Essay: On the spectacle of cancel culture
Depending on whom you ask, cancel culture is a threat to freedom of expression or mere background noise; it is changing social codes or it is changing nothing
Paul Mathews (Nicolas Cage) is a middle-aged academic so unremarkable he could pass unnoticed almost anywhere. Until, out of the blue, he starts to pop up in the dreams of his students, family and countless strangers. With newfound recognition comes media attention. Advertisers look to capitalise on his pop-up celebrity status to place products in dreams. Paul cashes in by getting a long-gestating book on ants off the ground. The 15 minutes run out when his role in the dreams changes from a passive bystander to a violent aggressor. The public turns on him; the pitchforks come out; Paul loses his job, his wife and his family. Just as quickly as he became a phenomenon, he becomes persona non grata.
At a diegetic level, Dream Scenario is a nightmare-comedy about a man with no control over his persona or public perception. At a more meta-level, the film functions as an examination of Cage’s own position in the cultural unconscious, given the internet has chopped up his performances into meme fodder. At a more satirical level, the Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli crystallises the anxieties of being at the whims of a participatory media. In the internet ecosystem, everyone is either hero and villain. It is either build up or tear down, cheer or condemn. Nuances are often glossed over because opinions are nothing but proxy stances taken for rhetorical purposes. With faith declining in established institutions, many among the public have grown firm in their belief that the duties of judge, jury and executioner rest upon them.
Depending on whom you ask, cancel culture is real or fabricated; it is a threat to freedom of expression or mere background noise; it is changing social codes or it is changing nothing; it is an offshoot of PC culture or it isn’t really a culture at all, more a byword used by those sweating in fear over being held accountable for their words and actions. What is irrefutable is cancel culture has been milked by media for all that it’s worth and it isn’t. Essays and op-eds have resorted to hyperbole, from comparing it to the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong to calling it the “new puritanism.” In a 2021 essay for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes, “The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices — these are rather typical behaviours in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure. This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds.”
On the contrary, the panic over cancel culture seems to far exceed the panic of cancel culture. There is a gulf between the actual impact of cancel culture and the feverish intensity of the discourse surrounding it. Adam Gurri, in a counterargument to Applebaum’s essay, points to the “status anxiety” that colours a lot of the writings. To decode cancel culture, he insists, requires “actually (wrestling) with the role of social sanctions in a free society rather than simply assuming that their mere existence is a sign of unfreedom.” As to those inflating it as an authoritarian trend, New York Times columnist Ligaya Mishan disputes the validity of such wild analogies. “Cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed. If anything, it’s anti-authoritarian,” she writes. “What cancellations offer instead is a surrogate, warped-mirror version of the judicial process, at once chaotic yet ritualized. It’s a paradox reminiscent of the mayhem in medieval Catholic traditions of carnival and misrule, wherein the church and governing bodies were lampooned and hierarchy upended — all without actually threatening the prevailing hegemony, and even reaffirming it.”
Denouncing individual behaviour en masse is not exactly a new phenomenon. But the internet, tabloids and reality TV have changed how the skeletons in everyone’s closet are exposed. If shaming has turned into a spectacle, the public is as complicit as the media. In the domain of social media, the overlap of users creating and consuming content further complicates the notion of complicity and the nature of motives. Is the intent of denunciation rooted in a benign demand for long overdue accountability or a malign delight of collective schadenfreude? As Mishan writes, “It’s not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a larger imbalance of power — to wreak vengeance as a way of rendering some justice, however imperfect; to speak out against those “existing mechanisms” that don’t serve us so well after all; to condemn an untrustworthy system and make a plea for a fairer one — or just the blood-sport thrill of humiliating a stranger as part of a gleeful, baying crowd.”
