an internal investigation into Fisher’s accusations against Whedon, which may have had something to do with this. But if that’s the case, would that investigation have happened had cancellers not called for it?

As we speak, there’s another example like this playing out: well over a million people have signed an online petition to get Amber Heard fired from Aquaman 2, where she’s plays Atlantean warrior Mera. This comes not long after Warner Bros. fired her ex-husband Johnny Depp from the Fantastic Beasts series, where he played Grindelwald. To make a long story short, Depp came under fire after Heard made allegations that he physically abused her during her marriage. Eventually, he made similar accusations against her, and the tide of public opinion changed.

But Warner Bros. only fired Depp after he lost a court battle involving all this, after a judge went on record as believing Heard’s accusations. Nothing like that has happened to Heard yet. Do cancellers only have real power when their efforts are vindicated by a more traditional authority, say a judge or an internal investigation? If so, it doesn’t mean they don’t have power, only that their power is — on its own — somewhat theoretical.

If cancellers truly want to use their power for good and take down evildoers who otherwise won’t be held accountable for their actions, it will pay to use strategy. I’d recommend they pick their targets carefully, and make sure to the greatest extent possible that they can back up their accusations with evidence, so they hold up in the court of public opinion at least (making sure they hold up in actual court is probably too much to ask; that’s what the lawyers are for). It also wouldn’t hurt to have people on your side who have more qualifications to recommend them than a pile of Twitter followers.

It also might help to change the word used to describe this phenomenon, since “cancelling” has become so polarized that few seem willing to have an honest discussion about it anymore. But no one really has control over the terminology, and the next term would get polarized sooner or later.

Anyway, I wanted to get some of these thoughts out on paper, since canceling doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. The most we can do is understand it, and maybe try and use it for what good it can do.