In a film industry that has become rife with hasty, face-saving, PR-vetted apologies, James Gunn’s read more sincerely than most. “My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,” said the director of the first two mega-grossing Guardians of the Galaxy blockbusters. “I have regretted them for many years since – not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.”
This week’s statement wasn’t the first mea culpa the 51-year-old film-maker had offered regarding a barrage of shock-humour tweets posted between 2008 and 2011, in which paedophilia and rape were the primary subjects of notional comedy. “The Expendables was so manly I fucked the shit out of the little pussy boy next to me! The boys ARE back in town!” he tweeted in 2010. A year before, he had fashioned a similarly grim quip: “The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped it’s like, ‘Whew, this feels great, not being raped!’”
That is a representative sample of several dozen such jokes that, even in 2012, he was apologising for. They are jokes that even with the best will – or darkest comic sensibility – in the world, few would declare particularly funny, and about which Gunn had publicly expressed regret as early as 2012. (That is just one year after he dashed off another of his most-quoted offences, in which he jibed that his hypothetical Hollywood adaptation of The Giving Tree would have “a happy ending – the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob”.) Then, he was called out by the feminist entertainment site the Mary Sue. After he had been suitably chastised, the issue died down and Gunn went about his business: specifically, writing and directing the 2014 Marvel romp Guardians of the Galaxy, which went on to gross more than £585m, launching a franchise and giving its maker a degree of power and status that the geek making bad-taste paedophile jokes from the indie fringes probably never expected. One thing he didn’t do as his career surged, however, was delete the troublesome tweets – whether out of negligence, complacency or a resolve to own the errors of his past.
It is a move he may have regretted last week, when controversy over the tweets flared up once more, proving just how drastically Hollywood’s moral code of conduct has shifted from the comparatively feckless days of 2012. A social media firestorm that once earned Gunn a slap on the wrist from the liberal blogosphere has had more severe consequences this time round.
Last Friday, the tweets were republicised, by a coterie of influential conservative figures on Twitter – with the “alt-right” media thug Mike Cernovich leading the charge with a relentless thread of icky buried treasure. Less than 24 hours later, Disney announced Gunn had been relieved of writing and directing duties on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, planned for release in 2020. Gunn didn’t object: “Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then.” Finally, with the horse long bolted, he deleted the tweets.
It is a sad outcome for one of the more characterful creators in the cookie-cutter-inclined Marvel factory, but one can see how Disney needed to protect its interests. Even before the rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements made industry leaders newly sensitive to sexual abuse allegations (however couched in jokey quotation marks), any controversy allowing for prominent use of the word “paedophilia” in headlines is one the world’s biggest manufacturer of family entertainment would have been swift to nip in the bud. “They’re protecting a family brand, simple as that,” says the veteran industry journalist Anne Thompson, now an editor at IndieWire. “[Disney chairman] Alan Horn is a very moral and upright guy. I understand the decision, but I would also suggest that no other studio would have done this. Disney represents a lot of things”.
But Disney probably didn’t anticipate the extent of the pushback its strictly business decision has prompted in quarters far beyond the Marvel fanboy realm, as Hollywood insiders, leftwing journalists and even some of Gunn’s own colleagues united in their objection to his dismissal – not in defence of his tweets, but in protest against Disney’s quick capitulation to an orchestrated far-right takedown. Cernovich and the other rightwing influencers gunning for Gunn are not, it seems, primarily concerned with preserving the moral purity of Twitter – however much their outrage advanced the unsupportable bad-faith theory that Gunn is a paedophile and his puerile tweets were confessions rather than quips. As the director’s supporters were quick to point out after the scandal, Cernovich has his own extensive history of grotesque rape-related tweets: “Have you guys ever tried ‘raping’ a girl without using force? Try it. It’s basically impossible. Date rape does not exist,” he blithely tweeted in 2012.
Rather, Gunn is merely one of several prominent leftwing entertainers – all vocal in their anti-Trump sentiment on social media – appointed as targets of moral outrage by Cernovich and his crew. Actor-comedians Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman have also been singled out for off-colour tweets of debatable comic value, though as provocative free agents untied to a corporation as image-controlled as Disney, they are likelier to ride this conservative censure than be rumbled by it. For Cernovich’s crusading purposes, Gunn’s scalp is a sufficient symbol of rightwing revenge, after the loose-cannon pro-Trump comedian Roseanne Barr was fired by the Disney-ABC Television Group in May for her own errors of Twitter judgment, quelling the sudden, surprising comeback of her self-titled, decades-old sitcom as soon as it had begun.
Gunn’s and Barr’s perceived sins are not equivalent: where the former suffered for past infractions of good taste, the latter got the chop right in the heat of the political flame war she started with a racist tweet comparing African American ex-Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to a Planet of the Apes primate. (Barr, a wildly inconsistent Twitter presence at the best of times, has since slid between penitence and defiance: “I thought the bitch was white,” is her latest, ill-advised line of defence.) Barr’s firing was instantly called for and subsequently applauded by the liberal media; in firing Gunn, perhaps Disney imagined itself to be evening the scales, proving its political impartiality by responding with equal readiness to protests from left and right.
Yet, while the Barr controversy was topically immediate and unavoidable, the Gunn one was carefully calculated and drummed up with specific rhetorical intent. In responding to such issues, where does the line fall for studios between practical damage control and political compliance? And how much innocence can Disney profess in hiring Gunn to begin with, given that he had apologised for his out-of-line tweets by the time Guardians of the Galaxy went into production? Having emerged from the offbeat creative stable of Troma Entertainment, the indie exploitation film producers renowned for exactly the sort of extreme content and boundary-testing humour spewed out by his former Twitter persona, Gunn was always a wild-card hire for Disney – and not one that wouldn’t have been made without extensive vetting and consideration. Letting him go, his defenders argue, is not so much an unfair punishment as a failure of nerve. These are questions a lot of Hollywood studios, their ethics guidebooks already in Weinstein-induced disarray, now have to ask themselves – even those in looser ideological straitjackets than Disney. Thompson predicts that Gunn “will be in demand” by other companies, though wonders what long-term spillover Disney’s actions may have. “We have fewer studios now,” she says. “Fox is going over to Disney and it’s going to be very interesting how much of Disney’s ethos is applied to all of those labels as well.”
As for individual celebrities, Twitter – once a bright tool for self-promotion and fan cultivation – is a platform to be approached with far greater caution, if not avoided. Even nominally benevolent intentions can land you in hot water, as the liberal actor-director Mark Duplass learned this week when an insufficiently considered tweet in support of peaceful political empathy prompted a furious backlash on the left: his intentions may have been good, but encouraging his leftwing followers to “cross the aisle” by following the reactionary Islamophobic pundit Ben Shapiro was not the best way to voice them. Stick to what you know, is the message being sent to entertainers on Twitter – and if what you know is paedophile jokes, best to keep quiet.
That’s probably a sound course of action, but could such increased care end up stifling creativity – or impassioned political activism – in the industry? Jenelle Riley, a reporter and features editor at the Hollywood trade bible, Variety, anticipates a sizeable celebrity exodus from Twitter, and is concerned: “The benefit of celebrities on Twitter was to show fans a side of themselves that felt personal and unique … now people have to worry about keeping the same image on Twitter. If they stay, it will probably be just another PR tool,” she says. Another industry insider politely emails to ask if I can edit out a quote they had given on the subject, fearing a wave of social-media trolling in response. They would rather keep a low profile, they say. Who can blame them?