To treat the extremely online as one homogenous entity may make it easier to criticise and satirise. But the internet is an unsupervised playground-turned-battleground populated by all kinds of users. For many, it is a happy distraction. For just as many, its dopamine feedback loop satisfies their compulsive need for affirmation. For some, the addiction to attention can turn into pathological narcissism. Before Dream Scenario, Borgli’s previous feature pitted two of the third kind against each other in an attention economy that rewards the self-obsessed. Sick of Myself was an id-gone-rogue comedy about a 20-something Oslo woman (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who makes herself ill to one-up her artist boyfriend (Eirik Sæther) after his career takes off. The lengths she goes to be seen and sustain attention becomes a performance art exhibition in itself. Both Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario could be seen as twin interrogations into how viral fame can go to people’s heads, altering their brain chemistry from within.
Once Paul becomes a pariah in Dream Scenario, the alt-right is quick to pounce on the opportunity to recruit him for their cause — a reflection of how so many supposedly “cancelled” celebrities like Jordan Peterson and Gina Carano have been welcomed by the conservative media matrix to air their grievances and find a new sense of purpose. In truth, cancel culture is about as successful as the media economy allows it to be. No amount of Twitter pile-on can put the rich and powerful in some jobless purgatory, as many on the right fear. The blanket stretchability of the term, however, makes it easier to antagonise social justice movements and discredit the people calling for some accountability. To be sure, calling for accountability isn’t about enforced erasure but akin to crossing a name out, like a strikethrough used as a pointer to an annotation, urging people to reconsider their icons in all their facets.
With his 2022 film Tár, Todd Field goes beyond the headlines and conversations to break down the complexities of cancel culture. In a key scene, Cate Blanchett’s imposing orchestral conductor Lydia is giving a master class at Juilliard, where one of the students refuses to play the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Identifying himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” the student Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) dismisses Bach because “white, male, cis composers” are “not my thing,” and goes on to insist the German composer’s “misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously.” Lydia gives Max a proper dressing-down for letting his devotion to identity politics come in the way of his devotion to music. “The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic epistemic dissident is that if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on,” she tells him, “Then so can yours.” She calls him a robot whose soul has been engineered by social media. She then encourages him to leave ego and identity behind, and “sublimate” himself to music. As the rhetoric goes from passionate to brutal, Max storms out in anger, calling her a “fucking bitch.” Max stooping to a misogynist insult reveals even he can’t live up to the standards he sets for others, not to mention centuries-old composers. Through this 10-minute-long unbroken take, Field frames identity politics as a precarious game that can leave its players acting in bad faith and succumbing to hypocrisy.
At the start, Max’s use of buzzwords and the language of intersectionality makes him sound like a caricature of the “woke liberal.” Lydia’s annoyance — with a young man so glib about his ideological conviction — is our own. By the end, she doesn’t come out of looking like a hero either. If Max is too eager to take offence, Lydia is too eager to take him to task and make a spectacle of it. But she does make a forceful case as to why artists should not be reduced to an ideology, an identity marker or a hot-button issue of our times. Milan Kundera once made a similar case against the reductivism of ideology in his essay Testaments Betrayed: “Given that an era’s political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings.”
We live in times where if a public figure has left any paper trail of bad behaviour, it will be submitted as evidence to the social media-led inquisition. The overlap of the private and the public is unavoidable on the internet — something that may not have pleased Kundera, who wished to be known as a novelist and nothing more. Quoting Flaubert, he said in a 1985 acceptance speech that the novelist “seeks to disappear behind his work” — a sentiment not too dissimilar to what Lydia says about musicians. “To disappear behind his work,” said Kundera,” is to renounce the role of public figure. This is not easy these days, when anything of the slightest importance must step into the intolerable glare of the mass media which, contrary to Flaubert’s precept, causes the work to disappear behind the image of its author. In such a situation, which no one can entirely escape, Flaubert’s remark seems to me a kind of warning: in lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered a mere appendage to his actions, to his declarations, to his statements of position.”
An artist is not a personification of a single opinion, a prejudice or an ideology. Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite but not just. Flannery O’Connor was a racist but not just. Choosing not to listen to Wagner and read O’Connor is not activism. Choosing to, doesn’t make a person lose all moral credibility. One can engage with a work of art without disregarding its creator’s blind spots. Imposing a normative language and a decisive judgment only risks impoverishing our cultural discourse — which is a sorry spectacle as it is.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
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